Traveling and Staging “North:” Romantic tours and exotic Gothics

The “Gothic North” was the paradoxical creation, the virtual spectacle, and destination of post-Napoleonic upheavals. Along with “Waterloo tourism” and princely plunder, early nineteenth-century art travelers, especially to the Southern Netherlands and German lands, doubtless experienced frissons on a par with eighteenth-century Grand Tourists to the Roman Campagna and post-Vesuvius Pompeii, exposed to a cultural displacement of vertiginous proportions. In this panorama of spoliation, as Francis Haskell observes, travelers could hunt trophies from looted monuments, light upon art treasures piled high in transient spaces, visit backstreet antiquaries and auction houses, witness the churches and aristocratic treasure houses of continental Europe thrown open to the highest bidder. Ephemeral and precarious, in particular, the spoils of a Northern Gothic and Renaissance heritage were everywhere on display as war trophies: pre-1815, as educational showpieces in Dominique-Vivant Denon's Musée Napoléon. But post-Waterloo, they were increasingly of fascination as “destinations” for collectors, writers and artists. Indeed, Friedrich von Schlegel writing during the high-watermark of Napoleonic displacements in his Letters on Christian Art (1802–1804), was amongst the first of his generation to perceive in the scattered art of Northern Europe's medieval Gothic past especially from the German Lands, “peculiar beauties” and “the hidden charms of soul and expression.”