Expressions of the Interior: Physiognomic Knowledge in Lavater, Goethe, and Alexander von Humboldt

This article examines the role of Johann Caspar Lavater’s (1741-1801) physiognomic ideas in shaping the relationship between the natural sciences and aesthetics at the turn of the nineteenth century. Using the examples of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early morphological writing and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse (1806), it makes the case for the importance of Lavater’s »scientific« physiognomy for understanding the discursive- epistemological shift from the sensual empiricism of the eighteenth century to the perception of the invisible around 1800. Far from a direct line of intellectual- historical continuity from Lavater to Goethe and Humboldt, this article contends that the diffuse uptake of physiognomic concepts by exponents of Romantic science gave them a new meaning in relation to the study of ›life‹ and its hidden dynamics as well as with respect to the roles of art and aesthetics in comprehending nature’s ›interior‹.

Revisiting the Harz Tour of Coleridge and the ‘Carlyon-Parry-Greenation’ in May 1799

The walking tour of the Harz Mountains in 1799 by Coleridge and his English companions – Clement Carlyon, Charles Parry, and George Bellas Greenough – was an exploration of Romantic science and Romantic poetry. This paper examines the Harz tour of the ‘Carlyon-Parry-Greenation’ as a geological and mineralogical excursion concurrent with Coleridge's Harzreise described in his letters. Influenced by the natural history lectures of Professor Blumenbach, the Harz walking tour was organised around visits to caves and mines. A comparative analysis of Coleridge's letters and Charles Parry's journal reveals that while the tour was more significant as a geological field trip for the ‘Carlyon-Parry-Greenation’, it was while walking en route to these destinations of scientific exploration that Coleridge responded to the landscapes traversed and discovered his own Harzreise.