The World on Your Pencil Tip: Baltic German Artists’ Travel Materials as Mediators of Knowledge in the Context of Travelling in the Enlightenment
The World on Your Pencil Tip: Baltic German Artists’ Travel Materials as Mediators of Knowledge in the Context of Travelling in the Enlightenment

Summary/Abstract: In the first decades of the 19th century, several Baltic German artists decided to embark on a journey to Europe in order to study abroad and visit sites of historical and artistic interest. In the Enlightenment period, amongst other things, art fulfilled a role as a mediator of knowledge. It played a part in education practices, as did travelling. In this article I consider the Baltic artists’ goals, priorities, and evaluations while travelling. I ask what kind of an effort was made to distribute their knowledge afterwards? Where, for instance, were their accounts published? The drawings and sketches that the artists produced while travelling later performed as agents that mediated places and people from the artist’s experience to later observers, and participated in the artists’ identity construction. I argue that artists were conscious participants in the production of knowledge, intentionally mediating and creating new knowledge for their contemporaries and for later generations. Artistic contacts – whether during the Enlightenment era or later – were constantly reinforced in the material, by publishing and trading objects such as letters, drawings and prints.

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