The Contemplation of the Rings

1845

Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882)

By permission of Museen Stadt Hanau

As the commentators of the leading catalogue of Oppenheim’s works note, his “genre painting The Contemplation of the Rings [Die Betrachtung der Ringe]” was conceived during a period when Oppenheim had devoted himself to the study of portraiture.  Thus the present canvas shows him to be painstakingly careful in his sketches and studies aimed at capturing the spiritual state of his subjects through their posture and physiognomy.  The motif for this painting derives from a fable [for text click here] featured at the center of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous Enlightenment play Nathan the Wise (1779), arguably the most widely known and authoritative expression of the German Enlightenment’s ideas regarding religious toleration.  “Each of the three characters, who together embody the three religions in Lessing’s story, is sketched according to his habitus and the studied via a living model in order to represent each specific physiognomic expression authentically. … By reversing the Renaissance understanding of portraits, where type determines individual habitus, here individual character gives rise to typified human appearance.  The morality of the protagonist thus becomes immediately clear to the viewer because it closely follows human experience.”  (Quoted in Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art, ed. Georg Heuberger and Anton Mark [Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1999])

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