His father, Paul, was an artist, a profession that at that time encompassed various modalities, and he specifically focused on architecture and painting, having had Mengs as a disciple. The child did not become brilliant by chance. Furthermore, it should be noted that one of the testimonies that have come to us about the virtues of the boy is signed by none other than Immanuel Kant, the celebrated philosopher, who wrote an essay about him calling him ‘ingenium praecox,’ which does not need to be translated.Īs can be easily deduced, he was a native of Lübeck, a city in the current German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which at that time had declined after the dissolution of the Hanseatic League in 1669, but in 1721, the year of Christian’s birth, it still remained a port of some importance.
So, if his merits may have been hyperbolized by chroniclers, it is also true that they had a certain basis. The fact is that Christian’s nickname as the Child Prodigy of Lübeck was not gratuitous, and the reason is quite well documented. It is difficult to establish how much of strict truth there is in his case and how much is exaggeration, even if it were partial. His name was Christian Heinrich Heineken, and he entered history with a life of only four years and four months.
There was another, however, who could have wrestled away the indisputability of that protagonism, and if he did not, it was simply because he did not have time, as he died in early childhood. In this sense, the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment, gave birth to some very famous ones, with Mozart being the archetype of all of them.
It is surprising that centuries ago, in times when access to education was practically restricted to the elites and pedagogy lacked the qualitative specialization developed today, child prodigies emerged with some frequency.
0 kommentar(er)
