In the early years of the 20th century, to escape the attacks of the press and bourgeois bigotry of the time, Diefenbach left Germany. He would stay for short periods around Lake Garda, then in El Cairo and Trieste. In 1900, Diefenbach settled in Capri, where he would spend the last 13 years of his life, finding in the Neapolitan island an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his incurable condition of intellectual exile. In 1975, a museum was dedicated to him inside the Charterhouse of San Giacomo.

 

His paintings, of a strong Symbolist pattern, are charged with an intense mysticism conditioned by the spiritual life of the artist himself. Diefenbach came to give art a function at the limit of the magical-mystical, so much so that in all his works the cosmic sense of nature and of an infinity of religious value are expressed through sublime and mysterious notes. His canvases are often of considerable size and generally painted in oils to which he added different materials, such as sand and bitumen, to obtain material mixtures.

“On the pinnacle of the highest mountain a naked human child. The dark mists rise from the depths; but above him, in infinite space, worldly bodies shine, immeasurable in number and size (...). And the spirit friend addresses his question to the stars: “Are there beings like me? And are they closer to ‘God’ than the lost of the earth?”

With this description in the catalogue of the 1899 Trieste exhibition, Diefenbach provided a starting point for the perception of his painting, which goes far beyond the first impression of “a nude”. Through these words and in the painting presented here Domanda alle Stelle, the artist tried to express a message: to represent nudity in an innocent way. However, his attempt to encourage the viewer to engage intellectually with the content of the painting failed: the painting was perceived mainly from an erotic point of view. For this reason it appeared commercially and in the press under the less philosophical name of “Bergfee” (Mountain Fairy).

The artist painted the work in a tragic and poignant moment of transition from the values of bourgeois society of the 19^th century to the disturbing and dark 20^th century. A moment which represented a collapse of the models and certainties of traditional civilization, under pressure from the irruption of progress, nationalism, social and political instability and the winds of war that blew more and more threatening. A diaphanous female figure with her gaze turned towards a night sky, represents the incessant search for answers in the face of the inevitable decline of an era and the irruption of an unknown modernity, in a mystical propensity towards the cosmic and the indefinite. A projection of Man’s aspirations and fears, and an expression of a sense of vertigo that still referred to the strong artistic suggestion of late 19^th-century Romanticism. The moonlight, which amplifies the mystical character of the scene, is a symbol of a revelation of cosmic wisdom suspended between dream and nightmare which quite literally “overwhelms” the past and shows man the horizon of a new century.

Of this same subject, much loved by the artist, there are different versions. Among these, the best known is the one dated 1901 (Fig. 1), which has some differences compared to ours from 1898: the girl has her head surrounded by a wreath of flowers and a seagull.

A painting made within a path of development of this subject so dear to the German artist.

 

 

Fig. 1 - Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Domanda alle Stelle, 1901, oil on canvas, 99x69cm, private collection