THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 837
It is different from the space which is usually painted, and thus the Sistine Madonna is the boldest picture and the landscape in it the most mysterious. There is no socalled
southern space here, the firmly constructed stage, nor so­called northern space, with the varying structure determined by the events within it. There is
geometrically clear unity, in the spirit of southern space, in Raphael's picture, but it determines no place at all for the figure within it, neither in nearness nor distance,
neither in this world nor the other world. The Madonna hovers equally before and between and behind the peculiar curtain which frames her aura in the picture. She
rises while she descends, and descends while she ascends, her space is that of abduction and of homecoming. The relation of the Madonna gloriosa in Faust to this
hovering one is obvious: in the gentleness of an outspread mystery, in the receptive inner world of immensity. Franz Marc has said that pictures are our own surfacing in
another place, and here, in the placelessness in which interior and perspective mutually merge and permeate themselves with a dissolved other world, a whole existence
surfaces in the other place; here there is nothing more than the wishful landscape of this Everywhere, of this permeatedness with homeland. A limit of art is also reached
here of course, if not ventured beyond; for religious art is none at all in so far as it is always on the point of doing away with the appearance which exists for the senses,
without which appearance nothing can be portrayed aesthetically. Wishful landscape of beauty, of sublimity as a whole remains in aesthetic pre­appearance and as such
the attempt to complete world without it perishing. Such virtual perfection, the object of every iconoclasm and of course itself perforated in religious art: this rises, suo
genere geographically, in the wishful landscapes, placed far ahead, from painting, opera, and literature. They are often mythologically cloaked and disguised, but never
remain settled and sealed in this; for they intend human happiness, a sense of its space having been well placed and having turned out well, from the idyllic to the still
mystical space. Pre­appearance gives this aesthetic significance of happiness at a distance, concentrated into a frame. For the happiness imagined in Kleist, powerful
enough to make foxes and wolves howl, deep enough to satisfy the demand made by the heart and to dispel the injury done to us by nature, in an unalienated world: —
for this utopia in the utopian element itself the situationless landscape is certainly one of the most exact spatial symbols, in the pre­appearance of the picture. But
everywhere the wishful landscape is such that everything which happiness needs is present; no less and equally no more than that. It will be incumbent upon socialist art
to see that this auroral feature in the picture