“Fragmented Impressionism and the Visual Translatio of History in the Literary and Artistic Experiments of the Romantic Castle”

Through an histoire croisée that avoids the binational trajectories of culture transfer studies, the essay charts the artistic practices and formations irradiating from the view of the past filtered by the new formalisation of philology in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century in non-tangential areas of the reimagined geography of artistic taste. More specifically, it explores the space of the medieval castle in late eighteenth-century literature (namely Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho) and nineteenth-century architecture (the palaces of Potsdam and Sintra) as a site of emergence of a new (counter) aesthetics of fragmentation undermining the conventions of figurative representation and painterly, rhetorical composition. Fragmentation, rather than a component of the dychotomy fragmentation/unity to be mediated along a platonist axis of transcendence takes a performative, ironic and metalinguistic turn rooted in the temporality of perception, thus making the experience of the work of art a site of emergence of modernist sensitivities.