Carl Rottmann
May 1955
“Carl Rottmann's Italian landscape frescoes in the arcades of the Hofgarten were world-famous, even if they had no star in the Baedeker. Gottfried Keller wrote in the original version of ‘Grüner Heinrich’: ‘An unheard-of and new thing has happened in that a plain artist has painted long halls with Italian landscapes in such a way that the Greeks would have understood and enjoyed these pictures and envied in them our time for an advantage.’ Ludwig I had written a distich for each painting. Over the years, Rottman's paintings were badly damaged by the weather.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 26, 1955)
“There they are again, memories of our youth, the frescoes with the Italian landscapes from the Hofgarten arcades. We saw them for the first time when we came from the north, stopped here to move further south. For hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Italy, they became the first signals of the south, the land of longing. That's how we thought of Italy, how Carl Rottmann formed this dream of the south with a halcyon gesture and how Gregorovius wrote it down in his Wanderungen. For ten years, these pictures remained hidden, and now they are back, not in their old place in the Hofgarten-Arkaden, but next door in the Kunstverein, temporarily united in an exhibition with other works of the great landscape master. They have become more beautiful than we were able to see them in recent years in the Hofgarten, where they often stood before us, displaced by caning from rowdy students, worn down by the weather, and disfigured by inadequate overpainting.” (Abendzeitung, May 26, 1955)