The Exploded Tower, Heidelberg Castle

Large-format view (44.8 × 41 cm) of the « Exploded Tower » of Heidelberg Castle, dynamited by French troops during the Nine Years' War in 1693 and never rebuilt, by Jean Adolphe Braun (1812-1877), the Alsatian photographer-industrialist who founded the Braun studio at Dornach in the 1850s and turned it into a full industrial photographic enterprise by 1860. The plate belongs to Braun's German architectural series, which captured the Romantic ruins favoured by nineteenth-century bourgeois tourism on the Rhine and the Neckar, and was distributed both as single sheets and in bound luxury folios. By the date of this image, Braun had secured a licence to the Swan carbon transfer process (1864) and become the first European industrialiser of the procedure, employing up to 200 staff at Dornach to supply permanent carbon reproductions to the Louvre, the Vatican and the British Museum. The cantilevered fragment of red sandstone tower, suspended above the moat, is framed as a sublime emblem of post-Napoleonic German Romantic taste — Braun's rare ability to reconcile commercial topography with fine-art ambition. Holdings of the German architectural series are dispersed between the National Gallery of Art in Washington (which preserves this print, NGA 101039), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Library of Congress and the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar (principal Braun studio archive). Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: this Heidelberg view is reinterpreted as a direct-monochrome charbon print using the non-toxic chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, with pigmented gelatin in Noir Musée or Couleur Profonde tissues transferred onto 640 g/m² cotton paper — the direct contemporary equivalent of the carbon transfer Braun industrialised, preserving the dense modelling of the sandstone masonry without the dichromate hazards of the Swan-Braun workflow.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / National Gallery of Art (Open Access)