“A second, silent, man-made nature”

Goldmund’s idea of “a second, silent, man-made nature” describes the carved figures and ornament that exist alongside nature’s plants and creatures. For him, this world is not merely decoration: its forms seem to share a secret relation with human life, and art becomes a means of carrying images, memories, and experience beyond their brief existence.

Discovery in the Cloister

Goldmund encounters this second nature in the religious buildings and objects around him. He feels a private kinship with carved saints, animal heads, capitals, and clusters of leaves emerging from stone. The figures seem to him like protective godfathers, while the architectural ornament appears to unfold with an eloquence of its own. He spends free hours copying these forms, moving between drawings of carved motifs and attempts to draw real flowers, horses, and human faces. His attention thus connects the made image not to a rejection of nature, but to an adjacent world formed from its shapes.

The idea belongs to a broader attachment to the cloister’s sensory and visual life. Goldmund loves the imagery and sound of liturgy more than the study of grammar and logic: carved and sculpted forms, sacred vessels, incense, and hymns make religious meaning present through sight and sound. The silent figures are one part of a world he can enter through perception, rather than through abstract learning alone.

The Madonna and Artistic Vocation

A wooden Madonna gives this attraction a decisive focus. After confession, Goldmund sees the statue in a side chapel and is repeatedly drawn back to it. He is struck by its forward-leaning posture, blue cloak, delicate hand, and living expression. The priest tells him that the work, made by Master Niklaus, has stirred controversy: some consider it too modern and worldly to be a true image of the Mother of God. Goldmund’s response is the opposite. He sees in it a spiritual and human beauty that he has long sought, and immediately wants to know the maker.

The encounter directs Goldmund toward Master Niklaus and the practice of carving. Niklaus recognizes the beauty, though not the perfection, of Goldmund’s drawing and offers him a chance to learn without a formal apprenticeship contract. The usual guild path is difficult for him: apprentices are ordinarily much younger, serve for years, and must meet conditions for advancement. Goldmund is instead allowed to try his hand in the workshop, free to leave if the work proves unsuitable. His artistic calling therefore begins not as a straightforward passage through guild custom, but through a personal recognition between a drawing, a master, and an aspiring maker.

Images, Memory, and the Work of Art

For Goldmund, the made image also gives form to an inner figure that changes through experience. His hoped-for image of the maternal source of life draws on the memory of his own mother, but it is continually reshaped by the women he has known and by each new encounter. It is not meant to portray one particular woman. The silent world of art can hold this accumulated and changing memory in a form that no single living face could contain.

His work on the wooden Saint John makes another dimension of that process visible. Goldmund portrays Narcissus as the apostle and discovers, while carving, a renewed sense of his own skill and inner life. His distractions and absences interrupt the work, but when he is ready he returns to it with devotion. The figure seems to him to emerge through his hands rather than to be imposed by conscious will: the work gives durable form to the being of a person he loves.

The contrast between a carved image and a living body is sharpened by Goldmund’s sense of transience. He reflects that the model for a Madonna may already be dead, and the artist will also die, while the work can remain in a church for generations. Art does not stop death; it preserves an image beyond the lifespan of both its maker and its subject. The enduring object is therefore at once a memorial and a reminder of the change and loss from which it arose.

Sacred Space and the Made World

Goldmund’s return to Mariabronn turns this idea into a practical design for the refectory. To repay the cloister’s hospitality, he wants his first work there to belong to the building and its life rather than to be an isolated curiosity. Since there is no need or space for an altar or pulpit, he chooses the unadorned niche from which a brother reads the lives of saints during meals. He plans carved panels for the lectern and its steps, combining half-relief with figures that stand nearly free of the surface.

The intended structure joins the created world to religious teaching. Its lower portion, a staircase winding around an oak trunk, is to represent creation through images of nature and the lives of patriarchs and prophets; the upper parapet is to carry the four apostles. Goldmund plans to give the evangelists the features of Abbot Daniel, Father Martin, and Master Niklaus among them. In this design, wood and carved figures become part of the refectory’s architecture and communal ritual: the second nature does not stand apart from human life but is made to inhabit its spaces, memories, and practices.

The phrase thus gathers together Goldmund’s way of seeing and his work as an artist. Carved stone and wood echo the forms of nature, awaken personal recognition, and make religious or human presence perceptible in material form. Their silence is not emptiness. It is the condition that allows the image to outlast its moment and continue speaking through the lives of those who look at it.