Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

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In a Berlin lecture, Dr. Steiner once sharply rejected a mystical interpretation of
Dürer’s Melancholia. He said that Dürer had composed the picture in order to show on the
female figure and on the other objects the same gradations of light and dark as are found
on the pentagon-dodecahedron. He said that all the different tones of light and dark that
are on the stone can be found again on the female figure. This had been for Dürer the idea
underlying his composition).
Dr. Steiner: “For Rembrandt the problem is essentially the interaction of light and
dark. The problem of the Melancholia would not have occurred to him in the same way. He
would have done it much more abstractly ... In teaching you can contrast the light/dark in
Rembrandt, which is taken by him qualitatively, with the painting of southern European art.
“The things can thus be worked in together. This can also be done of course when
you show how Rembrandt, who has plastic forms in his pictures, understands the problem
of light and dark qualitatively, and how space is here only a means of solving this problem in
painting—and when you contrast with this the fact that plastic art is exclusively a problem
of space. In this way you can lead over to plastic art. And probably the best thing to do here
would be to connect it with the classical plastic art of the French in later times.
“In Rococo, of course you must take the good side, you have the extreme plastic
counterpart to Rembrandt. You can show in Rococo how different is the effect of light and
dark in plastic art from that in the paintings of Rembrandt. But you must always point out
that Rococo, although considered by some to be of less value artistically than Baroque, is
nevertheless higher in the scale of artistic development.”
Question: “Should certain stages in the history of art be brought into relief?”
Dr. Steiner: “I should point out how these stages came to expression differently in
different places. It is interesting to show how, at the time of Dürer, the things being done in
Holland were quite different from what Rembrandt was going to do later. Different times
for different places.” (The dark/light problem which occupied Dürer in Germany at the
beginning of the sixteenth century appeared in Holland in a quite different form, through
Rembrandt, in the seventeenth century.) 8
The Teaching of Aesthetics
The Development, by Means of Examples, of the Concepts of the Beautiful, the Sublime, the
Comic, and so forth
Dr. Steiner: “These are children of somewhere between fourteen and sixteen years
of age. I should try, by using concrete examples, to bring to the children the concept of
the beautiful, of art as such, metamorphoses of the beautiful through the different stylistic
periods—the beautiful of the Greeks, the beautiful of the Renaissance. It is especially
important for children at this age, that what is usually presented to them in an abstract form
should be given a certain concreteness ... It can be particularly ennobling if, at this age, the
child is given the opportunity to understand the nature of the beautiful, of the sublime.