Comment on Why Are There Portrait Busts at Thorvaldsens Museum?
The classic English translation has here been somewhat modified in order to bring it closer to the German Ur-text, i.e. to emphasise Schiller’s clear parallelisation between political freedom and art.
The original German text, reproduced in Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford & New York 1982 (reprinted 2005), p. 6, goes:
”... der philosophische Untersuchungsgeist durch die Zeitumstände so nachdrücklich aufgefordert wird, sich mit dem vollkommensten aller Kunstwerke, mit dem Bau einer wahren politischen Freiheit zu beschäftigen…”
The English translation by Wilkinson and Willoughby, op. cit. p. 7 says:
”...the spirit of philosophical inquiry is being expressly challenged by present circumstances to concern itself with that most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man: the construction of true political freedom…”
Last updated 08.05.2022