Musica e paesaggio. Note sull’estetica di Schiller

Abstract

This article examines Friedrich Schiller’s reflections on music and their relationship to landscape representation in his aesthetic writings. Drawing on his theoretical essays, his correspondence with Christian Gottfried Körner, and lesser-known texts such as his review of Friedrich Matthisson’s poetry, the article traces Schiller’s attempt to define music’s place within the system of the arts. Departing from a Kantian framework, Schiller argues that music’s distinctive power lies in its capacity to give form to emotional states, transforming indefinite sensory experience into an intuition of ideas. The article then shows how Schiller connects this musical aesthetic to the modern representation of landscape in poetry and painting. Both landscape art and music, he contends, share an analogical relationship with human interiority: just as music articulates inner states through the modulation of sound, landscape poetry and painting achieve a comparable effect through the rhythmic arrangement of images and visual tones.