Earl Nitschke, Postcard and Graphic Design
Nietzsche’s Salomé Infatuation (2001)
This card is an original Earl R. Nitschke design laminated on light grey-green postcard
stock. Single outline border in thin black ink. Stamped with the number 178 in red
ink. On the left hand side on the back is a vertical rectangular box with the address and
eternal return signet of The Enigma Library. On the right are four horizontal lines for
an address, with a small box at the upper right imprinted “PLACE STAMP HERE.”
Inked at an angle cutting into the rectangular address box is the rectangular legend,
“THE BEST LIBRARY ON NIETZSCHE IN THE U.S.A.” with a yellow background,
outlined in black with two red lines above and below. The card was sealed in an
envelope addressed to the NYC editor, Babette Babich at Fordham University, Lincoln
Center, New York City.
GENIUS LOCI: NIETZSCHE AND LOU
AND THE “DREAM” OF SACRO MONTE
BABETTE BABICH
In Memoriam: Patrick Aidan Heelan (1926-2015)
Avant-Propos for Gary Shapiro — On Perspective, Archaeology, and
Vision
This essay was presented on the occasion of the celebration of Gary Shapiro’s
‘elevation,’ as I like to think of this, to “emeritus” professorial status at the
University of Richmond. As author of Nietzschean Narratives as well as
Alcyone and indeed his more comprehensive Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault
and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying,1 Gary is, as it were, the ideal for whom the
following reflections were written. A fellow traveler in philosophy, a thinker
of breadth extraordinary and of depth, I have called Gary a friend since I
began organizing and directing Nietzsche Society meetings with the Society
for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He is also one of the first
scholars invited to join the editorial board of New Nietzsche Studies and he
has also graciously permitted much of his work to appear in these pages.
From which stars...
The encounter between Friedrich Nietzsche and Lou von Salomé at the
pilgrim site of Sacro Monte in the Piedmont district of Italy commits us to
reflect on a specifically geographic constellation.2 This is not only because
Nietzsche and Lou met in transit, travelling from one poiont to another but
it is also ecstatically so, and the two were always in the company of others.
But ecstatic too, as Lou reports for us, to the extent that Nietzsche invokes
celestial happenstance upon meeting her. Of course the claim was a cooked
or staged one, no matter whether contrived by Nietzsche or Lou herself.
Paul Rée, with whom Nietzsche had already spent considerable time, both
as Malwida von Meysenbug’s guests in Rome, had written to Nietzsche to
tell him of Lou and Nietzsche replied directly. A great part of philology and
the history of ideas and biographical analyses is made up of readerly
reconstruction of such items of correspondence but in the enthusiasm for
such dialogical engagement, real life circumstance can be elided or
overstated. Hence commentators quote Nietzsche’s letter to Rée
(commentary in this tradition arguably beginning with Lou) taking his reply
New Nietzsche Studies, Volume Nine, Numbers 3 and 4 (Summer / Fall 2015): 137–167.
© 2015 Nietzsche Society. ISSN 1091–0239.
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as the foundational report of their first encounter as well as a palimpsest for
Nietzsche’s desire overall. We read, as Nietzsche writes:
Greet this young Russian from me if this makes any sense: I long for this
kind of soul. [Grüßen Sie diese Russin von mir, wenn dies irgend einen Sinn hat:
ich bin nach dieser Gattung von Seelen lüstern.] Indeed, I am about to go off in
search of a stealing of suchlike — with regard to what I have to do in the
next ten years, I am in need of the same. An entirely different chapter
would be marriage — at the most, I could consent to a two-year marriage,
and this too solely owing to what I have to do in the next ten years. 3
The reference to marriage is general one and to be distinguished from a
proposal to the Lou he had as yet to meet. Hence although it is not to be
doubted that Nietzsche was intent on finding a companion of the spirit, and
not least for practical reasons, a wife, this particular letter, although often
taken as a letter of intent in the literature, was not such. Nor did Rée’s letter
induce Nietzsche to head straight to Rome to fulfill a destiny he somehow
foresaw.4 Reading the rest of the letter, we find it full of the complexities we
have learned to associate with Nietzsche. And like most letter-writers (then
and now), Nietzsche’s greatest interest concerns neither Rée nor Lou but
himself and his own long-term projects concerning his writing and hence the
practical domestic focus he notes emphasizes assistance with reading (to him)
and writing (as amanuensis, for him). Only Friedrich Kittler and only in the
incidental context of his discussions of Nietzsche and then only with respect
to the ‘archaeology’ of non-digital (in our electronic sense) but also quite
‘digital’ (simply physically and because involving fingers — keying
operators, many of whom were for these same technical, i.e., physical,
reasons women) writing has paid serious attention to the sheer number of
woman assistants Nietzsche does engage. Kittler explores the typographical issues involved with the genesis and production of Nietzsche’s works in
the technological confines of his era of manuscript production.5 Note here
that Kittler’s attention is specifically to the count of those Nietzsche
mentions by name, meaning not that these women are the only ones
there would have been (this is an old debate that I have maintained with
Thomas Brobjer for many years) but that these are the only ones of
whom we may be certain. It’s like lovers (rather exactly like): who can
count them? Yet this practical functionality has everything to do with
the reason Nietzsche mentions marriage in the course of his general letter
reply to Rée. In accordance with the same, Nietzsche does go on to
make serial propositions to several women, more or less diffidently.
But how can I say such things the reader might protest? Of all the
philosophical love affairs — let’s just skip Socrates and Diotima (and not
only for Xanthippe’s sake) — from Abelard and Héloise to Sartre and
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139
Beauvoir — we actually do not have a huge number of these, for we cannot
quite (who are we kidding?) add Søren and Regina to the count and we
certainly cannot count Rousseau and his not quite madame or Schopenhauer
and his prostitutes if we could name Heidegger and Hannah — Nietzsche
and Lou (I have already mentioned the problem of first names in a
preliminary discussion of just this topic)6 rank high in the romantic
philosophical pantheon.
For these and other reasons, Nietzsche’s own reflections have acquired a
kind of retroactive confessional force given what we have already cited on
Lou’s word, regarding what Nietzsche says to her when they meet for the
first time, as Lou remembers this, to the word.
Lou herself — largely unhampered by other sources, tells us most of what
we know about this and other instances.7 Thus she tells us and who would
doubt such gallant words on Nietzsche’s part (hence he surely must have
said): “From which stars have we been brought together here?” [Von
welchen Sternen sind wir uns hier einander zugefallen?]8
The rest of the story we also know by heart: from Lake Orta (which,
actually, we might not know about) to Lucerne (the locus of that famous
photo about which so much has been written, beginning with an ancient
footnote in Charles Andler — setting everyone off in search of ladies playing
Horsey, as David B. Allison puts it, with old Aristotle) and Tautenburg
(about which last vacationer’s tensions Allison has also written very
instructively, along with David Farrell Krell), all so many small details
recounted again and again from the several studies available of Lou’s life: all
of them key to any Nietzsche biography.9 And, rather in the way one
deconstructs a failed love-affair, or in the way one can mourn a death, we
tend to review the same details over and over again, study the same
photographs, repeat the same remarks.
In what follows here, I go beyond the methodic approach of literary
analysis (and even beyond the literary psychoanalysis many have already
invoked), to employ a specifically phenomenological aesthetics for the sake of
a phenomenological hermeneutics of the “mystery” associated with what
Nietzsche (again: why not take Lou at her word, if only because we have this
“confession” only on the basis of her writings) would recount as the “most
exquisite dream of his life,” — “Sacro Monte.”10
Well and good but what “exquisite dream?” To what event or events
does he refer? What actually happened? And even as we ask, like
schoolchildren, we think we know: they must have kissed. Lou herself when
asked late in her life about the kiss they must have shared further
complicates things by telling us that she no longer remembers.
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Which settles it! as more than one commentator has exultantly
concluded: They have to have kissed! What more do we need?
We are used to taking commentators’ word for this who themselves, duly
and in their turn just happen to take Lou’s word for Nietzsche’s reminiscence.
Thus we suppose that the miraculous event, like having a baby, or, more
appropriately in the case of lovers (and to recall Freud’s January miracle of
liquifaction of the blood, rather more akin to the near-miss that it can be not
to have a baby), we suppose that the event would have been erotic or sensual.
This we take for granted, as we like to imagine Lou and as we imagine her
— this is the achievement of what I have in elsewhere analysed as Lou’s
“triangulation” — we write ourselves into Nietzsche’s/Rilke’s/ Freud’s position
by taking Lou to have been (as I, in fact, hardly doubt that she may have
been) the singular love of Nietzsche’s life. Or and at least we do this when we
do not assume that Nietzsche was gay, as Freud insisted himself likewise
inspired by Lou.11
In any case, if we had to play matchmaker, Lou von Salomé would be, by
our favorite choice for Nietzsche. Better than his misguided fondness for
Cosima Wagner, insisted upon to this day by the Wagnerites, including
Thomas Mann and much better than the old Malwida von Meysenbug or
any other (and Nietzsche seems in fact to have had other) such options.
For a modern example of such metonymic re-imagining of affections we
may take any Catfish example at random, we may think of Carly Rae
Jepson’s music video self-deprecating visual joke including a literal pratfall,
in her Call Me Maybe. The double-entendre cannot be unpacked from the
text and as I have emphasized the phenomenon I call the ‘Hallelujah Effect,’
we need the illumination of the You-Tube video playing the musical joke
against Carly Rae’s idea of the appropriate match, meaning a boy as
attractive as she is (in this case the beautiful and elegantly muscular vision
of the boy lawn-mowing, bare-chested and tatooed, meaning: poetically
minded, boy next door) culminating in the unspoken ideal of sexual
preference that is the boy’s own desire (which, no maybe about it at all, is
not Carly Rae).12 For a no less pop-culture example, we may consider
Britain’s once and future Prince Charles. The popular American mind always
much preferred the late Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, to Camilla, Duchess
of Cornwall. And Camilla, current entitled to the title of Princess of Wales
respects our preference, opting for a more sedate, if newly coined, title
instead. In ths same way, TV reality shows play on our vicarious appetites
not only for matchmaking but erotic aesthetic judgment. And as Simone
de Beauvoir reminds us, women reinforce all these judgments: judging one
another as men do, using the same oppressive conventions.
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
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Fig. 1. Paul Rée (1849–1901)
For the same reasons, Paul Rée is able to write “One wants the woman
who is desired by many in order to be preferred over them.”13 For this reason
too, as Rée writes, “the fact acknowledged by all, that jealousy makes our
love stronger.”14 The aphorism, drawn from Rée’s explicitly anonymous
Psychologische Beobachtungen: Aus dem Nachlass von “*”, is of a kind one might
name Nietzschean — if this appellation did not undo the order of influence
(influence between friends tends to be mutual, only the outsider’s
perspective traces its direction in accord with temporal details or external
affinities).15 And adding to the complexity here and as if it represented an
unedited, or unguarded (and so psychologically advantageous) peek into
notebook jottings, Rée’s book was published anonymously as literal Nachlaß:
the “remains” of a literary legacy.16
Rée includes a number of reflections on the role of society in the choice
of the beloved, including both the promise of as well as the regrets of
selecting a wife. “Our love grows if its object also pleases our friends, since
our vanity can now triumph as well.”17 Thus Lou, liked as she was by so
many, would have had to be the best match for Nietzsche. Had she only
seen that, we sigh. And we do prefer Lou, just as propriety demands we
must, above Cosima and Malwida and his sister too (Nietzsche’s affective life
was apparently quite complex).
In Nietzsche’s case, the “exquisite dream” of their encounter in Sacro
Monte, the two of them alone at least, and with no possibility for
contravention, can only have been about Nietzsche’s affection for Lou and
his talk of “Orta-weather,” all about his atmospheric conviction and
reflecting his belief, false though it turned out to be, that this affection had,
at least at the time, and at least to him, the look of a reciprocal basis. 81
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Nietzsche himself, master of perspective as he was, elsewhere writes of the
dangers of believing in such appearances, not only early on in his reflections
on rhetoric and tragedy but conversation, lights and shadows, the artifacts
of our own prejudices, convictions, hopes (BGE §192).
Thus in what follows I will call attention to the question of the identity
of the Sacro Monte itself. And it will matter, so I argue, to recall its’
explicitly religiously charged, even literally daemonic spirit qua genius loci.
This is the exquisite, or enchanting dream as Nietzsche affirms it on Lou’s
report but it is also the weather as Nietzsche speaks of the “weather”
associated with Orta and its lake in the northeastern mountains of Italy.
Fig. 2. Lake Orta. Author’s photograph: August 2010
And this atmosphere is not only that of the town of Orta, where the four
of them, Nietzsche and Rée in the company of Lou and her mother stayed,
but the region itself. For not far away from the the Sacro Monte at Orta is
the original Sacro Monte at Varallo — just finished and all the rage, “the”
Sacro Monte on everybody’s lips at the time, complete with Baedecker
references and all.
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143
Thus, if we know as we do that all five of them stayed at the resort,
lakeside town of Orta, ought we bother to ask which of the Sacri Monti in
the near vicinity they might have visited?
Our question, were we to ask it in an earnest fashion, also turns out to be
complicated by every existential, phenomeno-geo-graphical and -logical
contingency. This is not caprice, this is the existential-cum-biographical
element noted: hence and generally, when one travels one often aspires to
visit locations that subsequently turn out to be further than supposed at the
outset, which factual reality does not disqualify them from playing a
proximate role in the inspiration for the journey, even if the traveler never
reaches his or her goal.
Space and time determine the question here as they determine matters
for all travelers on this earth. There is spatial distance — some forty
kilometers of it — and the issue (harder to settle) of temporal protraction,
i.e., the question of an excess of unaccounted-for time. Both Paul Rée and
Lou’s mother were not only worried but disturbed because Nietzsche and
Lou managed to take overlong for their return from their excursion to Sacro
Monte. It matters too that just at this moment Lou’s mother fell
inconveniently ill, needing her daughter’s help just because it left Dr. Rée
in the — to him — unwelcome position of having to take care of Madame
von Salomé in place of Lou.
So: how long were they gone? How long does it take to take a walk? A
sidetrip? A daytrip? To visit a site? By whose standards? Just the two of
them? In the context of the sense of time out of time as one can have such
a sense of time while on holiday?
And then, after considering the question of time, there is the different
question (as opposed to the time-space question of distance as such) of
precisely locative specificity. We thus assume the local Sacro Monte in Orta
to be the locus in question, the referent. Sacro Monte di Orta is in fact the
‘there’ I am discussing in this essay but note to begin with that there are
several problematic details with this straightforward conclusion.
Firstly, there is the matter of an all-too excessive proximity (less than fiveminute’s walk from almost anywhere in town), a proximity tending to
render Nietzsche’s and Lou’s explanation for the delay in their return
problematic (ah, but then, you say, that’s how we know! they must have
‘kissed’!). Add to that the further dissonant report that, this is the Hercule
Poirot or Peter Falk Columbo moment of doubling back with a backdoor
doubt, rather as H. F. Peters glosses Lou’s report on the reason for their
delay, claiming that the two of them “wanted to see the sunset on Santa
Rosa”19 while pointing out, and as their companions would also have been
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well aware, that in fact one cannot “see Santa Rosa from the top of Monte
Sacro [di Orta].”20
Here we are visited by the spirit of geo-philosophizing as Gary Shapiro
might say. For, locally speaking, a sunset view would have been visible (at
least at the midpoint of the jourtney) from Orta over Pella to Varallo.
Which Sacro Monte, of the two relatively nearby choices (taking these two
among the many Sacri Monti for which the Piedmont is famous) did
Nietzsche and Lou undertake to visit?21 Note again that ultimately I am
happy to concur with most commentators. I think it likely that the nearby
Sacro Monte (di Orta), featuring the life of St. Francis was the site they
visited but I have reasons for thinking this beyond proximity alone and I
argue that we ought also to consider the original Sacro Monte di Varallo.
The very first of the nine Sacri Monti constructed, the Sacro Monte at
Varallo, enjoyed the accolade at the time of being one of the “wonders of the
world.” It was a must see.
Bur what made Orta and Varallo ‘sacred mountains’ was not the sites
themselves and as such — despite the charms of animistic eros. These sites
were purpose built as it were: constructed to be sites of the sacred, for the sake
of the faithful and built at a time when such spectacles in the sense of
something ‘worth seeing,’ as German language guidebooks then and today
would phrase it, would have been otherwise a rarity.
Today’s world, regarded in the ‘age of the show’22 as Ivan Illich once
referred to it is a world suffused by the spectacle as Guy Debord underlines
this along with Martin Jay, Hans Blumenberg, Horst Bredekamp and
many, many art historians among other analysts from Georges Bataille to
Jean Baudrillard to Jacques Rançière and Peter Sloterdijk and Friedrich
Kittler, in addition to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and Michel
Foucault and Gary Shapiro too, a world where the ubiquity of billboards,
magazines, television, movies — and I have not yet mentioned the internet
23
— make ‘spectacles’ less remarkable for us.
With all our experience with spectacles in our Illichian conversancy with
the ‘age of the show’ (including a dedication to self-display, that makes it
easier rather than harder for Carly Rae Jepsen not to take herself too
seriously, all together with an ethos of political and other — this is the
digital media point of data mining and social networking — concommitant
of constant surveillance) entails that one is simply unprepared for either Orta
or Varallo exactly as pilgrim sites, that is to say, as built for what the art
historian, Nevet Dolev calls “participant observers.”24 These sites afford a
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
145
full-size, real-life vista of and thus into another world, a sight assuming the
direct involvement and not the passivity of the viewer.
Fig. 3. Entrance to Sacro Monte di Orta. Author’s photo: 19 August 2010
What is key is that (and this is where we cannot do without the
advantage of phenomenology as a philosophical practice beyond mere
readerly, philological research and reflective interpretation) such sites must
be seen. The physio-dynamic point noted above is then that they have to be
visited, one chapel at a time, taking one’s time to take in what is there to be
seen, and in this sense both Orta and Varallo are marvelous occasions for
what one could call a miracle of sight and (if one wishes, one may also say): the
occasion for insight into the metaphysical domain: a sight into the world
above, depicted as because quite physically arrayed above and thus as part
of the world below, the world past and present in the light of eternity: the
fullness of time.
Architecturally distinct, including the design of the landscape and
incorporating the mountain itself and its location and vistas, the chapels
themselves are of individual interest, each one a treasure trove of perceptual
presentation and design, including trompe l’œuil paintings on three sides,
sometimes including the ceiling and the floor as part of the tableau within
and sometimes the tiling on the floor of the anteroom or the portico
without. To be sure, what we see today is weathered, although recently
restored as a World Heritage site and only sparely maintained. But this
would have been otherwise at the time of Lou’s and Nietzsche’s visit.
Of further interest to Nietzsche would have been the illustrations both
on the outside decorating the small oratories, and in the anterooms,
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featuring not only religious but also phallic and other apotropaic motifs in
addition to depictions of titans and other pagan deities.
Figs. 4 and 5. Sacro Monte di Orta
Portico ceiling interior detail and Exterior. Author’s photo: 19 August 2010
Nietzsche and Lou could easily have taken what can otherwise seem to
have been an inordinate length of time to visit the nearby Sacro Monte at
Orta with its offerings of one spectacle after another, set into an array of
bespoke chapels or temples and peopled by perspective-foreshortened studies
or dioramas of what thus look like life-sized statues displayed against and in
perspective-line with painted figures and landscapes in the distance, together
with a depiction of the heavenly world above (paralleling the world below),
all in the round.
These virtually or effectively life-size, richly colored terracotta figures
would not be dissimilar to the polychrome ancient Greek statues Nietzsche
invokes as an indispensable corrective to the popular vision inaugurated by
Winckelman and others of the classically white, pure and unpainted vision
of antiquity in his public lectures in Basel.25
The almost two dozen chapels on the mountain above the lake village of
Orta — as compared to the forty-five such architecturally distinct oratories
in Varallo — permitted visitors to ‘visualize,’ using the best perspective
tricks of the time, worldly and sacred visions. The point here concerns an
aesthetic phenomenon, far, far more than but also including a religious
dimension, and yet and this is what spoke to Samuel Butler who challenged
the excesses of Varallo in the epigraph to his Ex voto,26 as exceeding the
“sacred” as such. But just this excess would correspond to Nietzsche’s
scientific point taken with respect to the Greeks.
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Thus what Lou tells us that Nietzsche invokes as an “exquisite dream”
corresponds to the sacred perception afforded by such small chapels, crafted
as they were to be seen in a particular way, and yielding a veritable world,
seemingly in its entirety, a sculpted tableau of a world apart.
Fig. 6. Sacro Monte di Varallo. Author’s photo: August 19, 2010
And whether they travelled the forty kilometers thence (or not),
Nietzsche and Lou would have been conscious of Varallo’s presence in the
vicinity of Orta, as Varallo had been, just at the time of their visit, and
finally, triumphantly, completed in 1881 after centuries of work.
Once again, we ask just how late were the two of them in returning?
Both Nietzsche and Lou refer to Sacro Monte which we take to be a
shorthand for a special event that transpired between them alone and hence
known only to the two of them.
Was it Orta or was it Varallo?
I am not here attempting to argue for one or the other. Monte Sacro is
a word for the verisimilitude of the world of the sacred, a hyperreality, avant
la lettre, that is in advance of Jean Baudrillard’s sense of the hyperreal. And
both sites give the visitor a glance into an array of sacred worlds, fully
detailed scenes, more perfect than life, “exquisite” dream-worlds in every
case, whether illustrating scenes from the life of St. Frances in Orta, or else
in the case of the more extended oratories of Sacro Monte di Varallo: of the
life of Christ, and that is also to say, of the life of “man,” created imago dei,
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and thus beginning the garden of Eden, creation, and culminating with the
crucifixion and resurrection.
Fig. 7. Chapel XIII. Figurines at Sacro Monte di Orta. Author’s photograph
By invoking the specifically sacred character of these chapels as I am
doing here (which is, no matter which site they visited, what Nietzsche and
Lou would have seen), we are speaking not of just one or two and not just
of half a dozen or even a dozen but rather and even at Orta almost two
dozen such oratories, all set in close proximity one to another on the top of
a mountain, designed to be visited seriatim, with numbers, and a guided
tour, indicated by signs on the site as indispensable for a visit.
Fig. 8. Terracotta figurine (note foreshortening) of a fleeing beggar, Sacro Monte di Orta.
Author’s photograph
Again, there are 45 of these oratories at Varallo, 23 at Orta. In both
cases, the small chapels are architecturally distinct one from another and
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149
disposed one to another as pilgrim sites, as Dolev emphasizes, for the sake
of prayer and spiritual contemplation. In addition, the oratories at Orta and
Varallo feature what can seem to be an overwhelming, abundance of,
apparently life-sized statues,27 — more than 400 terracotta statues at Orta
and in excess of 800 statues in Varallo — all arrayed once again, just to
underscore this, so rarely is it mentioned in discussions of Nietzsche and Lou
and Sacro Monte, in perspective-adjusted dioramas against and that is to say
aligned with a horizon carrying the viewer’s vista in a three-dimensional
perspective from the sculptural group to a virtual coincidence with trompe
l’oeil frescos painted on the back and side walls (and sometimes including
ceilings and floors), in Italian Renaissance style, some merely workman-like,
some of breathtaking quality.
What complicates matters when one uses the language of a “dream” and
its captivation is that because these same vistas, qua three-dimensional were
shown in completely enclosed spaces, these were vistas not into the infinitely
Euclidean distance of a Brunelleschi or as in the Renaissance paintings we
know to reflect a geometrically, projected perspective but rather the
complete and variously closed or finite world.28
The question of perspective is a complicated one and we usually take it
as a conventionality that does not vary. To show to what extent this is an
error has been the work of art history, especially Rudolf Arnheim but also
Heinrich Wölfflin and Rudolf Wittkower,29 and more recently and more
precisely still, Patrick A. Heelan, the philosopher of science who has also
written on perspective, in terms of painterly technique as well as in terms of
the geometry of human vision.30
I mention Heelan’s work because we are not merely talking, as is Martin
Kemp, of the “intersection” between science — as if science were always
modern — and art — as if art were always underway to the Renaissance or
the vision of Vermeer, and so on.31 At these sites, the architectural is
deployed as part of a technical device for generating a closed infinite space. 23
I submit here that we need this reference to Heelan’s phenomenological
and hermeneutic work in order to think of art history and the philosophy
together in this sense beyond the modern photo-realist sense sense as artists
such as David Hockney have argued in their own contemporary reflections
on perspective. 33
As Heelan reminds us, and as art historians might also have done
(although and to date they have not commonly done so), perspective
indications are not only conventions of culture and of time but are also
dependent upon the specific geometry of vision which turns out to be,
inconveniently for geometric projections using straight-edge and curved
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drawing tools, measurably non-Euclidean, and here I suggest, phenomenologically speaking, that just this matters in a closed space.
The perception in question is an invented or constructed one. We are
speaking less of a mathematician’s schema for painting or architecturally
staging what will become the projective-maps of the modern scientific world
than a completed world, given in the fullness of space and time.
Fig. 9. Chapel XI, Grid detail from The Crucified Speaks to St. Frances, Orta. Author’s photograph
The statues, again, are distorted for perspective effect, with sculpted
exaggeration and foreshortening. At Orta, the effect yields the life of St.
Francis, a world articulated or aligned with reference to the world below,
mirroring the viewer on the one side of the grids through which, often from
very specifically indicated loci, the scenes are meant to be — and oftentimes:
can only be — viewed using these same grids or grilles in order to catch a
glimpse of the world above. Thus and in addition to the dimensionality of
space, represented in three dimensions and flattening out in the distance to
two and thence to one, there is also another and higher level, permitting a
representation of worldly space and worldly time, framed or compared to
eternity, quid hoc ad aeternitatem: exoteric and esoteric.
To suggest that we consider the place in question is an expressly
phenomenological, specifically hermeneutic move that takes us out of the
texts — and out of our vicarious imaginings of a more or less salacious, more
or less chaste, kiss (or some such thing), to the things themselves, in this case
the places themselves. But just this local move is hard for us: we who are
used to trusting texts, be they letters, be they novellas, or auto-biographies,
or commentary, and we usually consult more rather than less of the same.
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Which does not mean that we like to go to additional levels in our reading.
Thus we read the same thing again and again. This lateral strategy may be
responsible for our allergy to footnotes which in turn may indicates an
allergy to reading those others who (like ourselves) produce secondary
literature. As a result, scholars are often loathe to quote other scholars (or
keep such citations to a minimum so as not to confuse the reader or the
publisher or, and indeed, their own thesis thereby). And this makes tracing
out such questions, if we bother to ask them, a laborious undertaking.
Add to that the problem of the classifying the Sacri Monti themselves:
Are they art? Are they sacred sites? Religious kitsch? 43
Fig. 10. Chapel XIII, The Humiliation of St. Frances, Orta. Author’s photograph
For these reasons (and others to be sure), when we read of Nietzsche’s and
Lou’s visit to Sacro Monte (be it the one or the other), commentators when
they detail the mountain at all simply refer to “chapels and monasteries” in
passing, passing over the contents of those chapels, omitting as well any
reflection on how these same sites came to be there in the first place.
Beauty and Eros
We read (and more significantly perhaps: we know how to read) Rainer
Maria Rilke’s poem, Das Einhorn, the animal that is not,” [das Tier, das es
nicht gibt] “nourished on no kind of grain,” and we are almost more
comfortable with Rilke’s Das Stunden-Buch, poems in three books dedicated
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to Lou Andreas-Salomé, “Gelegt in die Hände von Lou.” Here we read the
beginning reflection of Rilke’s Book of Hours:
Da neigt sich die Stunde und rührt mich an
mit klarem metallenem Schlag:
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fühle: ich kann –
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag
Rilke goes on to represent a God that could not but appeal to Lou —
almost near enough to touch, a God of tenderness needing our solicitude: if
he were to cry out in the night (and all for the uncannily human solace of a
glass of water).
Fig. 11. Torso. Pergammon Museum, Berlin. September 2004. Author’s photograph
It is in contrast to this that we read Rilke’s Archaische Torso Apollons.
What catches us here is ekphrasis itself — only we ask, of what, of which
statue? We cannot know … the glow of the apple, the eyes … the center that bears
the flare of creation … Hence [Denn da] there is no place that fails to see you….
The word, the personal direction of it, catches us up. Gadamer
emphasizes this in his reading of the poem in his The Relevance of the
Beautiful. Peter Sloterdijk borrows the phrase to title his most recent
reflections.
Gary Shapiro, more than exigent with his own terminology, has discussed
ekphrasis in another context.35 And yet Rilke’s poem entitled ‘Archaic
Torso of Apollo,’ describes, tells us, directs us, neither to the statue itself, as
the statue itself directs us not to itself, not even to the contemplation of the
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153
heart of stone that is, as Heidegger says with respect to the temple, “more
stone than stone itself,” but and much rather to ourselves. We are talking
about the torso as it is, as we are, in its presence: in the glow of ancient
marble and it matters here that is specifically ancient stone, just to have the
kind of illuminated light Rilke invokes: “sein Torso glüht noch wie ein
Kandelaber.” Archaic too, as we recognize, the laughing smile — und im leisen
Drehen / der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen, giving us an erotic smile
takes us to the same smile that moves us when it comes to Lou and
Nietzsche or more certainly, still and to be sure: Lou and Rilke.
Fig. 12. Torso. Glyptothek. Munich. May 2011. Author’s photograph
But here I ask, which torso are we talking about? Which statue? What
will it be — and does it matter? Can we simply pick a torso we like? There
are so many we have seen, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Florence, Munich? How
many did Rilke see? As many? Less? More?
For a full consideration in the case of either Orta or Varallo, which
consideration we cannot offer here, we would need not only a review of the
tradition of Italian polychrome terracotta sculpture, Renaissance theories
regarding the interface between the space within which a fresco in its
perspective and a related sculptural group in its perspective was set up to be
seen and the quite bespoke, meaning: custom designed or made-to-order
architecture of the place in question, all of which would be needed whichever
site we might be talking about as such considerations apply to both.
In addition too we would need to reconsider Nietzsche’s own engaged
discussion of the “origin” of the work of art which he drew from his teacher
before Friedrich Ritschl, that is to say from the musically and architecturally,
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‘monumentally’ historically oriented Otto Jahn but also from his reading of
Gottfried Semper. Note here that this was well before either Benjamin or
Heidegger’s reflections on the work of art, but consonant both with art
history and its conventions as Nietzsche took these as substantive for what
he called the “science of aesthetics” [aesthetische Wissenschaft] (BT §1) as he
named the sculptural art of Apollo, the god of light and, as already
mentioned: the “beautiful realm of the dream-world,” and the dynamic and
frenziedly intoxicating music of Dionysos.
Thus Nietzsche also called us to a reflection on the evolution of form and
ability, the capacity of the ancients as judged from our modern point of
view, as he first described our scholarly convictions or prejudices with regard
to what the ancients could and could not represent as Nietzsche argued both
in his inaugural lecture as well as, as already mentioned above, in the first
of his public Basel lectures, “Das griechische Musikdrama,” and in his first
book, The Birth of Tragedy.36
What can we see, what can we not see? What is there to be heard in
silent words, what can be said of the music of the Greek language itself? 73
For it is thus to articulate this vanished, silenced sound and the lost culture
of speaking as the highest or most prized art of ancient Greece that is the
heart of Nietzsche’s efforts in his first book on tragedy and accounts for his
repeated emphasis in his letters that the same lost oral tradition was likewise
to be seen in the songs of the suppressed troubadours, claiming that in his
The Gay Science he ultimately sought to reframe the same point he had made
with his first book on the tragic art-form, which latter text as we know, and
as he wrote in his later preface, “should have sung not spoken,” (BT §iii) —
for all the good Nietzsche’s hint has done for scholars of his work. In a Gay
Science aphorism entitled Art and Nature, Nietzsche recalls to us the
importance of the fact that the Greeks went to the theatre not to be
entertained with the new or the latest show, but “to hear beautiful
speeches,” (GS §80) emphasizing that this would demand “of passion, even
on stage, that it speak well.” (Ibid.) This spoken consonance in the tension
of dramatic dissonance is the literally musical secret of the tragic work of art,
we recall this from the end of The Birth of Tragedy, it is the becoming-human
of dissonance, just as in the person of Euripides (and perhaps not less for
Nietzsche, in the theorizing of Socrates and Aristotle on tragedy), it is also
the reason for tragedy’s death at its own hand.
Given all this complexity, recall again that the visit to Sacro Monte in
May of 1882 took place when both Nietzsche and Lou were vacationing
together with Paul Rée and Lou’s mother at Lake Orta in the Piedmont
region of Italy. We have already indicated that most scholars note that little
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
155
is known of their visit to Sacro Monte because Nietzsche and Lou went
alone. The private or intimate character of this visit assures its mystery.
Whatever happened happened there well apart from texts and documents
at the site they visited on the mountain, where the path up and down, as
Heraclitus says, is one and the same but which path would have been
different for Nietzsche and Lou, where, as we recall — how could we forget
— what they wanted to see was the sun set on the high peak of Santa Rosa.
I am not saying that little has been said of the visit to Sacro Monte (i.e.,
that they were alone, for the first time, and for such an extended time) as this
is not in dispute. The case of Sacro Monte is much discussed, on every level,
and across the disciplines: philosophy, German studies, psychoanalysis and
especially popularly. Thus even today local guidebooks highlight the fact
that Nietzsche and Lou Salomé visited the site, notoriously, delightfully, unchaperoned. And everywhere and on every level we are also told that both
Nietzsche and Lou reported certain transports as a result of the experience
(although these accounts also vary in their emphasis of this mutuality).
Much rather I am suggesting that and although the transports in
question may have had romantic resonances, in one way or another, on one
side or another, it is also necessary to advert, as scholars to date fail to
advert, to the atmosphere or ‘weather’ of the place in question. As
encountered, in small, enclosed spaces, in chapels of differing sizes, hundreds
and hundreds of statues and hundreds and thousands of painted figures
telling the life of St. Frances and the life of the soul’s journey in a pilgrim
site on a mountain top, overlooking the beauty of Lake Orta, with a little
Borromean island to set off its beauty, framed with distant mountains, a
visit to Sacro Monte di Orta could only have been an “exquisitely,”
“charming dream.” And that enchanting atmosphere would have been
transporting, for Nietzsche and for Lou, and both for different reasons, with
or without a kiss.
Yet and this may be even more important from a phenomenological
point of view: in order to see the full vista of the statues and to take them
in together with their background fresco horizons (be it in Orta or Varallo),
one often has no choice but to kneel — these little buildings are not called
oratories for nothing. 38 The posture, the disposition required is for the full
effect of a tableau set up to eternity, poised in vibrantly coloured, more than
life-like three-dimensionality in time and space. The various grids set up
between the viewer and the sculpture groups in each chapel reflect this
positional focus, invited again via design elements and overtly so via size
differentials, sometimes including specific spots through which the viewer
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can see best and in every case, the effect of the grilles whether wooden or
wrought iron is to compel proximity. 39
For all of this, one must advert to the conventions of perspective
experience, as these are always conventions, in play at the time.40 As such,
these conventions play a hermeneutic role for the viewer, and thus it is part
of the conventionalizing process (if it is not only that) that the oratories
include what we may call ‘aids’ to ‘right’ perception in the form of stylized
grids,41 i.e., ‘technologies’ for seeing not limited to grids alone but beginning
with the architectural framework of the oratory in each case, availing of
larger and smaller spaces, and design elements including the intarsia tiling
mentioned above.
Fig. 13. Ecce homo, Sacro Monte di Varallo.
It is important to note that Bernardo Caimi’s project at Varallo was
begun in the close vicinity of Milan’s San Satiro, a church featuring the work
of the master architect of proportion and perspective, Bramante (14441514) and first designed by the painter, sculptor and architect celebrated by
Pater, Gaudenzio Ferrari (1470-1546). In the sixteenth century, Charles
Borromeo visited the work in progress and added new chapels, and giving
it the name of the “New Jerusalem.” It was Varallo, a site of contemplative
and locative, geographic, and thus literally meteorological art — thus the
reference to the ‘weather’ with which we began above, in this case, now,
with reference to the Sacro Monte di Varallo — a site accordingly that had
been centuries in the making, that also happened to have been just and
consummately finished, newly opened to the public, complete with an
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
157
Albergo and a lovely fountain carved and installed and thus dated just prior
to Nietzsche’s and Lou von Salomé’s visit (see Fig. 6 above).
Thus we are speaking of one extraordinary locus versus another even more
extraordinary locus, with the site of Orta taking the prize, as Butler says, for
its natural vista — how could it not, overlooking not the mountain peak of
Santa Rosa but rather the lake and the island of San Giulo? By the same
token, Varallo, consummate for its sculpture and its frescos, would require
as Butler reflects, a guidebook all its own,42 as he remarks in his book on the
Piedmont and the Ticino, published just a year before Nietzsche and Rée,
in the company of Lou and her mother, would undertake to travel to the
same region.43
No matter whether one opts for one Sacro Monte or the other, it is
important to underline that we do not know and cannot know for certain
in this case as in most cases when it comes to the history of past events and
past lives. Although much source scholarship is composed as if this were not
so, all that positive sources can tell us is what can be said positively, which
is to say at the most minimal level imaginable. If Nietzsche marks a text,
and if we suppose, as we do that we are sure that they are his marks, and
this is no kind of exact science (pace Montinari and pace Brobjer, etc.), this
and even still does not tell us anything about the care with which he read
the text, not even the loci underlined, not even the places he comments on.
Nor, as is famously the case with respect to Kant’s critiques, especially the
first Critique does the absence of such a book, or indeed the absence of
textual references as we would suppose we would recognize them constitute
a positive proof of anything: not having such evidence does not and cannot tell
us that he did not read it. And real-life events, factual matters are even
more elusive, think of the debate which we referred to at the start regarding
Nietzsche’s sexuality.
Lou’s “Painted Devils” — Poisoning Eros
All the above might lead one to incline to the possible locus of the Sacro
Monte at Varallo but what persuades me to take the conventional view, is
neither convention nor proximity but and much rather another possible
ekphrasis for us, here with reference to Nietzsche writing of Eros in his
Beyond Good and Evil and the erotic contest is depicted in Chapel X, The
Temptation of St Frances, in Orta.
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Fig. 14. Chapel X, Victory of St. Frances over Temptation. Sacro Monte di S. Francesco, Orta.
Author’s photograph, 19 August 2010
The tenth oratory is perhaps most remarkable for the beauty of its statues
but not less for the sheer scope of the scenic, in the sense of the closed space
of the Greek skene, and three-dimensional sculptural unto two-dimensional
painterly tableau perspective, depicted in frescoes above and behind the
sculptures, are the figures on the lower level of the broad, almost
cinemascopic in its effects, if one will permit, sculptural grouping in this, the
tenth chapel. These figures are identified at the site as “Satana — Demoni,”
satans or demons: the bent leg and cloven foot of the female devil can be
seen running off to the left in Fig 14 (and we see the figure in detail: Fig.
15).
Hence, the banished “Satana” may be seen as so many heroically resisted
“devils” — (Lou herself refers to these “painted devils” in her letter to Rée in
her efforts to organize the trio’s trip to Orta, if we ignore, as most of us
ignore, Lou’s mother in the count) Here the difference may be in painted
aspect of the repulsed devils and luminous quality of the paint shining from
the angels. Terracotta is a finish of textures, matte or smooth colors,
gleaming gold, and these same textures mirror the modeling of on the right
hand, the angels, beautiful and serene, by contrast with the course and
grinning “Satanas,” “demoni” — just garden-variety devils — on the left. And
if we needed more detail in our reading of the Victory of Saint Frances over
Temptation at Orta, we can note goats going off from left to right in the
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159
foreground, with a little hare resting as well, and to the far left, we see the
foaming jaws of a lion — or else the firehound of hell? The image illustrates
the sentiment Nietzsche expresses with regard to the encounter between
Christianity and Eros, the god of love: “The Church gave Eros poison to
drink. He did not die from it but degenerated into vice.” (BGE §168)
Fig. 15. Chapel X, Victory of St. Frances over Temptation.
Sacro Monte di S. Francesco, Orta. Author’s photograph, 19 August 2010
I have argued that we know the greater part of what we know about
Nietzsche and Lou from Lou’s own hand and that and in general that Lou
Andreas-Salomé is herself the source for much that we know about her.
Indeed scholars rarely contradict her account even where they seek to
amplify it, or as in Binion’s case, to psychoanalyse it. To say this is to rebuke
neither Binion nor the psychoanalytic method, just because psychoanalysis
as a method is predicated upon credulity and more credulity — which is
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why Karl Kraus says of it that is the disease whose cure it purports to
be. And psychoanalysis is not to be mistaken for the historical,
hermeneutic and even, phenemenological science Nietzsche called
philology.
About Nietzsche and Lou and their visit to Sacro Monte, I have reflected
on the significance of the fact that there are two possible local references,
suggesting that it matters to know which one we are talking about. Once
again, Orta is detailed in the Baedeker guide available to Nietzsche and Lou,
clearly indicating the distance to Varallo as a “five hour walk” (and
Baedecker also indicates an omnibus and says that mules may be hired) and
I would add that there would have been ferries as well. A five hour walk in
two directions, with or without mules, would be, I recognize, a big deal for
us today with our cars and our GPS devices.44 Such a hike would be within
the realm of possibility for the very youthful Lou and the merely middleaged Nietzsche.
I have highlighted the different aspects of the two Sacri Monti in certain
proximity to Orta in order to emphasize that the questions to be posed
remain the ones that are ordinarily not posed. In this case, scholars “just”
know that the exceptional, exquisite, loveliest “dream” of Nietzsche’s life has
to be, just as Lou tells us that it is, all and only about Lou. Not about the
site of Sacro Monte itself, not about brilliantly painted, life-like statues and
not about architecture designed within and without to recreate the
particular atmosphere or “weather” of the Mediterranean world, transposed
to the north of Italy for the sake of meditation or contemplation of that
same world, as the world of ancient Jerusalem and of ancient Greece.
We may add to this the critical disaffection found in scholarly sensibilities
with regard to the supposedly questionable aesthetic quality or “artistic
value” of Sacro Monte.45 That exactly this would have spoken to Nietzsche
who worked on the intersection between what texts tell us about antiquity
and the world of antiquity itself can seem easiest of all to overlook.46
Thus we assume that what moved Nietzsche in his trip to Sacro Monte,
be it in Orta (or, in Varallo) had nothing whatever to do with the enduring
obsession of his life, that would be antiquity and what we might know of it
and, further, how a comparable culture might come to be reconstituted in
our own times. Instead we think of Lou. What Nietzsche experienced in
Sacro Monte could only have been an encounter with Lou, more (or less!)
chaste. Where Nietzsche — and here it is Heidegger who remains his
successor and not Kaufmann and not so many other Nietzsche experts —
prided himself on his ability to raise a question as a question, today’s scholars
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161
take it for granted that they know what Nietzsche meant by speaking of the
“most exquisite dream” of his life. Of course it had to be an erotic matter.
The “so-called ‘mysterium of Sacro Monte’”47 is thus assumed to have
been a kiss — or maybe something even more erotically daring (and I thus
took note of the 19th century albergo just at the gate of Varallo, and, of
course, so it goes with 19th century travel habits, such options for ‘resting’
would also have been available in Orta). Hence commentators write that
Nietzsche “seduces” Lou, a triumph lent by textual means to a man known
to have been short, sympathetically so, on such triumphs. It is thus natural
that scholars also take for granted that they know which Sacro Monte was
meant, and always and naturally enough: this will have to be the closest one.
Yet this same nearby Sacro Monte — and this was for me the point of
departure or inspiration for this essay — commentators do not, seemingly,
trouble themselves to visit.
And right they may be in dispensing with such cheap, ontic details, as
David Allison would say. My own reflections here are no more than
reflections on possibility, thought experiments. Thus we ought to begin
considering the places themselves: both of them sacred sites, inasmuch as if
one sees one, one cannot but think of the other not because religious sites all
look alike (one church is like another) but because the one (Orta) is made in
the image of the other (Varallo), and as their guidebooks ensured that both
Nietzsche and Lou would be so informed.
We need more research but we need much more than digitally
preoccupied “source scholarship.” This is not to saying that we do not need
to return to the sources or that we do not need to read more than we do.
Rather we need cultural reflection as this includes both hermeneutics and
phenomenology. Above all we need what many scholars since Nietzsche,
including classicists and historians of ideas and Nietzsche specialists, have
unlearned or indeed, given the quality of today’s educational institutions,
what such scholars have never learned. It is our best, as we take them to be,
who block the most light.
Acknowledgments
A version of this essay appears in an Italian translation by Daniele Tagliafico
as “Genius Loci – Lo spazio scolpito e il mistero di Nietzsche, Lou e il Sacro Monte”
in ed. Daniele Tagliafico, ed., Nuove teorie dell’immaginazione. Revista di estetica, n.s.,
53, nr. 2 (2013): 235-262. This essay is based on a section of a longer, essay
invited by the Lou Salomé scholar and classicist, Pascale Catherine Hummel for
inclusion in the book collection she directed, Lou Andreas-Salomé, muse et apôtre
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(Paris: Philologicum, 2011), pp. 174-230. The first half has already appeared in an
earlier issue of this journal as Babich, “Reading Lou von Salomé’s Triangles,” New
Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 8, N os. 3 & 4 (2011/2012): 82-114. The inspiration for
including this second half here is due to the geophilosophical sensibility of Gary
Shapiro. I am grateful to the late Patrick Aidan Heelan, S.J., who not only
emphasized the active phenomenology of perception in his own work on space and
perspective but who also illustrated the practice when he fell to his knees when
visiting the chapels with me during my second visit to Orta, it was his first visit, in
2010. I owe to this bodily gesture the clarification of perspective and orientation,
above and below. I am also grateful to the art historian Nevet Dolev and to her
husband, the psychologist, Amram Dolev for sustained correspondence between
New York and Jerusalem over the years. This special friendship — we have never
met — has grown up around the particular mystery of Sacro Monte but not less
owing to their qualities: intellect, feeling, and spirit.
Endnotes
1. See Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989) and Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and W omen (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1991) as well as Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault
and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
2. As acknowledged above, this this essay draws on the second part of Babich,
“Nietzsche, Lou, Art and Eros: On Lou’s Triangles and the ‘Exquisite Dream’
of Sacro Monte.” This longer essay details the articulations Lou used to
negotiate her life with the public sphere as apex triangulated between men
and herself. See also endnote 6 below.
3. Nietzsche to Ree (Genoa, 21 March 1882). Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), Vol. 6, pp. 185-186 also rendered in Rudolf Binion,
Frau Lou, Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1968), p. 49, cf. p. 52.
4. Instead, and as Joachim Köhler has emphasized, it was just then that Nietzsche
left Genoa for Messina. See Köhler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche
und seine verschlusselte Botschaft (Nördlingen: Greno, 1989), pp. 317ff.
5. I refer here to Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey W inthropYoung and Michael W utz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). See for
a discussion of Kittler’s invocation of Nietzsche’s lady typists, my discussion of
Kittler in “Nietzsche’s Networks, Kittler’s Media Philology: On Timetables
and Maps” in: Dan Melamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, eds., The
Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche & the Network-Centric Condition (New York: Punctum
Books, March 2016). A more general discussion has been published as
Babich, “Archaeologies of the Alexandrian. Nietzsche’s Knots and Kittler’s
Philology,“ Nietzscheforschung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), pp. 169–188.
6. Babich, “Reading Lou von Salomé’s Triangles,” New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 8,
Nos. 3 & 4 (2011/2012): 82-114.
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
163
See for discussion and further references, Babich, “Nietzsche and Lou, Eros and
Art.
Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick. Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen, aus dem
Nachlaß, hrsg. v. Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1979 [1951]), p. 80.
On Lou’s side, we note again, Binion and the other authors listed above to the
more popular account by Vickers as well as the accounts offered by Carole
Diethe and Hummel. In addition to biographies of Nietzsche, see for its
analysis, David Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham , M D: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2001).
This words are recorded in the (later emended) diary Lou kept for Paul Rée in
Tautenburg, where, dated August 14, 1882 and just at the point of her elision,
she writes of Nietzsche’s declaration: “‘monte sacro / < sagte er > ‘den
entzückendsten Traum meines Lebens danke ich Ihnen’ … ” Nietzsche, Kritische
Studien Ausgabe: Chronik zu Nietzsches Leben, Mazzino M ontiari and Giorgio
Colli, eds. (Berlin: W alter de Gruyter, 1980), Vol 15 p. 125. See Allison,
Reading the New Nietzsche, for a discussion of the relevance of the missing pages
from Lou’s day-book, pp. 275 and pp. 281-282.
See for a discussion and for further references, Babich, “Nietzsche und W agner:
Sexualität,” in H. J. Birx, N. Knoepffler, S. L. Sorgner, eds., Wagner und
Nietzsche. Kultur — Werk — Wirkung. Ein Handbuch (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 2008), pp. 323-341.
I discuss this with reference to desire and its gendered complexities in pop
music with reference to Carly Rae Jepsen (by contrast with Leonard Cohen’s
Suzanne as well Psy’s Gangnam Style) in Babich, “Hallelujah and Atonement”
in: Jason Holt, ed., Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2014),
pp. 123-134. See too the chapters on desire in Babich, The Hallelujah Effect:
Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology (Surrey:
Ashgate, 2013).
Paul Rée, Basic Writings, Robin Small, trans. (Bloomington: Illinois Press,
2003), §267, p. 43.
Ibid., §265.
Rée’s observation See Robin Small’s introduction to his translation for a review
of Rée’s influence, especially pp. xxxiv ff. as well as Small’s Nietzsche and Rée: A
Star Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
This is like writing one’s own Nachlass a popular occupation as we may trace
this concern in Lou as in Nietzsche as of course, in Kierkegaard, and, more
recently, Heidegger as I argue that his Beiträge takes this device just a bit
further along the same direction Babich, “Le sort du Nachlass: le problème de
l’œuvre posthume,” in: Pascale Hummel, ed., Mélivres / Misbooks. Études sur
l’envers et les travers du livre (Paris: Philogicum, 2009), pp. 123-140. That Lou
also availed herself of the thus prepared text in the compilation of her memoires
makes the recollection of Heidegger’s Beiträge significant (and we may note that
the language of reservation serves Heidegger as epigraph).
The full aphorism continues to highlight this parallel: “Our love decreases if its
object is disliked by friends, since our vanity cannot now triumph, and perhaps
even suffers.” Rée, Basic Writings, §300, p. 48.
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18. Thus we read Nietzsche’s rueful reflections on mutuality in BGE §192, which
would confirm the lesson learned from the disappointment with Lou, if we
could not also read it in his earlier Human, all too Human §374 and §376 and
indeed the entire section on “M an and Society.”
19. See H. F. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé (New
York: Norton, 1962), p. 99 I note here that Samuel Butler refers to Santa Rosa
in the tour between Orta and Varallo as he describes it in passing and on a
single page. See Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1913), enlarged edition. A perfectly overnight
sensation, Butler inspired imitations and translations throughout Europe. See
Karl Baedeker, Northern Italy, as far as Leghorn, Florence, and Ancona, and the
island of Corsica (Coblenz: Karl Bædeker, 1868) describes the effective passage
from Orta to Varallo across the lake to Pella (“2 fr. W ith 2 rowers … At Pella
mules may be procured for the journey over the Colma to Varallo,” p. 183,
noting that at the midpoint, “the prospect of the Alps is beautiful embracing
Monte Rosa, the lakes of Orta and Varese and the plain of Lombardy. The
entire route is beautiful.” (pp. 183-184) Baedeker adds that from Varallo,
Sacro Monte “is attained in ¼ hour by a path shaded by beautiful trees… ” p.
184. In the 1882 version however one may read with respect to Orta that
“various points on the hill command charming surveys of the lake while the
panorama from the Campanile at the top includes the snowy Monte Rosa,
rising above the lower hills… ” Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers, p. 172.
20. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse, p. 99.
21. See the periodical publication, edited by Elena di Filipis, Sacri Monti. Rivista di
arte, conservaione, paesaggio e spititualità dei Sacri Monti piemontesi e lombardi,
2/2010 (Varallo: UNESCO, 2010).
22. Ivan Illich, “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, No. 28 (Autumn, 1995): 47-61.
23. But and in addition to illustrated magazines and catalogues, what we may call
cinema-scopes of the 19 th century kind, including Daguerre’s theatre displays
. Special rooms built for the purpose (we can still see a version of the same at
Blackpool Pleasure Beach in Bournemouth), were fairly common attractions in
Nietzsche’s day and before, including dioramas and the like.
24. Hence the title of Nevet Dolev’s “The Observant Believer as Participant
Observer,” Assaph 2 (1996): 175-192. The theme is more popular than ever
with today’s attention to performance and practice in theory but not less with
Baudrillard and Rançière’s attebtion to the “spectator,” an element to be sure
already foregrounded in Heidegger’s hermeneutic reflection on the ‘origination’
of the ‘work’ of art.
25. See for discussion and loci, Babich, “Skulptur/Plastik” in Christian Niemeyer,
ed., Nietzsche-Lexikon (Darmstadt: W issenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009),
pp. 325-328. See for further references, Babich, “Reflections on Greek Bronze
and the Statue of Humanity: Heidegger’s Aesthetic Phenomenology,
Nietzsche’s Agonistic Politics,” Existentia, XVII 5/6 (2008): 243-471.
26. The epigraph cites the Abbé Mabillion 1698: “Il n’y a que deux ennemis de la
religion — le trop peu, et le trop; et des deux le trop est mille fois le plus
dangereux.” In: Butler, Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte, or New Jerusalem,
at Varallo-Sesi (London: Trübner and Co., 1888).
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
165
27. Bruce Boucher, Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to
Canova (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
28. This closed world is the world of the dream: not Dionysus, but Apollo as we
recall that the language of the dream is also Nietzsche’s term for Apollo, the
sculptor god, in his first book The Birth of Tragedy.
29. See for a representative collection of writings, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problem
of German Aesthetics 1873-1893 (Vischer, Fedler, W ölfflin, Göller, Hildebrand,
Schmarsov) Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou trans. (Santa
Monica: Getty, 1994).
30. See Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983).
31. See Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
A broader account does not, alas, attend to the discoveries of Heelan’s work
although it does have the merit of referring to Husserl is Hubert Damisch’s
L’Origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
32. The very different orientation that is the “invention of perspective” is elegantly
detailed in Damisch, cited above.
33. Hockney, Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (London: Thames
and Hudson, 2001). See also Charles M. Falco and David Hockney, “Optical
Insights into Renaissance Art,” Optics & Photonics News, 11/52 (2000): 52-59.
34. See again Dolev’s “The Observant Believer as Participant Observer.” Cf.
Annabel Jane W harton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
35. See among his other discussions of ekphrasis, Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, pp.
247ff.
36. I discuss Nietzsche’s reflections on this question in the latter pages, again, of
“Die Naturkunde der Griechischen Bronze im Spiegel des Lebens as well as
Babich, „Skulptur/Plastik.“ Apart from Nietzsche, see in general, See A. A.
Donohue, Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture (Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1988). The assumptions “built into” the conventionality of “stylistic progress”
are addressed in her more recent book, Greek Sculpture and the Problem of
Description (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Although
Donohue does not here advert to this, these were the concerns that occupied
Nietzsche in his inaugural lecture in Basel on the Homer question and the
discipline of philology.
37. See here, and more accessibly than in the last chapters of Babich, The Hallelujah
Effect (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013)see my“The Science of W ords or Philology: Music
in The Birth of Tragedy and The Alchemy of Love in The Gay Science” in: Tiziana
Andina, ed., Revista di estetica. n.s. 28, XLV (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005),
pp. 47-78.
38. Once again, it is important to emphasize the perceptual experience of this
encounter in the round and as an encounter with a veritable world in each case.
Thus each of the oratories are, some more, some less, replete with wall and
ceiling frescoes. Still more importantly, architecturally: each has specific and
identifiable, places at the grids or gratings blocking and thereby guiding the
view. In the larger chapels there are even a series of these and in most there are
more than one, including larger and in some cases, highly decorative openings,
166
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
New Nietzsche Studies
spaced or set into the grids or grilles. Nevet Dolev offers one of the rare art
historically sustained discussions of the chapels as a whole and argues that
“Originally pilgrims could even enter the chapels and actually mingle in with
the biblical protagonists, so that by ‘taking by the hand’ there would be a
‘taking to the heart’. In the seventeenth century, however, grids were placed
at the entrance to the chapels, determining the angle of vision in keeping with
counter-reformatory values and separating worshippers from actual contact
with the sculptures.” Dolev, “The Observant Believer as Participant Observer,”
p. 180. The point is in accord with Dolev’s valuable claim regarding the
ordinary or every-day and the sacred in terms of the use of ready-mades and
ordinary things in a sacred context. But we should take care not to dismiss the
art-historical significance of perspective (see further references to Heelan and
Arnheim) especially given Nietzsche’s classical philological point of view. Dolev
herself notes that the grids were only added later, but this is not exceptional for
a long standing project and the grills are architectural components in several
instances. Dolev’s suggestion that the idea of “determining the angle of vision”
may be reduced to “counter-reformatory values” also runs the risk of ahistoricism and not only because the project itself took centuries to complete,
from the fourteenth through to the end of the nineteenth century but because
perspective was essential to the project from its inception with Bramante. See
notes below.
See Dolev, “The Observant Believer as Participant Observer” where W harton,
Selling Jerusalem offers a very different approach. I note too that frames for
perception conventional and performative are a frequent theme in Italian and
French studies of perception. See for initial references to the extensive literature
on Cezanne’s and Van Gogh’s use of these frames,Heelan’s Space-Perception and
the Philosophy of Science.
Heelan discusses these conventions or cues in terms of the geometry of vision
but also in terms of what he describes as “different spatial intentionalities”
leading to multi-stable perspectives in terms of Euclidean and hyperbolic visual
space in his Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, pp. 73 ff; cf. p. 35.
See Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 [1974]), especially his chapter
on “Space.” In the work cited in the note above, Heelan also refers to Arnheim.
Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. Preface to the first
edition, November 1881, p. 11. Butler begins his reflections on Varallo
enthusiastically quoting a magazine article by Alice Green who herself writes
“On the Sacro Monte the tableaux are produced in perpetuity, only the figures
are not living, they are terra-cotta statues painted and moulded in so life-like
a way that you feel that, were a man of flesh and blood to get mixed up with
the crowd behind the grating, you would have hard work to distinguish him
from the figures that have never had life.” Cited in Butler, Ex Voto, pp. vii-viii.
It is with reference to such descriptions that I understand Lou’s urgent April
25 th letter to Rée as they were planning their collective visit to Orta, “Have no
fear of painted devils, see to it that the trip comes off — please, please!” It is worth
adding that Butler also instituted the strikingly durable critical pattern of
characterizing the Sacri Monti, collectively speaking and as a religio-artistic
cultural phenomenon as a bastion of Catholicism contra Protestantism: “an
attempt to stem the torrent of reformed doctrine already surging over many an
Babich / Nietzsche and Lou and the “Dream” of Sacro Monte
44.
45.
46.
47.
167
alpine pass.” Butler, Ex Voto, p. 44. It is intriguing that such doctrinal concerns
remain influential in interpretations to this day.
And in support of distant possibilities, I myself, some twenty-five years ago,
walked more than the distance from St. Moritz to Maloja and back again in the
course of a day: five hours each way, timed — as the Swiss legends insisted, for
a grandmother’s energies, annoying as this comparison was to my younger self.
I had time in the process to look around Maloja, enjoy a relaxed lunch and take
detours on the way back. To be sure, I also climbed well marked paths, the via
Engadina, but the region in question in Italy, the Ticino, has similarly wellmarked paths (although, I would also add, having been to both sites, that for
a walker, the Ticino seems rougher in some cases, easier in others.
Dolev, cited above, begins by reflecting on this point in order to make a
differently nuanced argument and citing numerous examples of what is argueod
to be an obligatory distaste for wax museums and diorama. Indeed, Annabel
Jane W harton adds the language of the “theme park” in her discussion of
Varallo in her Selling Jerusalem, pp. 118 ff. It is too her credit that W harton
reminds us the dates, historically speaking, do not square with Butler’s
assertion that the purpose of Sacro Monte of Varallo was to serve “as a dam
blocking the flood of heretical ideas flowing through the crevices in the alps”
for the historically patent reason that the “Sacro Monte of Varallo was founded
generation before Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses (1517).” Selling
Jerusalem, p. 119. To say that this is patent does not mean that it is simple,
rather we need a more inclusive world-view — beyond the Protestant
conviction, paraphrasing Adorno, confident of its exclusive perspective.
This would be the point of Nietzsche’s own reflections in his fist book on The
Birth of Tragedy.
The mysteries, of course, refer to the sacred motifs of the oratories (in the spirit
to be sure of the sacred mysteries of the rosary). Krell refers to the “so-called
‘mysterium of Sacro Monte’” in his The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in
Word and Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 236.
New
Nietzsche
Studies
Economy and Psychology
Reinert & Reinert
Creative Destruction in Economics
Eckhard Heftrich
The Limits of the Psychological
Explanation of Nietzsche
Parody e Kierkegaard f Love
Roberto Borghesi
Charles Scott
Peter Bornedal
Greg Canning
Joseph Ward
“Ecce Homo” — Ecce Parodia
Nietzsche/Kierkegaard
Women and Seduction
Mann Contra Nietzsche
Nietzsche on Love and Marriage
Festival Essays for Gary Shapiro
Ed Casey
Babette Babich
K. E. Gover
Bill Martin
Shapiro (On) Seeing
The “Dream” of Sacro Monte
The Gift of Debt
Gary Shapiro & the Nietzschean Current
Review Essays
Tracy B. Strong
American Nietzsches
Reinhart Maurer
Babich, Nietzsches Wissenschaftstheorie
Book Reviews
The Journal of the Nietzsche Society
Volume 9, Numbers 3 & 4 Summer / Fall 2015
ISSN 1091-0239
Babette Babich