Porträt Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747)

Portrait of Barthold Heinrich Brockes. In the upper left part of the leaf, the portrait of the German writer appears as a frontal chest image. The head of the depicted is turned to the right at night and his view rests on something on the right edge of the leaf. He wears a kind of jacket, including a shirt and a cape above his left shoulder. The effigy is framed in an oval decorative frame, which bears an inscription in the upper part. The frame hovers over a piece of the river and the cloak of the depicted overlaps the frame. Just below the effigy lies a stone sarcophagus with reliefs in the water. Reed grass grows on the left, while a riverside with tree, rose bush and thistle can be seen on the right. Barthold Heinrich Brockes was a man of the Enlightenment, his main work, “Irish Pleasure in God,” is about nature with its beauty and its function as a mediator between man and God. Through his passion oratorio “JESUS, who was martyred and dying for the sin of the world,” published in 1712, he gained great fame; various composers, including Georg Friedrich Händel. set the work. Handel’s “Nine German arias” also emerged on texts by Brockes. This sheet is a post-engraving after Balthasar Denner from 1685. Other copies of this paper are available at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster and the British Museum in London. Signature: Denner pinx. Grave par Wolffgang. Engraving du Roy à Berlin. Caption: B. H. Brockes R. Hamb. Senator (Senator Händel-Haus Halle Foundation)