the adaptation of atrompe l’oeilpainting in a theatrical setting self-con-
sciously reminiscent of the curtain drawn by Parrhasius. In a discourse
replete with Platonism, Goethe establishes that‘“the Truth or reality of art”
and“the truth of Nature”are different: art is“above nature,”yet not
“outside nature.”^43 Reinterpreting“mimesisqua‘imitation of nature’,”
Goethe ignores the ‘inward’ aspect of antique mimesis, emphasizing
instead the‘outward’.^44 Goethe thereby expressed a modern role for art
that would imitate nature with enough of a distinction from it to enable the
viewer a higher consciousness through transcendence of its inherent
deception.
Emphasis of the tale as a root of European art had emerged earlier, in the
work of Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688). A German artist who spent
much of his life in Holland, Sandrart wrote thefirst German compendium
of painting and art theory in 1673.^45 The Latin translation of 1683 included
an expanded range of illustrations, among which were panels devoted to
Plato’s myth of the cave and the two narratives associated with the painter
Zeuxis: that of his depicting the most beautiful woman as a composite of
models; and that of the competition. [Figure 5] The illustration grapples
with the two realisms through thefigure of a child whose shadow falls on a
blank slate held in his hand as he looks at Zeuxis, about to try to open the
curtain. Like the king in the Islamic competition narratives, Zeuxis must
choose between the image that shows and the image that shows that it
hides. Sandrart’s illustration underscores the demonstrative aspect of
representation, which conditions the viewer to apprehend the layering of
its deceptions. Goethe adopts this interpretation. Through this and an
image on a preceding page depicting Plato’s cave, Sandrart emphasized
two antique stories about representation in the ancient corpus that have
become central to modern art history. However, this visualization discards
the nuanced, often contradictory discussions of representation in Platonic
dialogues, as well as in Seneca’s and Pliny’s ambivalent narratives about
Zeuxis.
Goethe also incorporated aesthetics from Alexander Baumgarten’s
Reflections on Certain Matters Related to Poetryof 1735. For Baumgarten,
poetry offered a domain of“heterocosmic”fictions. The definition of such
self-contained worlds likened the human to the divine creator. His ideas
offered a“new concept and model of an autonomous and‘disinterested’
realm of experience”that came to be described as‘aesthetic’, a science of
perception distinct from conceptual or intellectual cognition. This mode of(^43) Halliwell, 2002 :2. (^44) Halliwell, 2002 :3. (^45) Sandrart, 1675–1679.
176 Deceiving Deception