Journal Article

A mathematics of finitude: on E.T.A. Hoffmann's \Jesuit Church in G.\

Kittler, Friedrich A

2009

Overview

[...] it was not a flat surface, rather it was a semiround niche, onto which he was to paint; the correspondence between the squares that the curved lines of the net cast inside the niche and the straight lines of the original sketch and the correction of the architectonic relations that were supposed to be represented as projecting outward could only be accomplished by this simple brilliant method.1 At the center of the story stands a technical problem of painting that could be posed only under the media-historically constitutive conditions of European modernity. For it was this project that first demolished in museums like Denon's Louvre the old European hierarchy of landscape, history, and architecture painting in order to push through the general image concept of modernism that Berthold's theory also observes; this project burst open for the first time on the European continent the secret doors behind which palaces, churches, and monasteries had preserved and concealed books, documents, and images. Reprinted with the permission of Wayne University Press

• Subject: Churches / Hoffmann, E.T.A / Modernism / Modernity / Review articles