Edward Jakob von Steinle
The Warden of the Tower, 1859
Öl auf Leinwand, 140,5 x 69,6 cm
1863 durch Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack erworben
Inv. Nr. 11551
The Warden of the Tower
Schack admired Steinle less for his religious paintings, for which the artist was best known in his own day, than for his fairytale-like images of subjects from the world of medieval legend and Romantic poetry. The warden in this picture gazes down confidently at the world. In this way the artist alludes obliquely to the phenomena of looking and seeing, to sensory perception as an aesthetic experience, as expounded by the visionary tower warden Lynceus in Goethe¿s Faust Part Two.