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What role does the motif of the nightingale play in the ideal of the renewal of literature and of painting in German Romantism? This article questions the transformations of the Antique and Medieval heritage of the bird in The Lesson of the Nightingale by the painter Philipp Otto Runge and through its literary references – Klopstock’s ode, which served as its title, and the novel The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald by Ludwig Tieck, which seems to exemplify its ideal. The impressive plumage of the songbird became the emblem of the quest for the absolute – ideal of the fusion of art and of nature and of a rapprochement of the visual and the musical – as well as its distance in respect to a modernity that was perceived as irremediably divided. Following the trace of the bird in the literature of the period and in Runge’s painting, becomes a quest for understanding how his multifaceted symbolism can be placed between the desire for unity and modern doubt.