Pieter Bruegel, Thomas Mann, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer: historische Hafenformen im Spiegel von bildender Kunst und Literatur

Abstract

Ships, the sea and the coast have always been popular pictorial motifs, even if marine painting did not become established as an independent genre until the end of the sixteenth century in the Netherlands. Among the painters for whom maritime motifs played an important role even earlier is Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569), the greatest Netherlandish painter of the sixteenth century. In this context, the grandiose harbour view in Bruegel's painting "The Tower of Babel" (1563) is particularly worthy of mention, as two different phases of harbour development are juxtaposed here: on the one hand the wharf, entirely void of dock constructions, a relic from the earliest stages of harbour development and still prevalent in the Early Middle Ages, on the other hand the harbour of the Late Middle Ages / Early Modern Times, dominated as it was by the shoreline quay with its typical cargo-handling gear (heavy-duty crane, whip-and-skid devices, winches). While the harbour facilities of Antwerp - where Bruegel lived and worked for many years - will have served him as a model for quayage in the highly developed form of a well-fortified fortress, the rural environment of his native Flanders will have provided him with a wealth of visual aids for the more primitive harbour form, the wharf. Excellent descriptions of historical harbour types are now and then to be found in fictional literature. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) for example, in his novel cycle Joseph and his Brothers (1948), or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898) in his novel Jürg Jenatsch (1874) both brought the shoreline market to life, an archaic harbour form in which the harbour and the market are an indivisible unit, both spatially as well as operationally. Both market scenes take place in out-of-the-ordinary times and places: In Thomas Mann’s trilogy the setting is provided by the Upper Egyptian pharaoh city of Thebes in the middle of the second millennium B.C., in C.F. Meyer's work it is Lake Como on the southern edge of the Alps at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. By dint of their exceptional powers of intuition, both authors succeed in staging the characteristic atmosphere of a typical waterside market with great mastery. Each in his own way and with his own artistic means, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Thomas Mann and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer all created concordant images of certain specific historical harbour forms - the wharf, the waterside market, the Early Modern shore quay. While artistic designs such as these cannot replace the precise methods of science, they are nevertheless capable of making a welcome contribution to the vivid visualisation of historical harbour development.