/lit/ - Literature

>Franz von Lenbach, the reigning portraitist of Wilhelmine Germany, fashioned what became a more or less official image: head in profile, eyes fixed in the distance, nose and chin cutting into gray space, a large beret leaning to the side. The Rembrandtesque contrast of light and shadow, which also appears in Lenbach’s portraits of the German Kaisers, the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, and Bismarck, creates an Old Master ambience. As the Wagner scholar John Deathridge has observed, the donning of a beret itself has a political slant. Martin Luther wears one in a portrait from the workshop of Cranach the Elder, as does the real-life Hans Sachs in a sixteenth-century engraving. During the Napoleonic Wars, German freethinkers took to wearing berets as an expression of national identity. Wagner took up the trend around 1867, just as he was falling in line with the drive toward unification. He was consciously assuming a symbolic role.