Laboratoire d’une nouvelle forme d’art : l’édition des Minnelieder (1803) illustrée par Philipp Otto Runge

A new form of art laboratory : the Minnelieder edition 1803 illustrated by Philipp Otto Runge. In 1803, the writer Ludwig Tieck asks the painter Philipp Otto Runge to create drawings in order to illustrate his translation of a collection of troubadour songs. Backed up by a genetic conception of art history, this project attests their expectation of a new artistic period. While for Tieck the Minnelieder translation constitutes the necessary step towards the awareness of the specificity of an incoming poetry, for Runge, through their code of symbols, the illustrations appear as the forerunners of an unprecedented landscape art. Both feel that a bridge can be thrown over between poetry and plastic art, owing to their common « musicality», thereby endangering the doctrine of their compartimentalization advocated by the upholders of neoclassicism. This aspect comes to light as well in Tieck’s foreword, opening the collection, as in the conception of the Landschafterey which occupies Runge since 1802. The question of the relation between text and image raised by the illustration therefore undergoes a profound renewal. But, though in theory they appear to agree, the realization of the work discloses deep divergences between the two men, and its publication will put the seal on their break-up.