When Moses Samuel Lowe (1756–1831) visited his hometown Königsberg in Prussia in 1784, a very special task awaited him there: he was to create a portrait of Moses Mendelssohn as frontispiece for the first volume of the Hebrew monthly Hame’assef (המאסף The Collector), the in-house organ of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah). The portrait of Mendelssohn fulfilled the promise of the periodical’s publisher, the Society of Friends of Hebrew Literature (חברת דורשי לשון עבר), to distribute the portrait of a famous person among the Jews to the magazine each year. With the image of Mendelssohn, Lowe not only created a portrait, but rather a multifaceted allegory.
Mendelssohn’s countenance can be seen in profile in the center of the etching, whereby Lowe quoted a portrait that had been painted by one of his teachers, the court painter and director of the Berlin Academy of Arts Johann Christoph Frisch. Unlike Frisch, Lowe added a wide frame to the portrait and inserted it into a dark landscape with dense vegetation. This thicket is interrupted in the upper right part of the picture, opening up a source of light, which illuminates both Mendelssohn’s face and a path running along the right edge of the picture. The light also falls on several attributes that are visible in the lower part of the picture: an owl, a harp with a crowned head, and a putto playing the harp while resting one foot on a rock.
The complexity of Lowe’s portrait can be traced back to his own artistic creativity. The three most prominent attributes emphasize some characteristics of the portrayed. The owl (attribute of Minerva) placed in the lower left corner of the picture is a symbol of wisdom and identifies Mendelssohn as a philosopher. The putto in the center of the lower image is closely linked to the harp (attribute of King David) and refers above all to David as a poet and musician. By the putto’s prominent position, in which it replaces King David, it obtains the status of a Genius, and it thus becomes a symbol of Mendelssohn’s genius as translator of the Psalms. While the harp and the genius obviously symbolize Mendelssohn’s edition of the Psalms, which appeared the year before Lowe’s etching was created, the owl points to Mendelssohn’s philosophical work Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, which was also published in 1783. Another attribute of Mendelssohn is the stony path that runs along the lower right side of the picture, which is illuminated by the clearing. This pictorial element alludes to a third work of Mendelssohn’s published shortly before: The complete edition of his translation of the Torah, whose Hebrew introduction is entitled Light for the Path (אור לנתיבה). All of Mendelssohn’s works that were given a place in Lowe’s allegorical etching are not only works of enlightenment, but they are also strongly grounded in Mendelssohn’s faith and conviction of religious truth. This is what the rock, the foundation of Lowe’s composition, stands for. In the Tanakh, the rock is often used metaphorically as a notion of steadfastness, reliability, strength of faith and confidence. Lowe succeeded in visually representing the abstract notion of Mendelssohn’s strong rootedness in Jewish faith through the allegory of the rock. The iconography of Lowe’s etching is thus set in the context of Mendelssohn’s most recent writings with their strong references to the enlightenment and to Jewish religion.
According to the appreciation of his teacher Frisch, the „poetic part“ of the visual arts consists in the „invention“ of allegories that contribute to the vivid recognition of the viewer. By visualizing Mendelssohn, Lowe designed not least an allegory for the ingenious interplay of various artistic forms of expression, which were vibrant in the times of the Tanakh. The Jewish philosopher actualized the knowledge of the sublimity of biblical rhetoric, poetry and music. This became an essential factor of the Haskalah’s Jewish self-conception. More than any other portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, Lowe’s image reflects this achievement of the Jewish philosopher. Thus, he became a leading figure – he was raised to an icon of the Haskalah.
Dr. Uta Lohmann is a visiting research fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History.
Image: M. S. Lowe: Moses Mendelssohn. Etching, 1784; motif 12.5 x 7.5 cm. (Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History, University of Duisburg-Essen)