Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of February 7, 1873

Overview

A difficult night gives way to a quieter day of looking, reflecting, and arguing about art and culture. Religious and artistic images in the gallery provoke Wagner into deep aesthetic-moral commentary, especially on beauty, distance, and desire. Later, a dinner discussion reveals intellectual disagreement with the Wesendoncks, and the day ends in travel and familial duty.

Content

Friday, February 7:

R. again had a bad night, but toward midday he is sufficiently restored to look at some pictures with me in the gallery; we pay our devoted respects to the Tribute Money and the Sistine Madonna. In the first picture R. is again disturbed by the individual qualities of contempt, not to say malice, in the mouth, but this feeling soon gives way to admiration and emotion.

The beauty, the remote quality of the Madonna-“in this, beauty overcomes the sexual urge, no man would dare to approach this woman”-move us unutterably: “This is something the Greeks did not know.”

Dinner with the Wesendoncks, dispute over Strauss’s book The Old and the New Faith, which R. and I found terribly shallow, but which Frau W. admires. Departed at 6:30, spent the night in Chemnitz, paid our respects to sister Klara and the Ritters.