Basilius von Ramdohr

Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr (21 July 1757 – 26 July 1822) was a German conservative lawyer, art critic and journalist based in Dresden. From 1806 he was a Prussian diplomat to Rome and Naples. Life Basilius von Ramdohr was born on the family estate, the Rittergut Drübber (near Nienburg), which was their property between 1686 and 1839. He studied law and aesthetics at the University of Göttingen, before commencing a long and glamorous career as an art-critic and diplomat. He is remembered partly for his book Venus Urania (1798), an early work on the psychology of love and friendship (the book's name denotes "celestial love"), but mostly for the so-called "Ramdohr Affair" of 1809 (Ramdohrstreit) concerning his attack on the painter Caspar David Friedrich. Although he had a high reputation during his lifetime, to many contemporaries like Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel and Lessing he was not to be taken seriously. In his early twenties he had a brief affair with Charlotte Kestner née Buff, the model for Lotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther. The girl who had rejected Goethe in 1772 found herself rejected by Ramdohr in 1781.