The University has always been an exclusive place. Whereas in the 18th century it was reserved for few learned families, the research university of the 19th century was decisively a place for the aspiring educated middle classes, closing themselves off from the “bottom ranks”. Social advancement via a university career was an exception well into …
With a complete lack of freedom, students were supposed to pay for their sins behind the closed doors of the detention room. This solitary detention revealed itself to be an opportunity for freedom of speech which is evident in the numerous doodles on the walls. For instance, an anonymous student made fun of the meteorologist …
The budding mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who had already been hailed as a child prodigy during his lifetime, was also not inept at drawing. The full-figure profile portrait of his teacher Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719-1800), which he made with a compass and a ruler, is ambitious, even if the perspective representation of …
KAESTNER – CARICATURES, Carl Friedrich Gauß, around 1795–1798, ink drawing on paper, State and University Library of Göttingen
Gauss himself had the honour of becoming the subject of a caricature, one which turned him into a child. Ritmüller shows the mathematician with the head of an adult sitting on a childlike body. Dressed only in nankeen cotton cloth, he was dressed inappropriately for low temperatures, as noted by his daughter from the background. …
CARICATURE OF CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS, Friedrich Eduard Ritmüller, date unknown,Ink drawing over pencil drawing on paper, Art Collection of the University of Göttingen
Being depicted as a copyist is a hard judgement upon Carl Oesterley (1805-1891), who had been Professor of Art History in Göttingen since 1844. Simultaneously, he held a position as court painter at the royal Royal-Hannoverian court. Trained in Rome and consorting in Nazarene circles, his style was shaped by Romanticism and religion. Kneeling, as …
CARICATURE OF CARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH OESTERLEY, Friedrich Eduard Ritmüller, date unknown, ink drawing over pencil drawing on paper, Art Collection of the University of Göttingen
In 1837, when Ernst August I of Hannover abolished the then only four-year-old constitution of the kingdom, Friedrich Dahlmann (1785-1860) authored a protest booklet along with a group of professors who became known as the “Göttinger Sieben”(The Göttingen Seven), which subsequently led to their dismissals. Having been Professor of Political Science since 1829, the historian …
CARICATURE OF FRIEDRICH CHRISTOPH DAHLMANN, Friedrich Eduard Ritmüller, date unknown, ink drawing over pencil drawing on paper, Art Collection of the University of Göttingen
