“When I arrived in Italy I felt reborn; now I feel re-educated . . . When I get home you will judge for yourselves how well I have used my eyes. My old habit of sticking to the objective and concrete has given me an ability to read things at sight, so to speak . . . Angelica [Kaufmann] has paid me the compliment of saying that she knows very few people in Rome who see better in art than I do.”

Goethe’s letters from Italy, which make up the greater part of this compilation[1] (originally published in installments as Italienische Reise), were increasingly punctuated by these confident testimonials to himself as an Augenmensch, a seeing eye in the chapels and galleries of art, a daily improving connoisseur convinced that he was on the track of those “laws of Nature” which would enable him to explain the “laws of Art.” A week after relaying Angelica Kaufmann’s flattery to a friend in Germany, Goethe visited the Accademia di San Luca, where “the skull of Raphael” was preserved. “This relic seems to me to be authentic. An exquisite bone structure in which a beautiful soul could walk about in comfort . . . as I left I thought how all lovers of Nature and Art would value a cast of this skull, if it were in any way possible to get one made.” Before leaving Rome he arranged to have a cast made for him and sent to Germany. In later years,