Winckelmann’s “Philosophy of Art”

Winckelmann’s “Philosophy of Art”:

A Prelude to German Classicism

By

John Harry North

 Winckelmann’s “Philosophy of Art”:
A Prelude to German Classicism,
by John Harry North

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by John Harry North

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4004-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4004-0

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations ............................................................................................ vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One................................................................................................. 7
Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23

A Prelude to German Classicism
2.1 ‘Hellenism’ - A German Utopia
2.2 ‘Ideal Beauty’ – The Essence of Art?
2.3 Winckelmann’s Contribution to the German Language
2.4 Eroticism and Ambiguity

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 97

Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies
3.1 The Apollo Belvedere
3.2 The Niobe Group
3.3 The Belvedere Antinous
3.4 The Laocoön Group
3.5 The Hercules Torso

Chapter Four............................................................................................ 149

Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation
4.1 His Narrow Perception of ‘Art’
4.2 Aesthetic Education – An Illusion?
4.3 Enigmas and Textual Contradictions

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 179

Conclusion

Bibliography............................................................................................ 183
 ABBREVIATIONS

Abhandlung Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des

Schönen. KS p.218 ff
Anmerkungen Anmerkungenüber die Geschichte der kunst KS p.247
DTM Der Teutsche Merkur (year, quarter, page) facsimile
copies obtained from http:///www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/
diglib/aufklaerung/
Gedanken Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the
imitation of Greek works in Painting and Sculpture.
Complete German text (1756) and English translation by
E. Heyer & R.C.Norton.( La Salle IL: Open Court 1987)
Geschichte Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Geschichte der Kunst
des Altertums. Wien 1776, 2nd ed.( Mainz: Philpp von
Zabern reprint2002)
JUS Justi, Carl. 1889. Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen.
2nd ed. 3 vols. (Leipzig: FCW.Vogel repr.1956)
KS Johann Joachim Winckelmann - Kleine Schriften,
Vorreden und Entwürfe. (De Gruyter Texte 2nd edition)
(Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002)
MFW Il Manuscritto Fiorentino di J.J.Winckelmann, ed. by.
Max Kunze (Florence: Academia Colombaria, 1994)
Monumenti Monumenti Antici Inediti, spiegati ed illustrati da
Giovanni Winckelmann, Roma: MDCCLXVII (1767)
Vol. I & II
Rehm Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Ausgewählte Schriften
und Briefe, ed. by Walther Rehm (Wiesbaden:
Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Sammlung Dieterich
Band 52, 1948).
 INTRODUCTION

I aim to to examine the pivotal role of Johann Joachim Winckelmann

(1717-1768) as a major contributor to German art criticism. The key
features of Winckelmann’s treatment of classical beauty are evident in his
famous descriptions of large-scale classical sculptures. Five case studies
are offered below to demonstrate the academic classicism that formed the
core of his philosophy of art.

Interest in Winckelmann and his œuvre began with his first publication in
1756: ‘Thoughts about the Imitation of Greek works in Painting and
Sculpture’.1 This work was of importance among the literary elite of
Germany and it continued to be read beyond his death in 1768.
Winckelmann was one of the originators of the illusion that there had been
in late antiquity democratic government in Greece; a government that
fostered the freedom of the individual citizen and of the artist. The idea of
such a cultural homeland, i.e. Griechentum, spread through the succeeding
generations of German philosophers and historians, resulting in a second
illusion: the notion that classical Greece was somehow ancestral to
German culture, to Deutschtum. This theory of an imagined German
Hellenism persisted for centuries and came to a close only with the end of
the Third Reich.

I plan to give an account of the reception which greeted his major works
before they were incorporated into the structure of the full-fledged
classicism of Weimar. This study will, however, be limited to the period
before Weimar classicism came into being (approximately 1778-1780).
The reason for this limitation lies in the complexity and the wide-ranging
diversity of Weimar Classicism led by Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Schiller
and Hölderlin whose works have already merited a large critical literature.
I seek to identify the point at which Winckelmann’s art theories, his
knowledge of classical literature and his descriptive methods merged in his
attempt to offer a coherent history of classical art. The recovery of
classical aesthetic values by imitation and admiration should, he thought,

1
Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und
Bildhauerkunst.
2 Introduction

be at the core of the education of artists. The admiration of classical art

could form part of a general ideology of art and of its potential role in
modern society.

These concepts formed one of the major contributions to German

intellectual life in the second half of the eighteenth century and the
doctrine of classical restraint which Winckelmann derived from his vision
of ancient Greece exerted a strong influence upon German literature. It
helped to shape the thoughts of Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Schiller and a
host of lesser writers.

The intention here is not to trace a causal connection between the images
of Winckelmann’s life, his homo-erotic response to the naked male and the
ideals of freedom he found in the Greek experience; rather it is to gain a
more precise sense of what the Greek ideal would have meant for someone
writing in his particular circumstances in the mid – eighteenth century.
Winckelmann’s ruling passion was a vision of ideal personal freedom that
he thought lay at the root of the ability of Greek sculptors to create the
‘inimitable beauty’ of their sculptures. This obsession was clearly
informed by his own experience of the blockages placed in his path while
he was struggling to establish himself as an independent scholar and
writer. The details of his arduous path to eminence were related by Carl
Justi in his three-volume biography of Winckelmann. 2 However, Justi was
writing one hundred years after the death of Winckelmann and his views
often reflect nineteenth - century aesthetic and political attitudes. The facts
of Winckelmann’s early years, however, are clearly described and thus a
short summary will be sufficient here.

Our sources for judging Winckelmann’s theories are first, his published
works and secondly, the extensive correspondence with his friends and
pupils that give us insights into his social and emotional life. The third and
most important document for the study of his creative process is the
Florentine Manuscript which contains many essays and draft chapters of
his published works. 3 The fourth group of source documents are extracts
that he copied from classical literature. Beginning in his early days as a
librarian in Dresden, and continuing throughout his productive life, he

2
Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Verlag von
F.C.W. Vogel, 1898) hereafter referred to as JUS.
3
Manoscritto Fiorentino di J.J.Winckelman, ed. by Max Kunze (Florence: Leo S.
Olschki Editore 1994) hereafter referred to as MFW
 Winckelmann’s “Philosophy of Art”: A Prelude to German Classicism 3

copied short paragraphs of classical literature that he felt were supporting

his view of the ancient world and of his aesthetic theories. These four
sources contain important criteria for judging the success of his mission,
eventually casting doubt upon the merits of his absolute aesthetic
judgment. Moreover, the validity of his educational theories will be
questioned, since no major artist of his generation followed his proposed
educational programme.

To understand Winckelmann’s importance to art-criticism we need to

consider his social and economic background. From the start of the
eighteenth century, there was a gradual change in the economy of the
German regions from the dominance of agriculture to the dominance of
industry and trade. Politically and socially speaking, there was a slow shift
from a strictly hierarchical to a more egalitarian configuration of authority,
accompanied by a marked increase and widening of the spread of literacy
and of economic power to the professional and free-thinking citizens. The
success of these new movements depended on gradual changes within
Germany that undermined the confident assumption of men like Spener
(1635-1705) who thought that German ways were God’s ways and that
piety was the only way to salvation. The positive reception of
Winckelmann’s classicism was partly due to the emphasis placed by him
on pagan models of ‘nobility’ and ‘freedom’ that he found in pre-Christian
society and which he thought found expression in Hellenistic art.

In Germany of the mid-eighteenth century the unrestrained use of power

by the leading aristocrats and prelates caused problems for many artists
and philosophers. But the leading aristocrats also acted as employers and
clients. Their sons were taught by resident tutors, their libraries were
maintained by qualified librarians and the universities relied on their
financial support. The Thirty Years War had ended with the Peace of
Westphalia (1648) which had created many political problems of the
German regions because it had created a large number of independent
political units varying in size from single cities and small estates to large
kingdoms such as Bavaria or Saxony. Winckelmann, in spite of his
dependence on the support of patrons, prided himself as being a ‘free
writer’ and he writes scathingly about the low quality of the northern
aristocratic visitors to Rome, Kavaliere who sought his company as a
guide – castigating in particular the French travellers for their ignorance.

Beginning in the early years of the 18th century some members of the
intellectual upper class, mainly in the German universities, were engaged
4 Introduction

in the search for fresh sources of moral and political authority, sources that
were unconnected to the existing ecclesiastic or noble hierarchies. Some of
these leaders of scholarly trends were ready to believe in an imagined
Greek ideal, a model of freedom and democracy that they thought had
evolved under the benevolent authority of the state. Winckelmann’s vision
of classical [Athenian] democracy can be seen as part of this rhetoric, and
as part of the search for the true roots of a German cultural identity
Deutschtum that might become the philosophical foundation of the
Fatherland – of the unified German state that might one day become the
guarantor of the freedom of the citizens and the artists.

In the following chapters I will explore the problems and contradictions

intrinsic to Winckelmann’s conception of the Greek ideal, remaining
aware of the dominance of two issues that feature centrally and explicitly
in his account of Greek art: the ideal of political and subjective freedom
and the eroticism of images of ideal masculinity. Winckelmann’s writings
seem rather ornate, perhaps as an expression of his desire to stress the
importance of his subject. It could also be due to his ambition to be
recognised as a scholar of note, a reaction against his extremely difficult
path to eminence. An important role in the development of Winckelmann’s
theories was played by the city of Rome. Winckelmann moved to Rome in
1755 and there he gained access to the highest levels of the Catholic
hierarchy, a tolerant and cultured environment that accepted and furthered
his scholarly researches into the ancient pre-Christian milieu.

A number of major problems face the interpreter of Winckelmann’s work.

The first is the wide gap that exists between his life time and his modern
critics. Winckelmann’s theories seem deeply embedded in the intellectual
environment of eighteenth - century Germany. His theory of the evolution
of art is based on the idea that styles in art, like human life, move from
youth to adulthood and decline. Modern concern with the interpretation of
the past and of Winckelmann’s work in particular is timely since the
distance in time gives greater clarity to the ever changing evaluation of
past writing and of past art criticism.

Perhaps more importantly, a distance of more than two thousand years

separates Winckelmann’s vision of classical Greece from the actual
creation of classical art.

Winckelmann does not explain the difference in time between his ‘Heroic
Style’ which he dates to the time of Alexander (fourth century BC) and the
 Winckelmann’s “Philosophy of Art”: A Prelude to German Classicism 5

‘beautiful style’ which he dates to the time of Hadrian in the first century
AD.

Winckelmann’s very personal interpretation of classical notions of freedom

and beauty are not considered to form a portent of modern critical art
history. Moreover the examples of classical sculpture that he admired and
through which he attempted to exemplify his theories, are no longer
regarded as the summit of classical art by its critics. Beyond questions of
time and taste Winckelmann’s erudition and profound connoisseurship
were somehow disconnected from his sensory experiences and from his
emotional response to large sculpture. His general judgements were based
on the examination of this art and intuition rather than erudition informed
his judgements and interpretations.

His language is almost entirely German, which is a radical statement in

itself, since access to the courts and the German nobility would have been
in French and to the learned community mainly in Latin. The language he
used and further developed was the basic Saxon version of the German
language as used by Luther in his translation of the Bible, a language that
was familiar to Winckelmann from his Protestant religious upbringing and
from the dialect used in the region of his childhood.4 He engaged with his
audience at a poetic level of German prose that was much admired in his
day and there is, clearly, a further gap between what he wrote and what the
reader of his time would have interpreted and assimilated. Winckelmann
addressed educated readers who would have been guided by their own
experience of art, by their sensitivity to works of sculpture and by their
own interpretation of his scholarly vocabulary.

It is clear from Winckelmann’s texts that he based his aesthetic theories on

his emotional response to his visual experience. There is a difference
between Winckelmann’s attempts to apply critical or even logical
terminology to the art of Greco-Roman times and at the same time, he uses
highly emotional, at times even lyrical language. This dichotomy makes it
difficult to identify personal aspects of Winckelmann, as neither his
published works nor his letters give many insights into his true character,
beyond his clearly stated ambition to be recognised as the leading
authority on his chosen subject. This rather opaque aspect of
Winckelmann’s work makes it almost impossible to describe him in the

4
Stendal, the town where Winckelmann spent his childhood is not far from
Wittenberg where Martin Luther had been priest.
6 Introduction

terminology of German literary criticism. His work can not be described as

belonging to the German Enlightenment, nor to Classicism, nor to the
Romantic movement; it is unique and intensely personal.

There is a clear disjunction between Greek historical reality on the one

hand and, on the other hand, the utopian projections of freedom and beauty
in Winckelmann’s account of ancient Greek art and of Greek society. A
well-known study that deals with the myth of Greece in German literature
is The Tyranny of Greece over Germany by E.M.Butler. She takes, as the
title indicates, an extremely negative view of the diachronic aspects of
German Hellenism. Hellenistic ideas however, were significant in
Germany because they were part of a set of concepts concerning European
history (and the history of art) that were widespread among the educated
German upper class of the eighteenth century. These notions cannot be
regarded as Winckelmann’s own creation since the idealisation of classical
Greece was already part of the notions of cultural history that were held by
the educated stratum of society. Winckelmann’s contribution to German
Classicism became of interest to succeeding generations of German poets
and educators, culminating in the subsequent century in Weimar
Classicism, a period that lies outside the scope of this work.

Winckelmann’s gift lay in his ability to absorb and interpret the art-
historical views of others, for instance Bellori, Junius, Öser, and his friend
and confidant, the painter Mengs. The importance of Winckelmann’s
published work lies in the way it expresses the spirit of the time Zeitgeist
of the mid - eighteenth century north of the Alps. His aesthetic judgments
reflect in a complex way a polemic against the excesses of the Rococo,
proposing a return to a simpler and perhaps ‘nobler’ art, especially in the
sculpture of the human figure.

A balanced assessment of Winckelmann’s achievement needs to include

an outline of his arduous path to recognition as an authority on his chosen
subject. Brought up in provincial poverty in rural central Germany, he
succeeded in finding patrons who recognised his talents and who
sponsored the publication of his work. His arduous path to eminence laid
the foundation of his lifestyle as a German emigré during thirteen years of
exile in Rome where he became the most erudite and highly esteemed
guide to the surviving art treasures of ancient Rome.
 CHAPTER ONE

WINCKELMANN’S PATH TO RECOGNITION

To understand Winckelmann’s rise to distinction it is necessary to consider

his progress from a village childhood in dire poverty to the position of
eminence that he ultimately attained. His biographers give an adequate
account of his early years and a short outline is sufficient here to illustrate
the influence of his genesis on the ardour that permeates his writings on
classical civilisation and its art.

Winckelmann himself tells us:

The only way we can achieve greatness and if possible to become
inimitable is the imitation of the ancients and what some say of Homer
that whoever has learned to understand him learns to admire him. The
same can be said of the art of antiquity.1

Perhaps one can apply the same principle to Winckelmann himself – the
better we understand him, the more we may come to admire him. Better
understanding of Winckelmann may result at first in astonishment rather
than admiration. But on closer examination we find growing respect for
the achievements of this singular personality. Winckelmann’s biographers
give an adequate account of his troubled life. But their studies were
written more than a hundred years after his death, and had to rely on the
collected letters of Winckelmann himself and on those of his
contemporaries. Inevitably, nineteenth-century ideas formed part of their
selection from the scant material available to them.

Winckelmann was born in 1717 as the son of a cobbler, a Flickschuster in

Stendal, a small town in Central Germany, halfway between Hannover and
Berlin. The area is known as Sachsen-Anhalt and it lies along the Uchte
River, north of Magdeburg. Stendal was once the capital of the Altmark

1
Gedanken, p.12 This quotation and all subsequrent translations and quotations of
Winckelmann’s texts are based on Johann Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke, ed. by
Joseph Eiselein (Donaueschingen: Im Verlage Deutscher Classiker, 1825).
8 Chapter One

‘Old March’, a division of Brandenburg, and its early settlers were Lower
Saxons and Slavonic Wends. Winckelmann’s parents were Lutheran
Protestants but they seemed to be hardly literate and took little interest in
the progress of their only son. His father had been a migrant labourer from
Silesia, from the border with war-ridden Poland; his mother was a local
girl.

The first remarkable step in Winckelmann’s advancement was his gaining

entry into the local Latin School – quite an unusual move given his
upbringing in illiterate poverty; an advancement entirely due to a number
of his teachers and benefactors who recognised his ability and his intense
desire to succeed in the acquisition of knowledge. He was able to pay for
his education by giving extra lessons to other students and by singing in
the church choir. He contributed throughout his childhood to the upkeep of
his parents. His success can be seen as an indication of the increasing
esteem of secular knowledge among the teachers of his day, thus he was
fortunate to have had an understanding teacher in primary school, who
took to the child and relied on him when he himself, in early middle age,
became blind. 2 Winckelmann became his guide and reader. For this he
was paid a pittance, which he shared with his parents. To add to his
income he sang at the weekly Catholic services at the Marienkirche in
Latin and he also sang on festival days, at funerals and baptisms. He
became, through his own efforts, the ‘Präfect (the leader) of the choir for
which service he received 60 Thaler a year. He learned to help his fellow
students to memorise Latin verbs; this meant that he himself became
thoroughly familiar with the texts that he taught by rote. Throughout his
later life he remained at all times conscious of his struggle to cover the
cost of basic necessities and he records gratefully that he had received
financial help from the town councillors at Stendal; he also had help in his
studies from his tutors in Berlin and in Salzwedel, not far from Stendal.

When Winckelmann reached 17 years of age [1734], he realised that his

studies would not lead to a qualification or to employment unless he were
to seek work in an environment where he could have access to libraries
and to university-level instruction. His blind mentor provided
Winckelmann with a letter of recommendation to the headmaster of the
Kölnische Gymnasium’ in Berlin. 3

2
Esaias Wilhelm Tappert (1666-1738
3
Christian Tobias Damm (1698-1756)
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 9

On the basis of this recommendation Damm accepted Winckelmann as

tutor of his children and granted him free board and lodging in exchange
for their supervision. Winckelmann would take them to school and church
and then he would repeat their lessons with them. In this capacity he made
the acquaintance of the rector of the Grey-friars College in Berlin a
protestant clergyman who had travelled widely throughout Europe
including a period as interpreter during the wars against the Turks. 4

In the Gymnasia of the time, Latin was the language of instruction. In the
upper years the students were expected to address their tutors only in that
language and they were encouraged to use only Latin in their
conversations with each other. Winckelmann gained access to the Royal
Prussian Library (which contained at the time some fifty thousand titles)
Winckelmann’s interest in ancient art seems to have been kindled by his
study of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and by his occasional visits to the
collection of curiosities of the Prussian court.

Under the guidance of Damm he was introduced to the beauty of the

classical Greek language and its literature. Damm says that ‘only in the
Greek language are the deepest thoughts of human self-knowledge
Selbsterkenntnis expressed and not in Latin. ‘The Greeks,’ he wrote, ‘have
to be imitated if something worthwhile has to be written’, and further:
‘highly educated men and even women are beginning, to turn towards this
[Greek] literature.’ Damm thought that there was no possibility that a
researcher Gelehrter von Profession could have made a living exclusively
by their profession except in the universities or in the religious
establishments. Damm does not mention service in noble households.

In 1736, the now 19 year old Winckelmann joined the Latin school at
nearby Salzwedel where the rector punished him repeatedly for his
inattention and disobedience in matters of theological studies. He
described his pupil as a ‘thoroughly unreliable heathen who found more
pleasure in reading heathen literature than in the prescribed religious texts.
Winckelmann then moved to Halle where he began theological studies.
Theology was the first choice of many poor and aspiring students and
Winckelmann was fortunate to find teachers who encouraged his studies.
He hoped, like many poor students, that the priesthood might provide him
with professional status and a good living. In the university of Halle he
entered a famous centre of Protestant pietism and traditional theology.

4
Johann Leonhard Frisch (1666-1743)
10 Chapter One

There he gained a thorough knowledge and dislike of the abstract and

petty philosophising of his mentors. There were only a few hours devoted
to the study of history, geography and modern languages, or to the
explanation and translation of pre-Christian literature.

The few profane Latin books that Winckelmann could access in the
university library enabled him to find in them what he considered to be
beautiful and intelligent comment. He extracted relevant passages,
amassing a treasure of extracts that were more important to him than the
study of Holy Writ and theological commentaries. The speeches of Cicero
were the models that most attracted him. Exercises in rhetoric were part of
the school curriculum and he delivered speeches in classical Latin
ornamented with his own inventions of stylistic fireworks. Winckelmann
was guided and encouraged by his mentor, the aforementioned Tappert.
The exercise of rhetoric became a recurring theme of Winckelmann’s
works. Throughout his life he was always strongly influenced by his
friends and able to adapt and incorporate their ideas in his work. Such
original thought as can be found in his work seems to be mainly in the
form of heightened emphasis and the further development of the ideas of
others.

In 1740 he became private tutor to a noble family [von Grollmanns] in

nearby Osterburg and from this position he supported his parents in
Stendal. As soon as he could, he left Osterburg and enrolled to study
medicine at Jena, but he could not continue (perhaps for monetary
reasons). In 1742/3, he became private tutor to another noble family, the
house of Lamprecht in Hallersleben near Magdeburg. Here he formed a
close relationship with the son of the house and this may have been his
first homo-erotic experience. In later years he continued to think of his
loving relationship with the young Lamprecht as a unique and formative
experience, a deeply felt but one-sided love.

Male friendship, Winckelmann thought, formed the highest gift of the

gods to mankind. Love between men he felt to be part of a long lost
tradition of passionate relationships. Friendship in this sense is
fundamentally pre-Christian and of course heathen rather than Christian. It
was the foundation and at the same time the culmination of antique life, of
Lebensgefühl. There is a contrast between the monotheistic tradition which
sees the Love of God as the core and measure of all things; in Platonic
antiquity it was mankind itself, not God that was the measure of all things,
and masculine love was seen as a form of piety.
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 11

In 1743 Winckelmann became schoolmaster at the village school in

Seehausen. This was the most wearisome period of his life. In spite of his
fondness and loving care for his young pupils and his success in teaching,
he found his work extremely depressing. He writes in later years that he
wished, even at this early stage, to gain knowledge of true beauty. He
described how he had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours to
gain time for reading. At this time he decided to abandon all other subjects
of study (theology, law, mathematics, history and medicine) so that he
could concentrate on classical literature and the arts. Nothing was to enter
his life that could impede his central passion.

At that time, Winckelmann was reading Voltaire (1694-1778) who

expressed his belief in the human virtues of savages les sauvages.
Voltaire’s optimism was supplanted in Winckelmann by his love of
antique sculpture. 5 In later years he looked back at this period of his life
as most depressing and frustrating, although he cared for and made friends
among his young pupils, he suffered from the narrow-minded and
uninterested attitudes of the local peasantry (whose sons they were) who
did not see why the boys should learn Latin.

Winckelmann escaped from this form of servitude in 1748 when he

entered the services of the count (Reichsgraf Heinrich von) Bünau at
Nöthnitz near Dresden. He worked as assistant librarian mainly engaged in
research into documents of the early history of the German Reich and its
emperors. This was to become the History of the German Emperors and
State, the Genaue und umständliche Teutsche Kayser- und Reichshistorie
which was the great work of his employer. Winckelmann was charged
with listing and cataloguing the extensive library of Nöthnitz castle which
was one of the greatest collections of books in private hands at the time.
Later it became part of the great municipal library of Dresden.
Winckelmann was allocated a room in the castle and a desk in the library.
He was paid a pittance but he had his meals with the other servants and he
could have had access to the great art collections of nearby Dresden, the
capital of Saxony. These collections had become enriched and embellished
by the previous king (August der Starke), who spent large sums on the
acquisition of antiquities. The research into the Reichshistorie was
undertaken with the clear purpose of creating a national mythology, an
attempt to find historical justification for the unconstrained despotism

5
In his novel Candide Voltaire attacks the political evils of his time, the abuse of
power and authority. Such views were never voiced by Winckelmann who was
careful to restrict his ideas of freedom to ancient Greece.
12 Chapter One

practised in the German principalities by their innumerable noble families.

Winckelmann’s relationship with count Bünau was at all times that of a
servant to his master, but he was able to form a lasting personal friendship
with the count’s son with whom he later maintained a friendly
correspondence. He remained grateful to Bünau and his son for having
supported him in his earlier years.

In June of 1753, when Winckelmann was 36 years old, he converted to

Roman Catholicism. 6 Early in the following year (1754) Winckelmann
left the services of the Duke at Nöthnitz to move to nearby Dresden where
he rented a modest room in the house of his friend and confidant, the
painter Adam Friedrich Ludwig Öser (1751-1799). He wrote to his friend
Berendis (12th June 1754): ‘ I would not really mind if my master would
dismiss me – I would not be in the least unhappy.‘

Dresden had been a centre of German Protestantism, where the population

was almost entirely Lutheran. The hereditary Elector had always been
Protestant and his titles included the phrase ‘Protector of the Protestant
Faith’ . Augustus III was groomed to succeed his father as King of Saxony
and of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He converted to Roman
Catholicism in order to be able to succeed to the lucrative crown of
Poland. With the support of Russian and Austrian forces he then engaged
in the futile War of Polish Succession (1733-1738). To assist in the
conversion of the whole Saxon court, the Vatican dispatched a Papal
Nuncio to Dresden. This was Cardinal Alberito Archinto, an enlightened
and worldly prelate who saw in Winckelmann a potential convert. He was
instrumental in gaining for Winckelmann a stipend from the new Catholic
Saxon court after he had converted.

Winckelmann’s scholarly activities began to gain focus and direction

around the time of his move from Nöthnitz to Dresden. He cultivated his
friendship with the portrait painter Öser (who would later be art tutor to
Goethe). Öser’s favourite painter was the Venecian Giulio Carpioni (1611-
1674) whose works Öser thought were an example of the ‘gentle
simplicity’ that was so rare in Baroque and Rococo art. Öser introduced
Winckelmann to Georg Raphael Donner (1692-1747) a well known art

6
Carl Justi, in his above mentioned biography of Winckelmann, devotes a whole
chapter to the struggles of conscience that might have preceded the actual
conversion. There were, however, also practical and financial considerations that
weighed heavily in favour of conversion.
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 13

teacher. Donner explained to Winckelmann the ancient techniques of

modelling and of sculpting in marble. Donner and Öser were important
influences on the teaching of art and the development of a German history-
based aesthetic. Öser wrote that the secret of Christian art lay in
representation of the divine die Versinnlichung des Göttlichen. He cites
the head of Christ by Guido Reni [in the Swabian Cabinet in Hamburg] as
the high point of what is possible in the representation of divinity in
human form. Öser continues: The calm grandure in every aspect, the calm
and wise eye, the mouth that seems ready to speak, the noble simplicity of
the hair draped over the shoulder. The words ‘noble simplicity and calm
grandure’ edle Einfalt und stille Gröȕe were adopted by Winckelmann to
express his ideal of classical calm. We can see the influence of Öser in
many more expressions used later by Winckelmann – a vocabulary of
acclaim and praise for works of art of a bygone age.

During Winckelmann’s year at Dresden, Öser was the recognized head of

art criticism at Leipzig. The year in Dresden (1754/55) was thus fruitful.
The conversations with Öser were concerned with the state of German
painting and the decline of taste from the high point of the Italian
Renaissance and its classical models to his own time. Details of
Winckelmann’s life in Dresden are not known. According to Herder, his
eyes were opened by his experiences of ancient art in the Dresden gallery
but apart from Raphael’s Sixtinische Madonna (and her two famous ‘putti)
he seems not to have been impressed by the collection.

It was at that time that Winckelmann set his sights on a visit to Rome, a
well-nigh mandatory pilgrimage for someone who was concerned with
broadening his knowledge of classical antiquities. Winckelmann was able
to prepare his notes and the manuscript of his first and probably his most
important work published the following year (1756) as the ‘Thoughts
about the imitation of the Greek works of art in painting and sculpture’. 7
The title page (vignette) was designed and engraved by Öser. The work
was an immediate success. The tone and the lucidity of Winckelmann’s
prose in praise of classical art evoked acclaim among the contemporary
literary intelligentsia and within one year Winckelmann was able to
produce a second expanded edition with explanatory text and an
accompanying anonymous circular letter, the Sendschreiben.

7
Gedancken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Wercke in der Malerey und
der Bildhauer-Kunst
14 Chapter One

He had already expressed his admiration of the Laocoön group in the first
edition of Gedanken - a view he formed based on engravings. He had seen
the three undamaged figures of draped women in the Museum at Dresden
and Wolfgang Leppmann tells the story of the discovery of these
sculptures.8

No collection of antique statuary in northern Europe could rival the riches

on display in Italy, particularly in Rome. The city was the repository of all
the better known antique sculptures, most of which were Greco-Roman
works excavated in Rome and its immediate environs. Martin Disselkamp
describes in the central and unique position of Rome as a centre of
learning and as the home of Good Taste. Die Stadt der Gelehrten. He
seemed to enjoy his status as expatriate, perhaps he felt that he was an
outsider in Rome; it was not contemporary Rome, but the Rome of
antiquity that was his spiritual home. Although he sought the company of
senior prelates of the Papal entourage, he was never ‘one of them’ and
remained an emigré throughout the thirteen years of his stay in Rome.

Close to Winckelmann in his attitude to the classical past was Johann

Friedrich Christ (1700-1756), who was professor of history and poetry in
Leipzig. He wrote a number of essays for the entertainment of his friends,
collected and printed as Noctes academicae (1727-1729), about the art and
life of the ancient Greeks and on the theme of the’ honnête homme’, of the
gallant man etc. It was Christ who introduced into the university
curriculum of Leipzig the relationship between art and society, between
ancient artefacts and social history. Good taste, Christ taught, was evident
even in the domestic equipment of the Greeks and the art of the classical
period was natural and true. We have no record how much of Christ’s
work was available to Winckelmann who wrote: ‘ I would have liked Herr
Professor Christ to have given his opinion on my work.

It was through Öser, Christ and Damm that Saxony became the centre of
the new interest in ancient classical art, as Winckelmann exclaimed in his
first work: Now Dresden will become the German “Athens” of the artists.

8
Wolfgang Leppmann, 1932; Winckelmann: Ein Leben für Apoll (Leipzig,
Fischerverlag) p. 97: In the early years of the 18th century, the Austrian imperial
troops had occupied Naples and the Austrian cavalry-general Emanuel Moritz
d’Elbœuf, Prince of Loraine, was having a villa built near the beach of Granatello
near Portici. As the workmen were digging the foundations they came across a
number of sculptures. Without realising it, they had dug into the Amphitheatre of
the Roman city of Herculaneum.
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 15

German interest in classical art also received an impetus from excavations

at Herculaneum and Pompeii which stirred the popular imagination,
greatly increasing the interest in ancient life and art among the educated
stratum of society.

At this time, Winckelmann increased his collection of extracts and

references to classical sources and critical literature on classical sculpture.
In particular, he extracted from Junius’ thesis De Pictura Veterum
(published in Amsterdam: in 1637), the idea that there was a sequence of
styles in the art of antiquity, an evolutionary process in step with the
history of the region. The reputation of Winckelmann as the father of
eighteenth-century art-history may have been based on his ability to
absorb and re-invent the ideas of his predecessors modified and
accentuated by his own creative genius.

Winckelmann’s trip to Rome was facilitated by a stipend from the Saxon

court obtained by the mediation of the Catholic church. The King, like his
son Frederic the Great, declared his conversion to Roman Catholicism ‘a
private matter.’ The Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Archinto interceded with the
king on Winckelmann’s behalf in order to obtain an annual grant. It seems
that Winckelmann’s conversion to Roman Catholicism was primarily a
matter of economic necessity. He wrote to Gottlob Genzner in March 1766
telling him that he was studying the Hebrew Bible and that he sang a
protestant hymn every morning.

Winckelmann begins his Gedanken with the statement that Greek

sculpture was based on the beauty of the male physique of the local
citizens. Like the beauty of the Homeric poems, he thought the plastic art
of classical Greece was a unique achievement based on the reality of their
physique. The physical beauty of the Greeks, in turn, he thought was due
to the temperate climate and the blue sky. Moreover, Greek men were
trained athletes and they exercised naked in the gymnasia. He continues to
describe the beauty of the men of the Aegean islands in glowing terms,
never having been there. It is astonishing that he never refers to his
religious beliefs in spite of seeking daily contact with Papal prelates.
Might it not have been God himself who had so favoured the Greeks?

In Dresden Winckelmann had made the acquaintance of one of the most

influential art conoisseurs of his day, Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn
(1730-1780) and from this time onward he developed his respectful
friendship in the form of regular correspondence. When Winckelmann was
16 Chapter One

at the point of travelling to Rome he promised to write to Hagedorn,

giving his impressions of the Roman art treasures, since Hagedorn himself
was not able to travel to Rome. Winckelmann wrote seven letters to
Hagedorn addressing him as’ My dear friend’. The critical judgements of
Hagedorn made an important contribution to the emotional response of
Winckelmann to the beauties of classical art. In his circular letter
Sendschreiben Winckelmann wrote: ‘His [Hagedorn’s] work has been
conceived with much wisdom as well as recognition of the finest aspects
of art’ and in one of his private letters he wrote that Hagedorn’s erudition
was based on his travels in Europe but that he had little knowledge of the
art treasures of Rome, as he had not visited Rome yet. For the last 16 years
of his fruitful life, von Hagedorn was the head of the Saxon Academy of
Art.

There are two important fragments from Winckelmann’s Dresden years

(1753-1754). The first of these was the description of the foremost pictures
of the Dresden Gallery, (1753) which contained descriptions of paintings
by twelve artists mostly of the late phase of the Italian Renaissance.
Winckelmann speaks of the use of dark colours and shade and he criticises
the brothers Carracci, claiming that they were ignorant of the ‘correct’ use
of colour. He praises Guido Reni for his ability to express strong emotions
but takes him to task for making the faces of his subjects too pale.

His second fragment contains his thoughts about the oral presentation of
the latest general history of art: He writes about the importance of the
useful das Nützliche, the beautiful and the most characteristic, without
attempting to define the meaning of the terms. He writes about humanist
ideals Menschlichkeit and he believes that Periclean Athens was an
example of the happy state die Kategorie des Glücklichen. The sources of
his Greek studies were limited in two ways: first, he had access only to the
local libraries where the Greek sources were few; secondly he wrote
extracts of the material he thought relevant to his theme and thus he
accumulated his own selection from texts. These did not include
Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars in eight volumes (435BC), although
copies and translations (by Reiske) were available at that time in the
libraries.

The circumstances under which Winckelmann made his move to Rome in

1755 were still far from assuring him a secure future. His conversion to
Catholicism was an essential step to ensuring eligibility for patronage by
the Catholic establishment in Rome. In his early days there he lived on a
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 17

relatively hand-to-mouth basis, helped by a small and irregular stipend

from the Saxon court until, in 1757, he entered the services of Cardinal
Archinto as his part-time librarian. Archinto died in 1758 and Winckelmann
was fortunate to gain employment as librarian to Cardinal Albani.

His employment provided free accommodation within the Vatican and it

left him free to wander about Rome and visit the palaces of the Roman
nobility. In the first part of the second edition of Gedanken he added an
Introduction in the form of a pseudo-attack on his theories, which he
followed immediately by a defence and explanation.

Beginning in 1756 he prepared a number of exercise books that he filled

with inventories and descriptions of the sculptural treasures on display in
the private collections of Rome. It was a form of written guide-book, an
‘aide- memoire’ for his guided tours. The hand-written exercise books are
today preserved in the national library of Paris under the title Ville e
Palazzi di Roma. In addition to his Roman activities, he was able to travel
frequently to Florence where he prepared a descriptive catalogue in French
of the collection of engraved seals and cameos accumulated by Baron von
Stosch. He was renowned for his erudition and he was sought after to
guide the young men, mainly sons of the German nobility, who came to
Rome to improve their education. He was not paid for these guided tours,
but he was probably happy to accept gifts such as the popular snuff-boxes
or similar tokens of esteem from his pupils.

Winckelmann travelled to Naples with the painter Mengs (1758) to see the
latest results of the excavations at Pompeii and at Herculaneum; His notes
became the source of a report on the excavations at Herculaneum;
published in 1762. In the following year he was appointed to the post of
Prefetto dell’ Antichitá di Roma, which secured a small income. Two
years later (1764) he published his ‘Essay about the ability to experience
beauty in art and the instruction in the subject’ Abhandlung von der
Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst und dem Unterrichte
in derselben. Winckelmann shared with the painter Mengs the notion
that‘wisdom in beauty‘ Weisheit in Schönheit was the guiding principle
that informed the quasi religious experience of the comprehension of
beauty. In the same year(1764) he travelled once more to Naples and
published his ‘Latest news about the excavations at Herculaneum’. He also
brought his major work to conclusion and published his ’History of Art in
Antiquity’ Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums in two volumes, illustrated
with vignettes of engraved stones which he thought were classical Greek.
18 Chapter One

In May 1764 he wrote to his publisher (G.C. Walther) offering him the
publication of his latest work under the title of: ‘Attempt at a History of
Art particularly about the Greeks until their collapse’. But the manuscript,
if it ever existed, has not been preserved. Winckelmann was by no means
the first to have attempted a general history of art, and the Italian
successors of Vassari and Baldinucci as art historians were de Piles,
Passeri and Bellori, followed by Ridolfi and Pascoli who were all
attemtpting to systematise ancient sculpture and painting. Winckelmann
does not refer to his Italian predecessors except in general and derogatory
terms and his debt to Franciscus Junius remained unacknowledged.

The publisher Walther printed 1200 volumes of the Geschichte and in

1766 it was translated into French as Histoire de l’art chez les anciens
(Paris: chez Salliant). The success of the work was almost immediate,
although it clearly had a number of structural problems. It claimed to be
what it was not; it was not a history of art, as will be argued below, but
more a work of literature, a highly selective and personal work, more a
confession than a work of scholarship. It did, however, turn the interest of
the reader from the history of artists to the objects they had created. Under
the influence of Öser, Hagedorn and Mengs, Winckelmann had acquired
an analytical interest in the detail of late classical marble sculpture.

Winckelmann’s presence in Rome was a significant attraction for many

visitors who came to Rome in search of culture. He went beyond being
merely a participant in Italian travel and art circles and became himself
part of the reason why so many cosmopolitan connoisseurs headed for
Rome. It is important to investigate why this expatriate German acted as a
focal point for Italian travellers who were interested in art. Historical and
biographical coincidence undoubtedly played their part – he was certainly
the right man in the right place at the right time – but to focus exclusively
on these aspects of his rise to fame and consistent popularity would be
misleading. Potential travellers would have been aware of the meteoric
rise of this small-town German classicist to a position which gave him
access to the most influential circles of the Vatican hierarchy, thus also
gaining access to the great art collections of Rome that were to a large
extent in private hands. Winckelmann’s life in Rome was punctuated by
visits to Naples, to Florence and to nearby Tivoli, usually in the company
of his carefully chosen friends. Osterkamp, in his review of Disselkamp’s
analysis of Winckelmann’s letters describes his life as:
Excessive in controversy, excessive in endless work, excessive in eating
and especially in drinking; this is how he himself described his life, this is
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 19

how his friends and admirers experienced the modern exponent of classical
moderation.

It seems that his upbringing without a model of propriety influenced his

lifestyle in Rome where, in the shadow of the Church, the permissive
society allowed Winckelmann the freedom he could probably not have
experienced in Germany. It is in his private correspondence, analyzed and
commented upon extensively by Disselkamp, that we see him as he lived
in Rome. His letters formed an important component of the culture of
letter writing and of erudition in mid-century Germany.

Winckelmann’s arrival in Rome gave impetus to his intensive engagement

with the art of antiquity. Before he came to Rome, his experience of
Hellenistic sculpture had been limited to the few examples in the royal
collection of Dresden and to the engravings and small models of classical
sculpture that he could have seen. Thus the impact of the massive
sculptures in the Vatican collections made a great impression and would
have confirmed his intention to write detailed descriptive texts as part of a
major work on ancient art. He had obtained a copy of Franciscus Junius’
De Pictura Veterum (1694)9 from which he extracted numerous references
to classical literature that he then incorporated in the Geschichte. Junius
(1589-1677) had created a compendium of classical sources with the aim
of demonstrating the origins of classical art and its development during
‘propitious times’ (publica temporum felicitas). Moreover, Junius addressed
art-critical questions such as proportion, symmetry and colouring. He
wrote a rich compendium of classical sources and artists, a well-
researched document, including chapters on the representation of the
naked human. Winckelmann returned to the reading of Greek sources in
1756 because he found the collection of quotations prepared by Junius to
be incomplete. The collection of Junius is incomplete because he had
never seen Rome and art was not his metier, so he did not understand
everything and he did not notice all.

Following the success of the Geschichte, Winckelmann published a

number of minor essays: ‘Attempt at an Allegory Versuch einer Allegorie
followed by Monumenti Antici inediti in 1766 in Italian. He had hoped that
this catalogue of sculpture would generate sufficient income to make him
financially independent, but the costs of production and distribution

9
‘Francisi Junii Catalogus Architectorum, Mechanicorum, Pictorium, oliquorumque
Artificium veterum secundum seriem literarum digestus.’ (MFW, p.160) with
comments by Max Kunze (ed).
20 Chapter One

proved too large. Earnings from his writings were never enough to
guarantee him an adequate income. His financial insecurity was
compounded by his efforts to remain independent. As a writer, he prided
himself on being someone who worked entirely on his own initiative and
did not undertake work on commission, although his engagements in
Florence and in Naples seem to contradict this image of himself. He had a
small pension from the Saxon, (later the Prussian) court and he was paid a
stipend by the Vatican as curator of antiquities.

A large proportion of his last publication, the ‘Monumenti Antichi inediti

spiegati ed illustrati da Giovanni Winckelmann consisted of a catalogue of
the highlights of the Albani collection. He was at pains to present the work
as a catalogue of Roman monuments that he himself considered important.
He also indicated clearly on the title page that the book had been published
‘at the author’s expense’. Winckelmann’s meager earnings from his
publications and the care he took to avoid official benefices that would
demand too much time, meant that despite his grand accommodation in the
Villa Albani, he was in no position to live in a manner resembling the life
of a gentleman. The architect Erdmannsdorf, who met Winckelmann on a
visit to Rome in 1766 remarked on how small his income was: ‘He had
no-one to serve him.’ Winckelmann became the best known specialist
guide to the sculptures in the public and private collections of antiquities
in Rome. He might have been remunerated for his lectures by the visiting
foreign students of art and the members of the aristocracies of northern
Europe who came to Rome as tourists to explore the cultural treasures of
the South.

In the spring of the year 1768 Winckelmann travelled to Germany in the

company of the Roman sculptor Cavaceppi. The reasons for his visit are
unclear and his biographers cannot explain what made him leave the
security of Rome for the hardship of the transalpine coach journey. We
may guess that his failure to attract artists to his lectures in Rome may
have caused him to travel to Germany where the reception of his works
among the literary elite was more positive. The journey may also have
been undertaken because of his unease about his financial position in
Rome and how it might compare with the kind of position to which he
might have aspired in Germany as a professor at a university or as a chief
librarian. When they reached Regensburg Winckelmann cancelled his
further travel plans and instead followed an invitation to travel to Vienna,
where he was received in audience by the empress Maria Theresa who
 Winckelmann’s Path to Recognition 21

gave him a gold medal in recognition of his services. On the 14th May
1768 he wrote from Vienna to Muzel Stosch in Florence:
I arrived in Vienna two days ago after a very uncomfortable journey. I had
left Rome five weeks ago. And here I found your lovely letter handed to
me by Herr von Wallmoden. The journey, instead of entertaining me has
made me very depressed since it was not possible to make the journey in
greater comfort nor did I wish to continue, since it was not a pleasure.
Beginning in Augsburg I forced myself to remain cheerful but my heart
says no, and my aversion to further travel could not be overcome. My
friend! I would have liked to write more but I am unwell and not as I
would like to be. In a few days I will take the land-coach to Trieste and
fron there by ship to Ancona. I kiss your hands with heart-felt sadness and
remain your eternal Winckelamnn.

He complained of a state of mind of sadness, or he might have been

suffering gastro-enteric problems that would have made a continuation of
long-distance coach travel uncomfortable. (He would not have written
about such matters to his friend.) He was on his return journey, waiting in
Triest for a ship to take him back to Rome (via Ancona) when he was
murdered by a casual acquaintance in his rooms at a harbour-inn on the 8th
June 1768.

In order to gain a clearer view of the importance of Winckelmann’s art

historical theories it is necessary to consider the state of German art
history of the time and the reception of his work in the German literary
environment of the late century. This will become the subject of the next
chapter.
 CHAPTER TWO

A PRELUDE TO GERMAN CLASSICISM

Biographical details of Winckelmann’s arduous rise to eminence need to

be seen in the context of the German literary milieu of his time. There is a
need here to consider his socio-political background as well as that of the
readers of his books, the philosophers, the dilettanti and connoisseurs and
also the views of his opponents who might have read his books.

Early in the eighteenth century fundamental changes had occurred in the

world-view of some educated Germans. These new ideas are grouped
together under the name of the ‘German Enlightenment.’ This movement
spread across the regions north of the Alps in the form of a daring and
dramatically new intellectual and cultural tendency. Of its many
innovative characteristics – audacity, wit, an interest in the practical and
the applied – none was more important than its critical biting edge. The
members of the movement called for Enlightenment Aufklärung new
thinking about once unquestioned fundamental truths and eventually for
new actions that were
characterized by the metaphor of light, hence ‘enlightenment.’ In various
western European languages around 1700 AD the fashion arose of praising
some people as being enlightened – in French éclairé. These enlightened
people were moderately affluent and literate, they read books and journals,
wrote letters and pamphlets and they had leisure to visit coffee-houses,
attend lectures and scientific demonstrations. In the Western World the
mental universe of the literate minority expanded as never before. In
France, the impact of the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, of Voltaire and
of many lesser figures can be seen as the prelude to the philosophy of
freedom and insurgency that culminated in the French Revolution.

In Germany, there was a marked increase and widening of the spread of

economic power to the professional and free-thinking citizens. Exploration
and conquest of adjacent regions and of the New World contributed to, but
did not in themselves explain the rise and extended influence of the ideas
of the Enlightenment.
24 Chapter Two

These processes were accentuated by the crisis of absolute government in

France and by the rise of Prussia as a German, indeed a European, power.
These changes combined to support in the minds of some of the literate
middle class a new and different set of values. These changes prepared the
ground for popular notions of the Nation State which spread through
central and eastern Europe in the following century.

In early eighteenth- century Germany memories of the tragic religious

wars of the preceding century were still fresh; philosophers liked to
denounce religious fanaticism, although most of them adhered to basic
Christian beliefs and remained members of the churches. In the minds of
the educated middle class there grew the desire to share in the exercise of
power in competition with the ecclesiastic and aristocratic authorities. The
philosophes 1 of the Enlightenment were aware of the bloody record
Christians had compiled through the ages, a record that confirmed the need
for change in the teaching of the church on the subject of pain. In this
environment, the ancient pagan literature had its uses; it supplied the
innovators with illustrious models and it gave their polemics the dignity of
an age-old struggle between reason and unreason, a struggle that had been
fought in the ancient world by Socrates and the stoic philosophers. It was
now being fought again by Immanuel Kant, by Lessing and their
followers. As the Enlightenment saw it, the world of the thinkers was, and
had always been, divided into those who accepted the Biblical vision of
human imperfection and men who affirmed life, the body, knowledge and
generosity.

Heinrich Heine, wayward son of the Enlightenment, would later call these
parties, most suggestively, Hebrews and Hellenes. This duality was
already implicit in Winckelmann’s view of the history of Greek art and the
distinction he made between the earlier ‘high’ mode, austere and pure, and
the succeeding ‘beautiful’ mode, elegant and seductive. The distinction
was not just a stylistic and formal one, it articulated a series of
ideologically loaded dualities between the body and the soul, the erotic
and the spiritual. This dualism also formed a component of the German
Enlightenment. The theory of progress was a special case of this dualism:
it gave formal expression to the hope that the alternations between ages of
philosophy and ages of belief were not inescapable, that man was not

1
Les philosophes, term popular in France to describe the philosophers of the
Enlightenment; Quoted by McMahon, 2001, in her preface to The Making of
modernity. .
 A Prelude to German Classicism 25

forever trapped on the treadmill of these historical cycles. The

philosophers of the Enlightenment were returning to a supposed ancient
period of reason and justice. They tackled once more Plato’s fundamental
question of the relationship between right and might, between the rule of
law and the exercise of power, adapting the ancient problem to their own
milieu. After more than two thousand years, the eighteenth century
established direct contact with the thinking of ancient Greece and
Winckelmann’s re-discovery of the aesthetics of antiquity was part of this
field of philosophy.

Efforts were made to make the teaching of the Classics more attractive,
largely by the work of Johann Mathias Gesner (1691-1761), whose works
included the important lexicographical work: Novus Linguae et Eruditionis
Romanae Thesaurus of 1747. By his published works and by his influence
as a teacher he did much towards raising the standard of classical studies
in Germany. He taught at Weimar and at Leipzig. As headmaster of the
Thomasschule he produced the Crestomatia Greca of (1757) which
introduced the best Greek classics into the schools of Germany and he
compiled a Greek Reader for schools, which offered a more sensible way
of introduction than the customary start of Greek studies with Xenophon.
In 1733 he was called to the University of Göttingen which was then in the
course of being founded (by George II) and for the remaining 27 years of
his life Gesner remained there as head of the classics department, as
librarian and as chief inspector of schools in the Hannoverian kingdom.

Gesner can be credited with having inaugurated the first Philological

Seminar at Göttingen. This form of university teaching encouraged
students to think for themselves and it invited their cooperation - in
contrast to the lectures where a single teacher does all the talking. While
Gesner in many ways broke new ground, his greatest contribution to the
study of the Classics was the introduction of principles of taste and critical
judgement into their interpretation; ideas one might call an ‘aesthetic of
philology’. He was helping to make his university different from the older
German universities and also from the Prussian university at Halle and
from the Academy of Science at Berlin. Gesner’s introduction of new
approaches to the ancient literature was designed to appeal to the new
intake of the sons of the ambitious bourgeoisie. Under his guidance the
aim at Göttingen was to teach the students not to imitate the classical
styles of Latin or Greek, as other universities tended to favour, but to
assimilate their substance. This would form the mind and cultivate the
taste, and thus it would lead to the production of a modern German
26 Chapter Two

literature that was not to be a copy of a bygone age, but was to have a
voice of its own, whether in philosophy, or in learning, art and poetry.

This new German voice was to be an echo of classical taste and wisdom.
Like the ‘Roman Empire of the German Nation’ it was to be the new
‘Greek Culture of the German Nation’. Against this background the work
of Winckelmann and its immediate success has to be seen as eminently
expressing the most progressive spirit of the time. The age of Lessing and
Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin was approaching, and Gesner as well as
Winckelmann were its prophets and precursors. Gesner’s successor at
Göttingen was the equally gifted and scholarly Christian Gottlob Heyne
(1729-1812). 2 Heyne was able to promote Göttingen to become one of the
foremost seats of learning in Germany. His great works were a translation
of Homer (8 vols. in Latin) and his Vergil; he also translated Apollodori
Bibliotheca (2 vols), into Latin, with its valuable collection of Greek
mythology.

In the middle of the century perhaps the greatest German philologist was
active. This was Johann Jacob Reiske (1716-1774). He was fluent in
Arabic and Greek. He was not as fortunate as Gesner in having gained
financial security by employment at a university, but his place in the
history of scholarship is alongside Winckelmann, Gessner and Lessing.
Like Winckelmann, Reiske spent his formative years in dire poverty,
having to rely on the teaching of Arabic or Greek to private students who
often failed to pay him. Wilamowitz tells the story how Reiske came under
the suspicion of being a Freethinker, because the lack of a Sunday coat
prevented him from going to church. Salvation came in 1758 when he was
elected headmaster of the Nikolaigymnasium in Leipzig, a middle-school
of good reputation. His most important works were published posthumously
by his widow, as were his important German translations of the works of
Thukydides, Demosthenes and Aischenes. Between 1770 and 1775 he
published his important Oratores Graeci in 12 volumes. The 3rd volume is
dedicated to Lessing who had helped him by providing manuscripts.

Meanwhile in Berlin, the afore-mentioned Christian Tobias Damm (1699-

1778) became head of the oldest gymnasium of Berlin, where he produced
his great dictionary of Greek. His translation of Homer into German was
frowned upon as it was considered ‘primitive’ and in a language that was
more common in the Lower Classes. However, his translations served to

2
Christian Gottlob Heyne in Sandys III, 36; (Pfeiffer II, 171 is rather brief).
 A Prelude to German Classicism 27

make the poems better known in Germany. He believed that the imitation
of Greek models was the way to raise the level of German culture. He saw
the increasing interest in classical literature as a sign of a new German
Renaissance. One of his famous pupils was Winckelmann who spent one
year under his guidance (1735-36). It is likely that Winckelmann’s single-
minded pursuit of an Hellenic ideal had evolved from his studies under
Damm.

Throughout the eighteenth century and especially from the second half
onwards to the early nineteenth century, the reception and incorporation of
classical Greco-Roman material reached a high point and particularly the
knowledge of Homer and Vergil spread throughout Western Europe. At
the same time philological and textual studies were showing dramatic
progress; the number of universities and middle schools increased greatly.
This rapid progress in classical studies created a new interest in books, in
libraries and in the collecting of antique art.

The teaching of art history had become part of the general history
curriculum and was based largely on Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), painter
and architect, whose account of the lives of Italian artists of the
Renaissance had become the basis of ‘Good Taste’ in Germany of the
succeeding centuries. His famous work was Le Vite de' più eccellenti
architeti, pittori, et scultori italiani (1550, revised 1563). Vasari was born
in Arezzo.3 He was trained in art, went to Florence and worked in the
studio of the painter Andrea del Sarto. As an architect, Vasari was a
follower of his contemporary Michelangelo whose admiration for the
Greek sculptors was passed to Vasari. If there ever had been a founder of
the systematic study of art, it would be Vasari. Three aims can be
discovered in his ‘Lives’. The first is the promotion of his native Tuscany
as the leading centre of artistic excellence alongside ancient Greece and
Rome; the second is the consolidation of the advances in the status of the
artist from that of an artisan to a figure of note in society. Thirdly and by
no means last, was the idea of progress in art, an optimistic view of the
historical process that reached its apogee in the time of Vasari himself.

Winckelmann and his followers adopted Vasari’s idea of progress and

particularly his idea of a quasi-biological, tripartite cycle in the history of
art. They remained unaware of the conflict between the idea of progress
and the notion of absolute values in art. We do not know the actual date of

3
The home town of Piero de la Francesca, a town that paid tribute to Florence.
28 Chapter Two

creation of a classical work of art, so we arrange works in ascending order

of complexity or by some other pre-selected style or distinction and then
we ‘discover’ that there is progress towards an ideal and decline thereafter.
Intellectual pursuits had been partly dormant in Germany of the preceding
century, probably due to the terrible consequences of religious and civil
war; meanwhile art criticism in Italy made considerable progress. The
most important successor of Vasari was Giovanni (Giampietro) Bellori
(1615-1690), who had reached the eminence of President of the Roman
Academy of Art. In 1664 he delivered an influential speech to the
‘Accademia di San Luca’ in Rome on ‘The Ideal in Art’. In 1672 he
published this lecture as a preface to his biographies of recent and
contemporary artists:

The preface is an important source of Winckelmann’s aesthetic ideas. It is

entitled ‘The idea of the Painter, Sculptor and Architect, Superior to
Nature by the Selection from Natural Beauties.’ Bellori then proceeds to
describe – or to define, the process of creation, writing art-theory even
where he wrote biography. When Bellori looked at the art of his time, or at
the art of ancient Rome, he saw it as being largely split into two trends, in
his view both equally wrong: Naturalism (the imitation of natural forms)
and Mannerism (the invention of artifical forms). Naturalistic art, in his
view, lacked aesthetic norms and is devoid of noble ideas. It is ugly, since
the natural world abounds in ugliness. He thought that it appeals to the
Lower Classes. ‘Common people’, Bellori says, ‘refer everything they see
to their every-day experience. The noble and learned, however, refer what
they see to ideas rather than to familiar objects. He saw the main
shortcoming of mannerism as being the opposite to that of Naturalism. The
mannerist was independent of his model or nature in general. His general
sin was that he attempted to imitate nature, and he would be improving on
his models, stressing or selecting those aspects that he considered
beautiful. Bellori refers to Plato when he says that ‘the idea should be a
perfect rendition of a thing based on nature. But ‘mannerist painters’, he
continues, ‘imitate the brushstrokes of their masters.’ Idealistic art, Bellori
believes, embodies purified nature and reveals its beauty to our eyes. He
does not use the word ‘idealistic’ in the modern sense but what he has in
mind was later called ‘le beau idéal’. What he considers idealistic is the
approach to an idea of absolute perfection, a concept echoed and
elaborated by Winckelmann in the following century. Bellori believed that
nature provides us with the ideal – if we leave aside the extremes and take
the average measurements of each detail, it is perfectly beautiful and the
sum of the perfect details will result in over-all perfection.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 29

Bellori starts his influencial ‘Lives’with an exhortation:

That high and eternal intellect, the creator of nature in making his
marvellous works by reflecting deeply within himself, established the first
forms. For this reason, the noble painters and sculptors, imitating that first
Creator, form in their minds also an example of superior beauty and,
reflecting on it, improve upon nature.’

Bellori became the universally acclaimed promoter of the classical cause,

a central figure in the formulation of academic thought on classical
painting and sculpture. He was bestowed the title of ‘Antiquario di Roma’
by Pope Innocent XII. He wrote a number of highly acclaimed articles on
Roman antiquities, for instance the details of the Triumphal Arch of Titus.
But his main critical work was the veneration of Raphael and of Annibale
Carracci that was to dominate Italian and German academic thought
during the succeeding century.

There is yet another aspect of Bellori’s work that has to be considered

when trying to understand his theories as one of the sources that
contributed to the theories of Winckelmann. The text of Bellori’s lecture
‘The Idea’ La Idea became the preface to a long biographical work. He
divided the Renaissance artists into groups, based on their presumed
‘manner’ and he classified them according to the nature of their work. The
Roman school, for instance, was based on Raphael and Michelangelo. It
drew on the beauty of classical sculpture. The Venetian school was best
represented by Titian who based his art on the natural beauty of his
models. The Lombard school perfectly manifested by Correggio focused
on the model’s charm and the Tuscan school of Bologna reveals the beauty
of disegno and relievo. Bellori aproaches the modern concept of ‘style’
and his attempts to discover direction and structures in the art of painting
may well have been one of the sources of Winckelmann’s ideas in his first
publication, the Gedanken. Winckelmann omitted almost all reference to
God, or to Bellori; classical artists were not inspired by the Deity, nor can
one find any reference to religious or mystical forces in Winckelmann’s
ideas. It was his humanism that was probably a major factor in the
universal approval that followed almost immediately on the publication of
his work.

Bellori tells us that: ‘In imitation of the highest Artist [God], the artist
must bear within himself a notion of that unclouded beauty according to
whose image nature can be improved. The ‘idea’ itself was thought to
originate from sensory perception but he continues ‘Superior to Nature by
30 Chapter Two

selection from natural beauties’. [. . .] originata dalla natura supera

al’origine e fassi originale dell’ arte. The Idea [. . .] born from nature,
overcomes its origin and becomes the model of art.

During Winckelmann’s time, one can distinguish a number of phases of

German literature, for example late Rococo, Sturm und Drang’, early
Classicism, or early Romanticism; but the boundaries of these phases are
ill defined and one can truly only speak of a continuous process with
different degrees of emphasis, different styles, authors and audiences.
There exists abundant literature on the classification of German literature
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which includes a large volume
of literary criticism on the subject. The classification of German literature,
however, is not relevant to the subject of this study, since Winckelmann’s
works do not easily fit into any of the customary groupings. He can be
seen as an early exponent of romantic emotionalism, at the same time his
descriptive texts claim to be based on clarity and enlightened rationality.
Winckelmann’s term ‘Edle Einfalt’ ‘noble simplicity’ is somewhat similar
to Pietist faith, to the noble naïvety of the faithful. Winckelmann described
simplicity not as inherent in art in a more general way, but as an emotion
he experienced when he confronted the objects of his study.

In parallel to the phases of German Enlightenment there was a tendency

towards counter-Enlightenment. The new spirit of freedom of intellectual
endeavour was not shared by all the intellectual elite of the time and some
German high-schools of the eighteenth century took as their model,
naturally, the teaching methods of the old universities that had taught their
own, mostly elderly staff. There were a number of academics who did not
take part in the Enlightenment and yet did major literary work in the last
decades of the century. It was the function of the universities to educate
the fee-paying sons of prelates, counts, barons and dukes. The financial
stability of all educational institutions of the time depended on the support
of the rich and powerful. The ideas of the Enlightenment were not
generally accepted by the old noble families who owned the land and the
produce, who taxed the traders, the bankers and the peasants. But this
nobility also employed, supported and encouraged the intellectuals of their
regions – their conversations were thought to lend a superior tone to the
drawing rooms of the nobility and the studies of the prelates. The
employment of private tutors was an important feature that enabled many
independent scholars to find shelter and a little security. In this
environment Winckelmann was able to gain the support of the Catholic
hierarchy in Dresden and in Rome. He was at all times dependent on the
 A Prelude to German Classicism 31

generosity of his sponsors since his income from the sale of his literary
output was never sufficient to support his lifestyle.

The professors and the tutors at many high schools and universities were
keen to befriend the sons of the nobility in the hope that they might be able
to further their careers or provide them with opportunities of extra income
as private tutors, librarians and councillors to their high-born patrons. The
highest ranks of the civil and ecclesiastic hierarchy had their own libraries
and art collections. Their sons were educated at home by resident tutors,
some of them uniformed or wearing hats and gowns in the colours of their
universities. From the middle of the eighteenth century, some sons of the
growing middle-class were also able to enrol in the ‘Gelehrtenschulen’,
the Gymnasiums that provided a Latin [and sometimes now also Greek]
based curriculum of higher education. These newly acceptable students
were the sons of the developing Middle Class and were the offspring of
city councillors, bankers and entrepreneurs of the new industries. There
were also others who did not have to rely on the generosity of the nobility;
for example the sons of the owners of the glass industry which provided
engraved glass for the wealthy. There were also the sons of middle ranking
officers of the private armies and the senior staff of the noble establishments
such as musicians, rent collectors and overseers of the peasants. Finally,
there were also those members of the growing middle-class who had found
shelter in the vast monastic and ecclesiastic establishments of Protestant,
as well as Roman Catholic denomination.

These socio-economic developments of the early eighteenth century had

engendered what sociologists call a ‘crisis in values’. For instance, the
historian Karl Mannheim describes the Ancient Greek situation of the
fourth century BC, but his analysis could equally apply to Germany in the
early eighteenth century. He argues that neither imperialism nor
democratisation by itself would have upset traditional religious values.
One source of cultural disorientation reinforced the other so that the
combined impact of vertical mobility between classes and horizontal
mobility between cultures was likely to shake the belief in the eternal and
universal validity of traditional ways of thinking. Mannheim suggests that
democratisation in combination with an imperial enterprise culture clearly
created such a crisis in Athens of the third century BC. In the German
regions it was mainly warfare that brought individuals into contact with
other nations who would have different ways and values. In addition, the
wide distribution of learned journals brought knowledge of the latest
32 Chapter Two

discoveries to the literate middle class. These two factors contributed to

the ready approval of Winckelmann’s Hellenism by his educated readers.

One further important concern of the German Enlightenment was the state
of the German countryside after the devastating depopulation that
followed the Thirty Years War. Lawlessness and the spread of contagious
disease continued after the ending of official hostilities in 1648. The
population of Germany was reduced to less than half with the result that
large estates remained uncultivated for lack of workers. There was a
spread of dissention and civic disobedience due to the lack of controlling
authorities. In this environment, the churches, the monasteries, and the
new nobility were forced to make concessions and to accept the diversity
of beliefs – even in some cases the right of learned institutions to turn
away from organised religion.

Perhaps the most influential of the educators of the new century was
Christian von Wolff (1679-1754). He lectured on mathematics, natural
sciences and philosophy at the University of Halle. He was expelled in
1723 by order of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia when the Pietists
objected to his rationalist views. Friedrich the Great, the successor of
Friedrich Wilhelm called him back and made him chancellor of the
University of Halle in 1740. For more than a quarter of a century Wolff’s
secular philosophy dominated some of the philosophical faculties of
German universities and a whole generation of thinkers acknowledged him
as the major influence on their thinking. For Wolff there were no
mysteries in heaven or on earth: everything became perfectly clear, simple
and natural, once it was exposed to the light of reason. Nature, virtue and
reason were the three main themes of his educational method. He
demanded that the precepts of moral law be applied equally to all classes
and he claimed that even peasants should be taught to read, which was a
very revolutionary idea. He had a high esteem for the German language as
a medium of scientific and literary expression and he demonstrated this by
delivering university lectures in German rather than Latin or French. He
fought with great vigour against the antiquated and absurd witchcraft trials
that were still taking place in Germany in the eighteenth century.

The time honoured ‘humanistic’ education based on formal disciplines

(learning by rote) and proficiency in the liberal arts was considered
obsolete and foreign to life. The modern teacher was to prepare the student
for the practical requirements of life, providing him with the tools for the
acquisition of knowledge and skills, particularly skills in rhetoric and the
 A Prelude to German Classicism 33

use of language to communicate ideas. Students were to be confronted

with real problems and situations in state and home, in art and nature to be
resolved by experiment, demonstration and discussion. A teachers’
training college at Halle, the Seminarium Praeceptorum, was dedicated to
the introduction of teaching by observation and understanding. In this
environment, the young Winckelmann found the emotional and educational
space that he needed to follow his instinctive desires to express his search
for absolute emotional values of beauty and high art.

The opposition to the new methods of teaching by discussion was headed

by Jesuit as well as Protestant religious groups since the sacred texts were
thought to be beyond discussion. Discussion could lead to doubt or even
heresy. And it was much safer to teach the sacred texts by making the
students learn them by heart. Turning away from organised religion was
regarded by some (notably Johann Georg Hamann) as a descent into
anarchy and atheism. But there was also a significant movement against
Wolff emanating from the universities themselves. The loss of the
traditional scholarly Latin and the stress on the vernacular was regarded by
some of the learned fraternity as parochial, since the international
community of learning was based on Latin, a language that had all the
facilities for expressing abstract and philosophical thoughts. In Germany,
in spite of Martin Luther’s effort to introduce Saxon as the German
standard there was no general acceptance of a uniform grammar. There
was no German language dictionary until Johann Christoph Adelung
(1701-1793) published his German dictionary. It was not followed until in
1812 when the brothers Grimm published their Deutsches Wörterbuch.
This was the great dictionary in 33 volumes, laying the foundation of a
common set of meanings of words in the standard German language.

Winckelmann wrote in the earlier linguistic vacuum in what he considered

to be academic German, a style and format that was immediately popular
among his educated readers.

The lamentable state of Greek literary studies at the beginning of the

eighteenth century was due to the lack of classical texts in Greek; the
Garramond printing fonts of Venice had not crossed the Alps and foreign
editions were costly and rare. The study of the Greek language at
universities was mainly directed at the Greek sources of the New
Testament and to their exegesis. A number of anthologies were produced,
such as translations of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and of Xenophon into
Latin. But the systematic study of classical Greek was not introduced until
34 Chapter Two

after the death of Winckelmann. The revival of interest in Greek language

was led by outstanding scholars such as for instance Christian Gottlob
Heyne (1729-1812) and Friedrich August Wolff (1759-1824). This
resurgence of interest in classical literature was to some extent prepared
and foreshadowed by Winckelmann who claimed that his philosophy of art
was based on his research into Greek classical literature.

Winckelmann’s notions of Panhellenic sentiments of ‘freedom’ in classical

Greece seem to come exclusively from the German literate minority, be it
in the form of drama, poetry, speeches or written history. In ancient
literature, some indications can be found in Homer himself, who describes
Panhellenic sentiments among the leaders of the Greek cities strong
enough to sustain for ten years a common attack on Ilium; although Homer
never used the term ‘Hellenic’ or ‘Greek’. It is debatable how far the idea
of national identity could have been a projection of later ideas into the
heroic past and how far there might have been indeed a joint attack on
Troy by Greek national forces.

The acceptance of the Homeric poems as ancient history was common in

classical Greece, in Rome and in Germany of Winckelmann’s days. This
idea inspired Schliemann and others, in the following century, to search
for evidence in the mounds of Asia Minor. The assembly of the sources of
the Iliad and Odyssey into coherent narratives had been undertaken in
Alexandria in the last stages of Ptolemaic rule,4 many centuries after the
Trojan War might have taken place.

Whatever may have been the true origin of the Homeric epic poems, their
fundamental importance for Greco-Roman religion and for Winckelmann
is not in doubt. His first encounter with the Homeric texts was during his
early studies under Christian Tobias Damm in Berlin and from this time
onward he read and re-read the texts throughout his life, annotating and
extracting passages that he admired. Already in his younger years in
Germany, he had acquired the Ilias edition of Alexander Pope and during
his long stay in Rome, he claimed to have read passages of the Homeric
poems every morning, using the edition of Adrien Turné (Paris 1554) and
in the autumn of 1757 Winckelmann made enquiries about acquiring the

4
According to Pseudo-Plutarch’s Life of Homer, these were Aristarchus,
Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristophanes of Byzantium, who lived in the last
century BC.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 35

recent edition of Count Caylus’ Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade et de l’ Odyssée

d’Homère et de l’Eneide de Vergile, Paris 1757.

We recognise, and the ancient Greeks also recognised as ‘hellenic’, a

complex array of attributes that were present in varying degrees wherever
Greeks settled and that distinguished them from the barbarian alien. Some
claimed to be Greek by descent, others by language and culture. This set
of prejudices confirmed their right to rule those who did not share
‘Greekness’. Winckelmann, in his Geschichte, writes in the introduction to
his chapter on Greek Art as follows:
It was the aim and the intention of the constitution and government of
Greece to place freedom at the forefront and preference of art. Freedom in
Greece had at all times been in the forefront and at the side of the thrones.
Their kings ruled like fathers until the taste of enlightened freedom of
thought gave them a foretaste of the sweetness of complete freedom.
Homer calls Agamemnon the shepherd of the people to indicate the love
and care he felt for his flock.

Winckelmann’s vision of the classical Greek city state was an illusion,

perhaps based on his desire to find a model or an example of good
government. This would have been in tune with the search for German
cultural identity that was preoccupying some contemporary German
philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing, Wolff, Herder and
some minor authors. Winckelmann’s earlier employment as a researcher
into the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation may
have been an influence pointing in the same direction. Winckelmann’s
patron and employer at Dresden, Heinrich von Bünau, a member of the
ancient nobility of Saxony, was preparing the History of the German
emperors and State which was clearly an attempt to create a German
national history, a utopia of a glorious past of benevolent dictatorship that
might have served as the foundation for the rebirth of Germany as a
unitary state. 5

This search for the ancient roots of German culture was truly revolutionary,
since the philosophers themselves were dependent on the continuance of
the disparate state of administrative units and thus on the patronage of
their noble or ecclesiastic masters. Universities and freelance scholars
were financially dependent on the benevolence of the local power structure

5
Deutsche Kaiser-und Reichshistorie. Vier Bände (1728-1743) and 16 Folio
volumes of manuscripts, then in the Dresden Royal Library (according to JUS I,
177).
36 Chapter Two

for their maintenance and they were subjects of their masters rather than
free citizens. As their livelihood depended directly on the will of their
noble sponsors and on the continuance of the system of patronage they had
to take great care not to appear too innovative or revolutionary. Even the
professors at the growing number of universities were finantially
dependent on the nobility. And the ubiquitous censorship saw to it that
only ‘reliable’ candidates were chosen for university positions.

Winckelmann’s theory of classical art was based on the assumption that

such ideal beauty as he saw in classical sculpture could only have been
created by an ideal society; ideal in its notion of the freedom of the
individual and in its masculinity, its creation of idealised shapes. The only
way such a theory could have been put forward was by the highly selective
reading of the literary sources and particularly the social ideals suggested
by Plato in his proposed government (politeia). This Platonic utopia
imagined a society that could only have been constructed in an ideal
population of educated modern men and therefore could never have been
achieved in antiquity. Plato’s state is a paradigma (ʌĮȡȐįİȚȖȝĮ) an
example based on formal justice [and by definition also of injustice] that
should serve as a model for future attempts to create the perfect society.

In the last book of the Republic, Plato considered the position of art. He
argues that art deals with the most fleeting, unstable and therefore most
unreal aspects of the world. Its effect on the soul is precisely opposite to
that of the education that is to be given to the elect (Guardians). Art,
according to Plato, encourages the rule of the senses and the passions and
it makes the soul incapable of ascending from the unreal and the
impermanent to the permanent and true. Thus art must be excluded from
the ideal city. Winckelmann did not engage with Platonic strictures nor
with the reality of the Greek city state. Greek economy was based on the
enslavement of strangers and of other Greeks by the self-selecting men of
the land-owning upper-class who ruled and governed to further their own
rather limited interests. However, Winckelmann was never revolutionary
and his personal history shows that he chose his friends and admirers from
among the cardinals of the Papal court and from among the minor nobility
of the German states.

Winckelmann’s Griechentum, like Deutschtum is one of the notions of

group identity and loyalty that are difficult to define clearly because such
concepts tend to vary by social (cultural) set, by place and by time.
Individuals saw themselves in Plato’s classical times as members of many
 A Prelude to German Classicism 37

overlapping groups and the sentiment of the moment varied in fervour –

depending on the individual and on the situation. There was awareness of
a common national identity of all Greeks only on the occasion of special
events such as the great competitions (games), festivals or pilgrimage to
common sanctuaries. Political or military panhellenism may have been
debated in some Greek intellectual circles, but it only occasionally
penetrated into the consciousness of the citizens as far as this can be
judged. Moreover, even in intellectual circles, the ‘nation’ was never
regarded as a substitute for the city or for feelings of belonging to regions
such as Attica, Boeotia or Laconia. The state, in antiquity, was never
regarded as the guardian of the freedom of its subjects and the ideas of
Winckelmann, in spite of his claims, were rarely based on his literary
studies. Similarly, in eighteenth-century Germany, local identities and
dialects were defining group loyalties much more strongly than Deutschtum,
German national consciousness.

In classical Greece, notions of local identity would distinguish the citizens

of the polis from their neighbours and from the few who lived in the rural
environs. The geographic diversity of the eastern Mediterranean littoral is
reflected in the diversity of social and political structures of classical
Greece. There was no comparable diversity in the German speaking areas
of Europe; there were no major geographic barriers between European
regions and the political structures that were created by the peace of
Westphalia had no clear geographic foundation. Even so, like the Greek
citizens, Germans had much in common. They could easily feel ‘at home’
in any of the cities of their region. A visitor would have seen many
familiar sights and language was a common bond, in spite of the many
dialects and local turns of speech Greeks, like Germans, would have
understood local speech in most of their areas.

Some Greeks, in classical times, might well have considered their

superiority as self-evident, given their status as leaders of the known
world. This was in spite of the religious and political diversity of their
homeland. One can consider Greek nationalism of the fifth century BC
primarily as a case of Athenian rhetoric rather than national sentiment. As
in Germany of the eighteenth century, there were instances when those in
authority – and there were many forms of authority in the Greek speaking
world as in Winckelmann’s Germany – would appeal to nationalist
sentiments to further their aims. By claiming that the interests of the whole
Greek or German world was at stake, they might gain approval for their
plans and by stressing national sentiments the rulers quite properly aimed
38 Chapter Two

to combat the centrifugal forces of self-interest and by appealing to

patriotism, then as in Winckelmann’s days, orators would buttress the
loyalty of subjects to their leaders. Winckelmann’s notion of Griechentum,
‘Greekness ‘ disregarded the fact that the administrators of the classical
city were never concerned with the freedom of the citizen and that such
notions were not mentioned in Plato’s ideal republic. Perhaps the reason
why Winckelmann imagined the Greeks to have had feelings of national
identity and liberty lies in his own preoccupation with the nation state as
guardian of individual freedom.

In the Geschichte, Winckelmann goes as far as he dares in his view of

contemporary German art critics by comparing them to the ‘wise and free’
Greek judges.
The honour and fortunes of the Greek artist were not depending on the
obstinacy of ignnorant pride and their works were not judged by the
untrained and evil eye of judges who had been selected by flattery and
subservience. But the wisest of the whole people judged and rewarded
their works at the meeting of all the Greeks at Delphi and at Korinth where
there were contests of paiting under specially appointed judges at the time
of Phidias.

Winckelmann’s view of an ideal art in an ideal society in classical Greece

is quite erroneous. The notion of ‘Athenian ‘freedom’ is clearly
contradicted by the tragic end of Socrates, whose gentle criticism of
traditional values was regarded by the authorities as sufficient reason to
condemn him to death as ‘perverter of the youth’. The dilemma of
Winckelmann’s aesthetics was that it led him to an illogical conclusion.
Systematic imitation of the ancients in his day was historically unfeasible
and of little practical use for the reason Winckelmann had demonstrated so
brilliantly, namely that the development of Greek art was determined by
its environment: the climatic, social, and political conditions that made it
unique. He looked back with nostalgia, while erecting signposts pointing
in the opposite direction. In his letter to Berendis (July 1756)
Winckelmann writes critically about the lack of response from the visitors
he tries to instruct; it was posterity that might have their eyes opened by
his enthusiastic prose.

Winckelmann ignores the debt he owed to his French predecessors,

principally Jacob Spon (1647-85), who was professor of medicine at Lyon
and whose travel literature was enhanced by his descriptions of the art
treasures he had discovered. Spon considered the sculptural remains of
 A Prelude to German Classicism 39

classical Greece to be the most remarkable monuments of antiquity. He

claims: un aveu sincere, que mes plus grandes recherches ont eu pour but
la connaissance des monuments antiques des pays que j’ay vûs. Most
important, for the earlier studies of antiquity was Count Caylus (1692-
1765) who criticised his predecessors for their concentration on ancient
literature instead of the monumental arts of the past.
‘Les monuments antiques sont propres à étendre les connoissances. Ils
expliquent les usages singuliers, ils éclaircissisent les faits obscures ou
mal détaillés dans les Auteurs. Ils mettent les progrès des arts sous nos
yeux.’

It was Caylus’ thesis that art began with simple forms and therefore simple
forms can be classified as archaic and the linear treatment of forms, the
omission of detail and ornament give their sculptures monumentality and
grandeur. He writes about Egyptian sculpture. Caylus continues with the
idea that the Etruscans followed in the footsteps of the Egyptians by giving
their sculptures more movement and elegance. These views contrast with
Winckelmann’s negative assessment of the art of Egypt and of Etruscan
Italy. Winckelmann criticises Caylus for not having travelled to Rome to
see the Hellenistic sculptures, and he thought that the engravings that
formed the basis of Caylus’ opinions were inadequate. However, there are
considerable parallels between the views of Caylus and of Winckelmann.
Caylus described his method. Perceptively, Caylus implies that the artist in
all periods had to heed the taste of his clients and was never independent
of his masters. This view differs from Winckelmann’s theory of the
‘freedom’ of the classical artist.

Whether the art that Winckelmann admired was Greek or Roman cannot
be established even by modern means. We know that the large sculptures
he describes in the Gedanken and in the Geschichte were hewn from
Carrara marble, thus were made in Roman Italy, but whether the sculptors
themselves were Greeks, Romans, romanised Greeks or Greeks from Asia
Minor cannot be determined. The notion that these Hellenistic pieces were
modelled after Greek prototypes can not be proved, since the supposed
models have not survived. There is, however, little doubt that the
techniques and the general design of the sculptures were developed in
Greece and in its Asiatic dependencies rather than in Rome or its Italian
empire. The art-historical methods of Winckelmann were under immediate
attack by some classical scholars, for instance Christian Gottlob Heyne in
the Sammlung Antiquarischer Aufsätze. However, in spite of the
opposition from some classicists and historians the humanism that
40 Chapter Two

informed Winckelmann’s critical judgements was perpetuated and extended

in the liberal education system Gymnasialbildung that endured in Austria
and in Germany until the twentieth century.

His enthusiastic descriptions of the sculptures of the Vatican collection

were particularly effective since these objects existed and were preserved
in the museum, accessible to the tourist who could go and see for himself
(or herself) whether Winckelmann’s descriptions were accurate and
persuasive. Winckelmann’s supporters and friends maintained a positive
attitude, and Winckelmann was Europe’s most famous and most fashionable
theorist, critic of art and he was called upon by conoisseurs for advice on
the authenticity of supposed works of ancient art.

The surprising impact of Winckelmann as an arbiter of good taste is part

of major changes in German socio-political structures. The eighteenth
century saw the rise of new forms of wealth arising from trade, industry
and banking; substantial fortunes were no longer solely based on
agriculture or on family connections. This was a new phenomenon,
European rather than German and great fortunes were made and lost on the
world’s stock exchanges. There arose the need to find new criteria of
excellence to define the social heritage of the new aristocracies of wealth
and to find criteria of excellence to distinguish the really rich from the
ambitious newly rich. In order to understand the impact of Winckelmann’s
aesthetics on his contemporaries it is necessary to consider in some detail
major social changes that influenced the rise of early classicism in
Germany. The ecclesiastic and the aristocratic hierarchies had lost much of
their wealth and power during the upheavals of the wars of the seventeenth
century and the early eighteenth century saw the growth of new centres of
wealth and power no longer based on the ownership of land. This new
urban wealth was supporting the gradual industrialisation of the
manufacture of domestic and luxury goods.

The generally accepted standard was taste – der gute Geschmack - le bon
gout; although there never was a clear definition of the term. It was
generally accepted that good taste could be shown by anyone, no matter
how low his or her social status. This concept of inborn nobility of the
human character was somehow related to the idea of the ‘noble savage.’
This idea was plainly contradicted by the clear connection between the
gymnasium education (Gymnasialbildung) and the development of taste as
part of the history curriculum. Knowledge about the classics was the
foundation of all good taste and Winckelmann traced the idea of natural
 A Prelude to German Classicism 41

nobility to its source in classical Greece. In Greece he found nobility of the

highest form expressed in its art. His own rise to fame and status was
clearly an example of the inborn qualities of taste that found expression in
his publications. But this rather egalitarian attitude was balanced by the
fact that he found his friends and admirers among the minor aristocracies.
These aristocrats claimed to be born with the ability to discern good taste.
King Henry XIV claimed that he was the source of good taste: ‘If I wear it,
it is perfection’ he is claimed to have said.

‘Good taste’ was an essential aspect of Winckelmann’s aesthetic theories,

and his recognition as an arbiter of good taste contributed to his rise to
prominence. The middle- eighteenth century saw the development of a
new popular aesthetic in Western Europe and Winckelmann’s success was
an aspect of and contribution to the rise of good taste in Germany. Persons
of good taste were in the forefront of modernity; they could recognise
what was beautiful. Beauty was to be enjoyed and praised. It could be used
to dignify the expense of acquisitions.Whilst urban centres in northern
Europe turned into rapidely growing hubs of manufacturing industry and
commerce, Italy became the main centre of all the performing arts at the
time that Winckelmann was travelling between Rome and nearby
Florence; yet he did not notice the great advances that were made in these
arts.

Italian opera was performed in all the Italian cities and musical notation
took its modern form. The Italian instrument makers were making viols
and keyboard instruments like the clavicord and the forte-piano were
produced in industrial quantities to be supplied to the salons of the middle
class for display and music making. Of all this, Winckelmann seems to
have been unaware; at least he remained silent about this side of Italian
culture. He may have consciously excluded all aesthetic experiences that
could have distracted him from his mission, the promotion of large
Hellenistic sculpture.

There is a clear dichotomy between the idea of good taste as being part of
the birthright of everyone, even of the savage and on the other hand the
fact that the acquisition of good taste demanded study and travel; it
required leisure and finance as well as natural judgment, and it was, of
course, claimed by the ruling aristocracies as a birth-right. The old nobility
never questioned their right to absolute freedom and Mozart’s Count
Almaviva found it shocking to be frustrated by his servant. The ‘nouveau
riche’ was lampooned and made to look ridiculous in comedies and
42 Chapter Two

operas; to become the modern citizen of good taste, it was necessary tobe
receptive of beauty and elegance and by using his good judgement, the
citizen could distinguish good pleasures from base ones without the
guidance of the clergy. Thus good taste or elegance became one of the
pillars of modern society – and it was part of the notion of individual
freedom for the nobility, political liberty and wealth for the merchants. It
was in the ‘here and now’ that mankind should seek excellence and not in
the preparation for the hereafter. Pre-revolutionary Europe embraced in
certain social quarters sheer hedonism. But what particularly caught the
imagination of Winckelmann’s contemporaries and still assures his books
a place among the classics of art history is what he himself envisaged as its
core, the eloquent and hugely ambitious attempt to redefine the history and
aesthetics of the ancient Greek tradition. In several finely wrought, almost
lyrical, evocations of the beauties of the Greek ideal, Winckelmann
brought his personal experience to the attention of his readers. The
Geschichte remained, for almost 50 years after his death, nothing short of
the standard text on the art of antiquity. It was extracted for information as
well as for its eloquent celebration of the Greek ideal by almost anyone
writing about Greek art. It became an almost sacred text for early
nineteenth-century Neoclassicism.

Why did the work gain such a hold? It was partly Winckelmann’s
achievement in gathering together an important amount of textual and
visual material in support of his theories and partly his attempt to impose
some order on the art of antiquity. While his first published work, the
Gedanken, was primarily addressed at artists and connoisseurs, the
Geschichte could function as a more general inspiration for art historical
studies by establishing a model for the classification of artistic traditions
into periods of rise, flourishing and decline. It was the pretension of the
work to appear to be what it could not be and again precisely this title of
the Geschichte der Kunst im Altertum that constituted its success and also
its failure. The name was a grand idea and produced a grand effect. It
devalued the narrow methods of antiquarians who saw only one object or
artist at a time and who made no attempt to discover the connection
between them; it replaced it by an equally narrow emotional one. Perhaps
one could speak of a ‘romantic’ or quasi religious attitude based on
observing one’s emotional response to art.

One of his more perceptive readers, Denis Diderot (1713-86) spoke in his
Salon (1765) of Winckelmann’s excellent work excellent ouvrage and of
his enthusiaste charmant. He added: This work full of warmth, enthusiasm,
 A Prelude to German Classicism 43

of good taste and grand and profound visions. Cette ȅvre rempli de
chaleur, d’enthusiasm, de goût, de vues grandes et profondes.

Winckelmann’s limited choice of examples puts him into the same

category as his Italian predecessors and by generalizing from carefully
selected pieces he undermines the validity of his schemes. Throughout his
writings he claims to use scientific methods of analysis of the few objects
he discusses, however, he disregards entirely the corpus of Greco-Roman
sculpture that did not fit into his proposed schemes. In his days, all capital
cities of Europe and some cultural centres (e.g. Hildesheim, Weimar,
Göttingen) had begun to collect antiquities and to build museums to house
them. It had become popular to collect and to display antique sculpture
and exotic objects in the homes and gardens of the nobility and of the
growing number of wealthy citizens. This massive volume of classical
museums objects on display in public and in private collections was
excluded by Winckelmann as being inferior to the pieces in the Vatican
which he visited frequently and which he described in his eloquent essays.
Winckelmann had become an authority on ancient art, famous among the
art-lovers of his day. A Roman visit was part of the education process of
the growing affluent upper class of Western Europe. The journey to Italy
and its dangers, the use of strange currencies and the experience of novel
foods and drink, were the subject of polite conversation in the German
drawing rooms of the middle of the eighteenth century. Travel had become
interesting and enjoyable; tales of adventures in foreign lands were
entertaining the stay-at-home ladies of the upper class who were busy
running the houses, the children and the servants. Tales of travel could
also prepare the gentlemen for their next adventures. Improved postal
services made it possible for the travellers to keep their families informed
of their progress and their experiences. Rome was, in many cases, the
main focus of the travellers’ attention not for religious but for cultural
reasons. It may have been Winckelmann’s enthusiasm as well as his
erudition that attracted visitors as well as members of the Catholic
hierarchy. He was sought out as a high-class guide to the Roman
antiquities, mainly concentrating on the major pieces of sculpture on
display in the official collections and in the private estates of the higher
ranking prelates. In his correspondence he names with pride the more
important scions of the German nobility that came to seek his guidance –
he seemed conscious of the status of his clientele. There are a number of
his letters that emphasise the importance Winckelmann ascribed to the
high ranking nobility that sought his services.
44 Chapter Two

In the later eighteenth century ‘Antiquity’ denoted not just the discovery
of antiques or the fashion of Greek and Roman styles in architecture, but it
referred to a world of imagination and a collection of beliefs based on
carefully selected remnants of the literature and the art of the past.
Winckelmann gained a reputation among a substantial literate public that
would not have attempted themselves to tackle the detail of the works he
showed them, nor would they have read the texts he quoted, but who
adopted his attitude of fulsome praise for late classical sculpture. This
group included artists and art collectors as well as artistically minded
tourists visiting Italy. He was the single best known classical theorist of
the period and in retrospect came to be seen (justifiably) as a forerunner of
the ‘Sturm und Drang’ – a literary taste that emerged in German writing
and the visual arts after his death.

When Winckelmann’s revised edition of the Geschichte appeared in 1776,

it already needed to be supplemented and corrected on a number of points
of fact, but for a number of years it was not superseded. There was a
breath of modernity in the choice of Winckelmann’s objects of admiration.
The idea that frontal nudity can be observed and enjoyed was in antithesis
to the traditional values of the ecclesiastic establishments. For more than a
millennium nudity had been declared to be sinful with medieval
illustrations of the sinners in Hell showing them nude, while the blessed
and the angels wore long gowns. 6 Engravings that accompanied the
Geschichte showed male and female frontal nudity. This was to some
extent revolutionary but it was presented in the context of art and
embedded in the ecstatic prose of Winckelmann’s panegyric essays. This
aspect may have added to the success of the work.

Other authors who dared to oppose the political and ecclesiastic power
structures of eighteenth-century Germany, or who offended against the
‘taboos’ of the time, did not fare as well as Winckelmann. For example
Johann Christian Edelmann (1698-1767) who became the champion of
‘modernité’. He had read Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus; he
studied Martin Knutzen’s books and he wholeheartedly approved of
Knutzen’s denial of providence, of heaven and of hell. Knutzen’s books
were banned as heretical in nearly all the German kingdoms. It was argued
that ‘Civil Good Order’ depended on the population’s fear of hellfire.
Edelmann rejected the notion of original sin and indeed of sin in general

6
For example: the Norman wall painting at the Abbey Church of the Holy Cross,
Waltham Abbey, Essex, diocese of Chelmsford.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 45

and in his view the sinful body, harbinger of forbidden desires needed to
be freed from censure. Edelmann’s essay Moses mit aufgedecktem
Angesichte, (The Face of Moses uncovered) provoked a general outcry in
Germany. In Denmark alone, twentyfour published refutations appeared.
Edelmann and Knutzen became names virtually as infamous as Spinoza or
William Tyndale. Their books were widely banned throughout the land
and on the 9th of May 1750 their books were publicly burned in Frankfurt.
In this environment, it is surprising that Winckelmann dared to publish his
illustrations of male genitals that could be seen by men and by women. It
was done, of course, in the service of the history of art and it was therefore
‘modern’ and acceptable. Pre-Christian Pagans had produced these images
(they had, perhaps, not known better). To publish these pictures was truly
revolutionary – partial male nudity had rarely been allowed to be shown in
religious contexts: San Sebastian, or the adult Jesus, for instance, was
always shown bedecked with a loincloth and women, e.g. the Virgin,
martyrs and saints were always shown fully dressed in the hagiographies
and altarpieces. But Lucrecia Borgia, the prototype of the sinful woman,
was shown naked. Thus we see that Winckelmann’s popularity as author
and expert was perhaps to some extent also due to his astonishingly liberal
and courageous attitude to images that could have been offensive to some
of his more traditional contemporaries.

The strange mixture of Enlightenment logic and emotional outpourings of

Winckelmann have made his works controversial, but his contemporary
critics accepted, almost without exception, the doctrine of the imitation of
the Greeks and of their ‘ideal’ art. The general warmth of their approval of
Winckelmann is striking and writers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn
(1729-1786), Ewald von Kleist (1715-1759) and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig
Gleim (1719-1803) praised his style although none of them shared his
fanatical devotion to Hellenism. The core belief of Winckelmann was that
Greek culture represented mankind in a simpler, less corrupt time when
nature, the gods, mankind and its art existed together in freedom and
harmony. Greek art and literature were granted exemplary status because
they portrayed ‘complete’ men and women in their natural state, living
free and contented lives in an environment permeated by the Divine.

Grecophile elements appear in individual variations among all the writers

of the period. The myth of a Greek Golden Age represented a dynamic
social model because it contained the tensions of the historically ‘real
world’ and the ‘aesthetically ideal world’. At the same time, it
nostalgically embraced images of an irretrievable past, an arduous present
46 Chapter Two

and a hopeful future. Among the first to heed Winckelmann’s cry to

Greece was Goethe who described Winckelmann as

A new Columbus, in a land that was long imagined, discussed, yes, one
may say a land once known and lost again.

This ‘Shangri-La’ historicism is a strange and unique aspect of German

classicism. Among Winckelmann’s contemporaries and successors there
were many who may not have fully agreed with the generalizations of
Winckelmann and with his personal critical judgments. Goethe’s friend
Karl Phillip Moritz (1757-1793), for instance, writes in the third part of his
Imitation of Beauty:
The idea of natural progress can be described as the process of the
perfection of matter. Every lower form of living matter moves to the next
higher form by the dissolution of its original shape, its nature, however, is
ttransformed into the higher form. At the core of the natural
transformatrion lies the „Tatkraft“ the force that renews through
destruction. In the case of humanity the process of enoblement has ceased
in the physical being but through the spirit mankind places ideal beauty
externally and thus creates the really beautiful, the aim of nature and of
human artistic evolution.

Leibniz castigates in his Laocoon essay, representative art as being unable

to show actions or progressions. One can argue against this theory by
stressing the ability of painters and sculptors to imply or to hint at previous
or subsequent events. Artists can exploit the prior knowledge of the
observer by giving titles to their work that can lead the observer to
imagine the ‘story’ and thus overcome the static nature of the images.
There is clearly a parallel here with Winckelmann’s aesthetic theories.
Where Lessing gives poetry the ability to describe actions and events,
Winckelmannn sees ideal sculpture as being impersonal and the essence of
inaction klassische Stille (Classical Calm). There is little to suggest that
Winckelmann would have agreed with the distinction Moritz makes
between the good being able to create ‘out of themsselves’ rather than
‘within themseves’. The imitation of the good and the noble is surely one
of the aims of education whereas the imitation of nature or the allegory of
nature is the function of all representational art.

If we take as an example the sculpture group of the Laocoön, the moment

the sculptors have chosen to portray lies between the offence committed
by the priest and the terrible end of the three victims; one can imagine the
next moment as the writhing in torment of the fallen Trojans, like the
 A Prelude to German Classicism 47

images that are vividly described in many instances in the Iliad, where
Trojan warriors are nearly always shown as fallen in the dust. Lessing
does note that the Einbildungskraft, the imagination of the observer can
provide the past or the subsequent state of the representation.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was a great stimulator and mediator
in the generation following the death of Winckelmann, influencing many
writers of his time. He was primarily a theoretician and theologian
developing the visionary concepts of Winckelmann and Lessing into a new
theory of Greek antiquity. He saw the relevance of the past primarily in the
tension between the worship of Greek art and literature on one hand and
on the other hand the historical reality of classical times. Even in his early
days (1762-69 he developed his analytical views on antiquity. He
recognised that the conditions in ancient Greece and conditions in
Germany of his time were fundamentally different and in 1765 he
wrote:’Do we still have today the public and the fatherland of the
ancients?’ Thus classical antiquity could never be a model of modern law
and of propriety.

Herder emphasised the differences between classical antiquity and modern

times in his essays ‘About the latest German literature’ Über die neuere
deutsche Literatur (1766/67) he demanded not to learn what the ancients
thought, but how they thought and how they wrote – and how they might
have written in modern times. He saw the Greek achievement in its
historical setting, especially the links in the fifth century BC with Persia
and the Orient. He compared contemporary German authors against their
Greek predecessors whom he regarded as the fathers of all later European
literatures. Herder regarded the influence of Latin on German university
education as unfortunate – he wanted to liberate German education from
the yoke of Latin, vom römischen Joch befreien.
Further, at the end of the essay, Herder writes: 7
For many years of my daily pilgrimange to the ancients I regarded
Winckelmann as a worthy Greek who had revived from the ashes of his
people to enlighten our century. I can not read Winckelmann any
differently from the way I read Homer or Plato. In the meantime, however,
after having read Winckelalmnn seven times, I have found that a number
of doubts have arisen, especially in his historicism and the extracts of
Greek literature that he uses to bring the ancients themselves to witness his
thesis.

7
Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der
Menschheit (1774), ed.by Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, jun.
(n.d.), p. 22.
48 Chapter Two

Herder continues:
In the history of mankind there will be an eternal place for classical
Greece where mankind experienced the most beautiful youth and
flowering Brautblüte.

It is the illusion of ideal youth, of the joys and pleasures, of the Lust of
immaturity that inform Herder’s romantic vision of the classical past as the
‘youth of mankind’, the time when we were not in conflict, when life was
a joyful expression of freedom and obedience – of liberty and duty. This
view of antiquity is, of course, quite absurd; but the idea of Freiheit
became an essential ingredient in Goethe’s early play Götz von Berlichingen
and in Schiller’s ode ‘An die Freude’. Moreover, the sweetness of
immaturity is closely related to the Pietist notion of the obedience of the
faithful to the Word of God; freedom and duty reconciled in joyful
unquestioning submission. Einfalt includes the notion of the unification of
the diversity of the world and of the divisions – polarities that can be
reconciled in faith and the mystic union with the Deity. Herder is more
daring than Winckelmann in his expression of political idealism:
The beautiful concept of a republic in the Greek sense, obedience paired
with freedom, and embraced by the name of Fatherland; the flower in
bloom: beautiful phenomenon of nature called Greek Freedom.

Herder repeats the proposition of Winckelmann that the climatic

conditions had favoured the development of Greek civilisation and of
Freiheit. Freiheit was an emotion-laden term that was never defined.
Clearly, Greek freedom was only enjoyed by some in a slave-holding and
trading economy and Greeks did enslave other Greeks when ever their
military strength made it possible.

Eric Robinson has edited and translated a collection of original sources to

illustrate the complex and often confused state of democratic notions in
ancient Greece.8 Notions of ‘good government’ began with the complex

8
Eric W. Robinson, Ancient Greek Democracy: Readings and Sources. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), p.35 :‘Athenean democracy was, at all times, characterised by
the rule of a small minority of citizens who represented their communities.
Women, men who worked, foreigners and slaves were excluded. The method of
selection of the administrators was by lot and the leadership of the assembly was in
the hands of 9 generals. The assembly of the ‘demos’ was addressed by the
generals who used their skills of rhetoric to convince the citizens to take political
decisions.’
 A Prelude to German Classicism 49

notions of how kingship might have operated in ancient times. In the Ilias,
for instance, the kings were described as independent rulers but they chose
to be fighting under the overall command of Agamemnon. The fighting
men that were not kings did not speak nor did they have a direct bearing
on the course of the war. In the Odyssey, democracy is never mentioned
and it is argued that Odysseus’ “wife” Penelope has the gift of kingship
rather than his son. Before the return of Odysseus to his home, the suitors
were hoping to inherit the land and the kingship through “marriage” with
Penelope.

The poet-philosophers of the later eighteenth century were daring in

voicing views that could endanger the status quo, endanger their powerful
aristocratic land-owning masters and their dependants; groups that
included the poet-philosophers themselves. The French Revolution was an
extreme example of the dangers that confronted both the aristocrats and
the reformers. These dangers were seen by some clearly and it may well be
that the incipient nationalism of the German Enlightenment was coming to
the surface, perhaps as a way of introduing change that did not directly or
necessarily confront the existing power structures. Although Winckelmann
never expressed any revolutionary ideas, his successors were perhaps more
transparent or braver in putting forward the doctrine of the German
Vaterland, an idea based on the illusion that there had been, in antiquity, a
Greek model of the political unity of all Greek speakers under a
democratic political system. It is difficult to understand the belief in a
Griechentum that guaranteed the status of the individual citizen who was
at the same time obedient yet free.

The idea of freedom and obedience was also part of pietist philosophy and
it is echoed by Herder (who was trained as Protestant theologian)
describing his notion of the avoidance of the descent into uncertainty by
the Greeks. He thought that they diverged from their predecessors at the
right time to develop their own characteristic national identity. Herder here
seems to assume that the Greek literary and artistic creators of
masterpieces consciously and deliberately turned away from their foreign
predecessors at the right moment to create national art. This idea may be a
projection of his Germanic contempt for foreign [mainly French] taste into
the Hellenic past. As the Greeks refused to be misled into uncertainties, so
Deutschtum should become independent of French taste.

One of the more important contributors to literary periodicals was Johann

Heinrich Merck (1741-1791) who was entrusted with the task of writing a
50 Chapter Two

major part of the comments on artistic matters. He helped to found the

periodical Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen in 1772, and was one of the chief
contributors to Nicolai’s Allgemeine Bibliothek.. Unfortunate speculations
brought him into pecuniary embarrassment in 1788, and although his
friends, and particularly Goethe, were ready to come to his assistance, his
losses combined with the death of five of his children – so preyed upon his
mind that he committed suicide in 1791. Merck distinguished himself as a
critic; his keen perception and refined taste made him a valuable guide to
the young writers of the period. He did not accept the certainties of
Winckelmann and he regarded antique sculpture with astute scepticism:
Let us suppose that a statue was found in all parts undamaged, or that
inspite of being incomplete could easily be reassembled or restored, yet it
is at times very difficult to determinewhether the figure represents a god, a
hero or even when this is deteremined, who of the gods or heros it is meant
to be. Thus one believes that a completely naked figure without other
attributes is likely to be a fencer rather than a god and one believes that
figures lying on the ground are meant to be\olympians to express the sweet
calm of the gods.

It is hard to understand why Merck thought it of importance to discover

the name of persons represented in works of art. He also wrote a number
of small essays, dealing mostly with literature and art, especially painting.
He also wrote a few poems, stories, narratives and the like; but they have
not much intrinsic importance. Merck's letters are more interesting and
instructive, and some light upon the social conditions of his time. As a
rational and keen-minded critic, he saw the dangers inherent in German
Hellenism clearly. There is a certain ambivalence in his attitude ( as in
Herder’s) for he did not exclude his personal fondness for classical
sculpture. Moreover, in his essays and reviews he seems to consider
Winckelmann from many different points of view. For example his
influence and his erudition but his doctrines and classification of works of
art seemed to Merck implausible. He writes that from all too great a love
of antique calm we are losing the truth Wahrheit and objectivity of art
criticism. However, when Merck reviewed the Vienna edition of the
Geschichte (1776) he noted the ‘noble simplicity’ not of the art, but of
Winckelmann himself. He deplored his failure to accept landscape
painting as an art form. He points out with considerable sarcasm that not
all of Winckelmann’s writing is true, and he thought that Winckelmann
resorted to tirades when he was short of data.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 51

One of the more enigmatic figures of the later eighteenth century was
Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse (1749-1803. In 1776 Heinse published his
first art-critical work, in the periodical Teutscher Merkur in the form of
letters descriptive of some paintings in the Düsseldorf Gallery of art.
Briefe über einige Gemälde der Düsseldorfer Gallerie. The letters took the
form of ‘narrated Pictures’, somewhat similar to Winckelanns descriptive
texts. Heinse’s prose avoided the stylistic extremes of Winckelmann and
Wieland, his prose was shorter and thus more dramatic.

Heinse diverged from Winckelmann in three areas. First and most

importantly his letters stressed the importance of the dramatic, the exciting
aspects of art and instead of Stille the ‘calm’ that Winckelmann favoured
as the essence of beauty, Heinse preferred the stormy aspects of life.
Secondly, Heinse favoured originality and invention instead of
Winckelmann’s insistence that the imitation of the ancients was the best
way to recapture their grandure. Thirdly, Heinse thought that the artist
should derive his subjects and his style from contemporary sources and not
from the ancients. When Winckelmann speaks of Zeichnung ‘design’ as
the most important aspect of painting, Heinse favoured Kolorit’ colouring’
and he believed that so little of Greek painting has survived that any
criticism would fall into the category of Märchen - fairytales.

When Heinse had concluded his studies he was not offered a post at the
university, nor did he want to continue as private tutor, instead he decided
to join two ex-officers on a walking tour through southern Germany.
Heinse was a great wanderer and throughout his short life he walked,
carrying his meagre belongings in a rucksack. In 1780 Heinse could fulfil
his childhood dream and undertake the journey to Italy. He travelled
mostly on foot, probably for economic reasons, crossing the Alps in
Switzerland and France, stopping at Avignon and Nice. He continued
along the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, staying for some months in Pisa, in
Rome and also in Naples. Heinse’s impressions of the journey were the
basis of his first novel Ardinghello and the happy Islands. (1787). He
aimed to give the German readers a more rounded view of the antiquities
of Italy; Roman remains were placed side-by side with Renaissance works
as a compound European heritage.

Winckelmann had decided against the use a framing story-line to make his
art-critical comments more attractive to readers; not so Heinse, who called
his first important publication a novel ein Roman. This was his most
important work. Five chapters deal with the adventures and encounters of
52 Chapter Two

a young man who travels through Italy in Heinse’s time. The genre of
‘Travellers’ Tales’ had been popular since the Homeric tales of Odysseus,
the histories of Herodotus, and in Germany, Grimmelshausen who
described travels in the seventeenth century. Gulliver’s Travels and
Voltaire’s Candide followed the same genre. Ardinghello narrates, in the
form of an autobiography the travels and adventures of a young man, a
person of innate nobility who is a magnificent fencer, a crack shot and a
great lover – without ever having to exercise, practise or train himself to
excel in these arts. He never needs to work or even think about money – he
is the guest at the table of the lesser nobility of Italy, he attends their balls
and festivities, travelling from one castle (Schloss) to the next. He meets
other young men similarly leisured and enters into discussions about
theology, philosophy and art. Ardinghello is not really a novel, but it is a
series of connected essays in the form of dialogues which Heinse
interlaces with stories of parties, of naval engagements and piracy. Heinse
describes these strange pirates of the Tyrrhenian coast as being much
concerned with preserving the virginity of their female captives. In the
second part of Ardinghello, Heinse introduces a dialogue on the art of
painting:
In the art of painting the artist must apply creativiry, sensitivity and
intelligence or whatever you call the quality that places one man above
another.

Heinse echoes the extravagant praise that Winckelmann lavished on

Hellenistic sculpture, however, he adds the attributes of Empfindung and
Phantasie to the chain of superlatives he finds appropriate to describe the
Apollo Belvedere:
An astonishing work of sensitivity and phantasy. The problem is solved:
here stands a God resurrected out of invisibility and held fast in soft
marble. What the sculptor has created here in the Apollo Belvedere can
not be imitated or copied.

Heinse then attacks the doubters who would date the piece to the Roman
Empire and stresses the essential Grecism of the Apollo. He talks of the
ideal period, the short time when Greek art reached the ‘sublime.’ He dates
it from Athenian Perikles (died c.430 BC) to the death of Alexander (323
BC), but he does not say where, in this period, he would have found Greek
democracy or the free artists of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. He believed
that the apogee of Greek art only lasted as long as the gymnasia celebrated
the dance and the physical contests of both men and women – he thought
 A Prelude to German Classicism 53

that they competed without clothing. He regards Winckelmann’s proposed

educational scheme as absurd:
Who, moreover, is so cheeky and vain that he could imagine he could
create a better Apollo than the one in the Vatican, a better Hercules than
the Torso or he would need to continue eternally to make copies.

Instead of teaching artists in the Winckelmann scheme, Heinse proposes

that the student look to nature for his models and not to the products of
past generations of artists. Where would the originality of ‘Genius’ find its
source if not in the beauty of the natural world?

He discounts the educational value of copying the art of past generations;

however, Heinse does not tell us in what way the copying of nature would
be better than the use of ancient models. He skates lightly over the true
problem which lies in the definition of beauty and of art itself;in the
creative process, the selection of themes, of transmittable images that the
observer experiences as art. Perhaps we need to wait for modern critics
like Panofsky or Thomas Franke (Ideale Natur aus kontingenter
Erfahrung) who address the underlying philosophical problems.

Heinse follows Winckelmann’s vocabulary when he describes the

‘Rotunda’ (Pantheon) and the Roman Colisseum, and he believes that their
stability was based on the use of cement in their construction. He is adding
to Winckelmann rather than contradicting him when he talks of the
superiority of colouring Kolorit over design in its ability to express the
sensory qualities of painting. He praised particularly Rubens and Raphael
for their ability to express more than representation – the emotional
content and the beauty of the human figure. It is the observer who, like
Heinse, has to add his hermeneutic understanding to his experience.
Thomas Hübener describes the relationship between the creative dialogue,
between the object and the observer in his own rather stilted terms:
The relationship between the creative dialogue between statue and
observer: the reference to the imagined sculptor in the context of an ever
changing understanding of the reception of art contain additional
dimentions to those of the artistic re- creation of works of art.

It is Winckelmann’s idea that the observer has to become the creative

agent in the act of interpretation of the work of art as he participates in its
creation – without the observer there can not be art, thus the acts of
observation and of creation are somehow merged.
54 Chapter Two

The German style of Heinse differs from Winckelmann and from Wieland.
His ‘broken phrases’ abgebrochene Sätze distinguish his prose from his
predecessors. In his analysis of paintings, Hense, like Winckelmann, takes
no notice of the opinion of others, nor does he develop a theory of
painting. All descriptive text he acknowledges to be subjective – even the
descriptions of Winckelmann appear to Heinse to be only the product of
his personal vision and have no general validity. All painting, he wrote, is
deception since what we see is a flat piece of canvas covered in oil-based
and varnished sections of colour; all the rest is interpretation; the artist
deceives the viewer into believing that he sees nature when he actually
sees stretched canvas. And the same can be said of the sculptor, who
deceives us into seeing flesh and clothing when we actually see white
crystalline marble, chiselled into shapes that imitate nature.

Two important critical essays formed the response to an invitation to

create a Lobschrift (Panegyric) in praise of Winckelmann. These were the
Kasseler Lobschriften. The Société des Antiquités de Cassel had been
founded by the Count Friedrich II of Hessen (1760-1785) on the 11th April
1777. 9 He was following the example of Paris and of Berlin where
Academies for the study of Antiquity had been founded earlier. The Count
had travelled widely in Italy where he had bought a substantial collection
of examples of antique artefacts which he brought to Kassel to be
displayed in the new Akademie. The Society offered a prize for a memorial
essay on the art-historical importance of Winckelmann: ‘L’Éloge de Mr.
Winckelmann, dans lequel on ferat entrer le point où il a trouvé la Science
des Antiquités, et a quell point il l’a laissée.’ The title already assumed
that there was such a thing as a science of antiquities, a rather modern idea
at that time. The prize was to be a gold medal to the value of 400 Livres.
The essay could be written in French or in Latin, but it would be published
only in French. Only two manuscripts were received in response. The first,
which was adjudged the winner of the prize, was by Christian Gottlob
Heyne, professor of rhetoric in Göttingen and the second was by Herder.
Herder was naturally concerned with national identity and he laments the
absence of a German national art style, writing in his Lobschrift:
It is clear that we do not posess the allegory of art that can be seen and
described as being original and national; an art that springs from the
language, the modes of thought of the nation and one that can be
recognised as such.

9
Fürstl. Hessische Gesellschaft der Altertümer.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 55

Herder’s fundamental influence contributed to the rise of romantic

Nationalism. He projects his own feelings of Deutschtum into the work of
Winckelmann when he writes, at the end of the Lobschrift:
The most sensitive theory of beauty presented here with modesty, dignity
and force of the ancients as Winckelmann presented it, is the forerunner of
the artist who is yet to come: the new Raphael and Michelangelo of the
Germans who could create Greek art for us. This was the point of
departure of Winckelmann and the objective of all his knowledge and
classicism.

The art that forms the core of Winckelmann’s history is certainly not
German in any sense, but Herder hopes for a Germano-Greek art of the
future, a new German Raphael could arise, perhaps based on
Winckelmann’s educational project which, so Herder says, was also
looking forward to the German Michelangelo. To show Herder’s literary
excesses I quote from the Lobschrift:
Rom zählet, in dem noch verwachsenen Walde betrüglicher Fuȕtapfen,
voll schreiender Stimmen rathender Deuter, täuschender Künstler und
unwissender Antiquare durch ziemlich lange Zeiten In dem Walde von
vielleicht 7,000 Statuen und Büsten, die man in hinunter, endlich in der
schrecklichen Einöde alter Nachrichten und Geschichte, da Plinius und
Pausanias, wie ein paar abgriȕne Ufer dastehen, auf denen man weder
schwimmen noch entern kann; in einer solchen Lage der Sachen
ringsumher an eine Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums denken, die
zugleich Lehrgebäude, keine Trümmer, sondern ein lebendiges
Volkreiches Theben von sieben Pforten sei, durch deren jede Hunderte
ziehen; gewiss das konnte kein Kleinigkeitkrämer sein, kein Krittler an
10
einem Zeh im Staube.

Herder regards Winckelmann as a great discoverer; he does not consider

the limitation of Winckelmann’s theories, particularly the way
Winckelmann draws general conclusions from a small selection of marble
statues. The interest of Herder here, as elsewhere, is probably the creation
of a programmatic theory of cultural Deutschtum. He appears to regard
Winckelmann primarily as a German innovator. In his collection of essays
Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1770) Herder includes an essay on Ossian
and a lengthy defence of Shakespeare as examples of heroic figures,

10
Johann Gottfried Herder’s ‚Denkmal Johann Winckelmanns‘. Eine ungekrönte
Preisschrift aus dem Jahre 1778. Ed.by Albert Duncker (Kassel:Verlag von
Theodor Kay, 1882).
56 Chapter Two

perhaps examples of literary achievement north of the Alps. He begins the

Lobschrift with a patriotic phrase:
To begin I take the liberty to write about Winckelmann as a German to
write in the German language (and not in French). Winckelmann was a
German and he remainwed German even in Rome. He wrote in German
and for the Germans; he expressed his love of his nation and his fatherland
while living abroad.

It is the contact between two ‘Great Nations’, between Griechentum and

Deutschtum in literature and in sculpture that Herder sees as the discovery
of Winckelmann. The Greeks had reached artistic perfection and Herder
echoes Winckelmann in the vision of a German renaissance evolving from
the Greek model. In classical art, Herder sees the reflection of nobility, of
humanity and freedom displayed in its most perfect manifestation. Herder,
in the Lobschrift, retraces the experiences of Winckelmann and finds the
highest form of human nobility expressed in the Vatican marbles;
‘nobility’ that is at the same time universal and national; an expression of
perfect Griechentum and perfect humanity in general.

Martin Disselkamp’s study of Winckelmann’s Roman letters leads him to

see Winckelmann in the light of the incipient growth of a German national
cultural identity. Neither Winckelmann nor Herder, can be regarded as
patriotic Nationalist in the mid-twentieth-century sense, but part of their
patriotic Deutschtum was the notion of the non-German enemy and
particularly the alien French.

More recent critics of Winckelmann’s classicism took the form of voices

raised against the sensory response of Winckelmann to Roman sculpture.
German classicism was facing problems in the mid-eighteenth century.
The methods of reasoning introduced by the empirical sciences caused the
art of neo-classicism to come under the pressure of needing proof.
Enlightenment logic demanded the application of reason to the experience
and analysis of art. Winckelmann’s intuitive approach appeared to some
critics to be ‘old fashioned’ since tit seemed to return to the emotional
aesthetic and the metaphysical certainties of the Baroque.

Winckelmann told the reader to look at the examples of Greco-Roman

sculpture and join him in the experience of exultation. The authors of the
Lobschriften try valiantly to describe the great contribution of Winckelmann
to art history and art. In modern times, however, it is more difficult to
recognise its true value given the changes that have occurred in the
 A Prelude to German Classicism 57

definition of art and in the evolution of German cultural consciousness and

national awareness.

As an example of modern re-evaluation of Winckelllmann’s philosophy I

quote Thomas Franke who examines the philosophy of Winckelmann in
his chapter on Winckelmann’s hypothesis of the special nature of the
Greeks.The rationale Begründungskomplex however, seems not to be
based on aesthetic or historical insights, but on the homo-erotic response
of Winckelmann to naked masculinity. His normative art theories were
based on his highly personal interpretation and on his idealisation of
Helenism, a misconception of classical history.

The Kasseler Lobschriften on Winckelmann were by definition uncritical

and designed to highlight the achievements of this extraordinary personality.
In spite, or perhaps because of the ambiguities and shortcomings of
Winckelmann’s texts, his lasting effect on German cultural evolution is his
main achievement. His contribution to German literary and art-historical
writing was his ability to sense the spirit of the age The Zeitgeist and to
introduce important aspects of German cultural identity that were to
determine the course of German cultural history Kulturgeschichte for the
succeeding hundred years. Winckelmann’s work foreshadowed Classicism,
Romanticism and German Nationalism that were all envisaged in Goethe’s
words, by this modern Columbus who saw the New World before he had
discovered it.

As a consequence of Winckelmann’s tragic death, an almost mythic

quality quickly came to surround the Geschichte. If Winckelmann had
recovered from the atack of his murderer he might have gone on to
become a famous figure, delivering trenchant opinions in his high-pitched
German accent. The Geschichte would have still been the same book and
reading it would still have been a pleasure. He would have continued to
improve the content and perhaps he would have revised some of his more
improbable judgements. The Geschichte, however, would remain the most
influential art historical work of the century. The notion of classical
nobility and the illusion of a classical homeland of German culture and art
will be explored in the next chapter.

2.1 ‘Hellenism’ - A German Utopia

Winckelmann’s grecophile classicism should be seen in the light of the
state of classical studies in Germany before his work became generally
58 Chapter Two

known and accepted as the foundation of a modern critique of ancient art.

The prevalent attitude toward classical Greece (before Winckelmann)
among the educated public was generally negative. There was widespread
ignorance of the Greek language, literature and mythology, as Humphrey
Trevelian has shown.11 In the early years of the eighteenth century, there
was considerable antagonism against ancient Greek art in the German
speaking area. This dislike is found among the early Rationalists as well as
the Pietists. The hostility towards pagan gods and heroes may have been
influenced by the ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’ of the preceding
century. Greece was seen by some German poets of the early century such
as Gleim, Heinse, Hagedorn and other Anacreontists as a land of graceful
Rococo nymphs and shepherds, whose life seemed to consist mainly of
hedonistic pleasures, kisses, wine and roses. Where Greek was taught at
universities it was learned largely as the language of New Testament
sources and was subordinated to Latin which was the language of
scholarship. And even in Latin studies attention was concentrated on
grammar and vocabulary rather than content. A revival of interest in the
classical Greek language began under the above named Christian Tobias
Damm (1698-1778) of the Köllnische Gymnasium in Berlin. Winckelmann
studied under him in 1735-1736. (Later Damm taught Greek to Moses
Mendelssohn and to Nicolai.)

The excavations at Pompeii and at Herculaneum, which began in 1738 and

1748 respectively, stirred the imagination of the German upper class,
greatly increasing interest in Roman life and culture. The work of Count
Caylus (1692-1765) received much attention in Germany: the successive
volumes of his Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques,
romaines et gauloises (1752-1765) were discussed in many periodicals.

Finally, the study of beauty Schönheit was beginning to come into its own
in academic and intellectual circles and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
(1714-1762) can be regarded as the initiator of the modern study of
aesthetics in Germany. He believed that a separate, if ‘lower’ faculty of the
mind was devoted to aesthetic perception. He called it the cognitio
inferior.

While Winckelmann disliked greatly all abstract philosophising about art

[by others] his reception may well have profited from the new tendency.

11
Humphrey Trevelian, The Popular Background to Goethe’s Hellenism. (London:
Longmans, & Green, 1934), p.35.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 59

The way had been paved for Winckelmann in Germany and his
proclamation of the superiority of Greek art was less startlingly original
than is sometimes assumed. However, Winckelmann’s publications gave
considerable impetus to a literary and philosophical movement (German
Classicism) that spread through the country in a number of directions from
the middle of the century onward. 12 His exuberant descriptions of the art
of the ancient Greeks and their culture were particularly popular and they
influenced the evolution of art critical thought in Germany during the later
century. Egon Friedell, for instance, wrote more recently scathingly about
Winckelmann’s classicism.
One will never be able to be precise about what ancient Greece was really
like but one can be quite certain about what it was not like, namely the
way that eighteenth century Germany imagined it to be. If we were to
believe in their Hellenism then the main occupation of the classical Greeks
would have been to read extensively Winckelmann’s texts.13

Many of Winckelmann’s contemporary scholars (e.g. Herder, Heinse and

Wieland) also partook of the practically meta-historical glorification of the
ancient Greeks. Winckelmann claimed that his own view of ancient
history was based on his examination of ancient literature and of Graeco-
Roman art. This may be true to some extent, however, his historical
determinism owed little to his study of Greek texts and his rose-tinted
view of Greek culture had much more to do with his own political
prejudice, his belief in the state as guardian of the freedom of the citizen.

Much of the attraction of Winckelmann’s vision of the past lay in this

utopian quality. His Sendschrift and the Erläuterungen to the Gedanken
are provided with ample quotations and sources are given in footnotes. He
appeared also, to some degree, a ‘deceived deceiver’ and given his initial
concept of an ideal Griechentum his admiration of classical sculpture was
not illogical. There can not be the slightest doubt of his sincerity. Like
many other utopias, Winckelmann’s contains a large element of a polemic
directed against his own age. Thus he contrasts a youthful Sparta ‘begotten
of a hero and a heroine’ with a young sybarite of his time. In his praise of
the political freedom of the Greeks there seems also to be an implied
criticism or even a mild protest against current German conditions; veiled
references to Prussian tyranny are sometimes concealed in his letters. The

12
John Edwin Sandys, ‘The eighteenth Century in Germany’ in A History of
Classical Scholarship; Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), p.
20.
13
Egon Friedell. Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Zürich: Helikonverlag, 1927) p.31.
60 Chapter Two

situation of classical Attica was entirely different from that of the German
lands. The members of the ruling elite of Athens knew each other and
were familiar with the family connections of the citizens. The first and
most basic concept that linked the citizens of the Athenian upper class was
the idea of citizenship itself. In Greek democracy, individuals were not
primarily subjects of the king or lord but were citizens of their ‘deme’, the
district of the city-state. This brought many benefits such as festivals to
celebrate, the enjoyment of the fruits of imperial expansion and the ability
to adapt the law to be of benefit to the ruling elite.

The connections Winckelmann made between Greek art and political

freedom were to some extent based on his contemporaries’ view of
antiquity as an ideal. Similarly, his conceptions of the beauty of the Greeks
are related to popular ideas on male friendship and ‘brotherly love’ that
feature prominently in his letters. But the image of ideal Greek manhood
that he conjured up did not reflect in any simple way his particular erotic
fantasies and desires. It was a cultural construct with its own logic of
images that seemed to have marginalized and perhaps repressed his own
desires.

The humanism that pervades Winckelmann’s published works was

probably a major factor in the universal approval of his work that followed
almost immediately on its publication. The Greek ideal contrasted with the
current situation in Germany where matters of human suffering were
conducted with a marked lack of sympathy and attention by the clergy and
by the autocratic administrators. Religious attitudes to human suffering
were strangely ambivalent: suffering was a necessary part of human life
(after the Fall), and thus it was through ordeal that salvation could be
achieved. On the other hand, it was the duty of the church to fulfil its
pastoral obligations and care for the poor – in return for obedience. The
autocratic regimes of the regions and cities had not yet accepted
responsibility for the care of the poor, leaving it to charitable and
benevolent individuals, often in the guise of a monastic or municipal
charity.

Winckelmann wrote about the ancient Greeks in glowing terms in his

Geschichte:
The way they acted and thought was light and natural, their activities were
carried out with a certaain carelessness and from the dialogues of Plato
 A Prelude to German Classicism 61

one can deduce how the youth with joking and joy carried out their
exerecises in the gymnasium.14

However, the literary evidence shows clearly that the gymnastic exercises
were designed to enhance the military prowess of the citizens and the
notion of mit Scherz und Freude (with joking and joy) was purely a
projection of Winckelmann’s idealisation of Greek youth. Furthermore,
Winckelmann wrote:
In the Olympic contests they were never shorrt of thorough and learned
judges because the Greeks saw to the instruction of their children in
drawing from nature because they believed that it would make them more
appreciative of the beauty of their bodies.

The idea that the Greek children had lessons in drawing was indeed quite
novel; one wonders what classical source Winckelmann had in mind. He
thought that these juvenile art students later became judges at the
competitions. Such positions are known to have been of great political and
social significance. Winckelmann saw classical Greek sculpture as the
highest achievement of a free society. Examples of his exuberant prose
will be given below. Lessing considered the relative merits of the visual
arts and of poetry in evoking similar emotions. But he thought of poetry as
a superior mode of expression as it was not limited to depicting a moment
in time. Lessing saw this immobility as a problem of all the visual arts.
However, in Winckelmann’s eyes the statue of the Apollo includes the
vision, in the mind of the beholder, of the arrow he had just released, and
the figure of Laocoön was part of the story of the ‘Wooden Horse’ –
introduced by Homer in the Odyssey and elaborated by Vergil in the
Aeneid. The figure of the Niobe embodies her unfortunate insult to the
Goddess. Thus in Winckelmann’s eyes the visual arts imply more than the
moment shown, and the knowledgeable observer would recognise the
immediate past and the immediate future of the situation depicted. The
richness and complexity of Winckelmann’s reading of the Greek ideal was
recognised by his contemporary critics. Its weakness seems apparent to us
today. This may be due to our increasing awareness of the flaws in
Enlightenment thought on aesthetics. Rationality applied to sculpture and
painting begs the question: was art ever rational?

We are are, today aware of some darker aspects of the German

Enlightenment such as its mostly unspoken misogyny, or the ramifications
of its fantasies of subjective freedom in an ideal state. Winckelmann

14
This view of classical youth is entirely utopian. Geschichte p.28.
62 Chapter Two

claims to have some historical grounding for his preoccupation with

freedom and with the values that feature in his writings. But his text is
limited by what we know would be publishable in his circumstances. In
the case of the fantasy of an ideally free self – an idea that is central to
Winckelmann’s notion of the Greek world, we are fortunate in having a
body of letters from him that abound in vivid accounts of his social and
erotic self, of his personal ‘freedom’ and his desires. However,
Winckelmann was financially dependent on the generosity of the Saxon,
later the Prussian court and on Cardinal Albani at the Vatican in Rome.
Thus his notion of freedom was always carefully expressed to refer only to
ancient Greece and not to Germany or to the Vatican and its religious and
political constraints.

The Greeks, because of their creative genius stand for him at the beginning
of the development of art and he ‘knows‘ that the arts like mankind have
their youth, their maturity and decline. There is a dichotomy here that is of
significance: Classical Greek art is seen as the youth of taste, yet at the
same time it is described as the summit of artistic excellence. The
admiration Winckelmann expressed for the surviving Greco-Roman
sculpture is well within the framework of German philosophy of history of
the time; however, we read with surprise his glowing fervour for works of
art that are today seen as secondary or perhaps as inferior copies of Greek
originals.

He writes, in his first publication of 1756:

In ancient Rome, the Laocoön was a complete rule of art for the artists [ . . .]
eine volkommene Regel der Kunst. [sic] There is considerable literary
evidence that Roman high society regarded the products of their Greek
predecessors as exemplary. Winckelmann dates the Laocoön group to the
time of Alexander, in the fourth century BC. Perhaps he did not realise
that the first mention of the story of Laocoön was three hundred years later
in the late first century BC by Vergil. The Roman political and military
leaders of the early centuries (AD) supported the renaissance of classical
Greek sculpture (and literature), a renaissance that makes it difficult to
determine the degree of ‘Greekness’ in Roman art.

The German art historian Friedrich Hauser (1859-1917) wrote about

classical reliefs in which he identified a style-category he called ‘Neo-
Attic’ Neuattisch. This style he demonstrated in stone sculpture and relief
work that was being produced in late Hellenistic and Imperial Rome. This
corpus included decorative vessels, funerary plaques and coffins. The
figural and drapery style looked to classical models, particularly to Attica.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 63

It can also be seen as an early form of neo-classicism. The examples of

Hellenistic sculpture that Winckelmann regarded as classical Greek were
well within the range of the style identified by Hauser.

Mohammad Nafissi writes, in his thesis:

The intense dialogue with the ancient Athenians would have long ceased if
their modernity was identical with ours: interest could not have been
sustained over the three centuries since Winckelmann started in earnest the
‘modern’ conversation with and about the Greeks. Certain minimum
conditions may be adduced from the longevity, breadth and intensity of
this conversation.[. . .] What we may call an ‘historical utopia’ meets these
conditions exactly.15

Two philosophies of government had developed in classical Greece and

both had great and lasting influence on the philosopher poets of
eighteenth-century France and Germany. The Athenean constitution,
perhaps better called Attic, was based on the theory of male supremacy
and on the rule of the ‘demos’ led by the landed nobility. This was the
constitution that Plato idealized in the Republic. Spartan government, by
contrast, was designed to create and maintain the military might of its
citizens. It was in theory egalitarian among the Spartiates but its economy
was based on the exploitation and oppression of the majority (Helot)
population. The role of women as the incubators of the next generation of
warriors was of great importance in Sparta. Neither of the two contrasting
models (Athenian and Spartan) was ever truly implemented and both
remained utopian even in classical antiquity, because in both political
systems it had been necessary to limit the amount of freedom granted to
the ruling privileged citizens.

In summary it can be argued that the idealisation of classical Greece began

in the Roman period in the second century BC and reached its apogee
during the succeeding Roman Empire. In German philosophy of the
eighteenth century there arose a revival of interest in classical Greece and
Winckelmann’s contribution was significant not only as a major influence
on the appreciation of Hellenistic art but also on the utopian vision of ideal
freedom that he thought had once been created in Greece by a benevolent
state. This ideal state, he thought, had supported and encouraged the
creators of ideal art. The following section will expand on the notion of

15
Nafissi, M. ‘Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology‘ in the Journal of Hellenic
Studies 2005 (London: Institute of Classical Studies) p. 285.
64 Chapter Two

ideal art and its importance in the history of art Kunstgeschichte proposed
by Winckelmann.

2.2 ‘Ideal Beauty’ – The Essence of Art?

The cult of beauty lies at the centre of Winckelmann’s philosophy of art.
Beauty, he considered to be the highest aim of all art; the picturesque and
the characteristic (or graphic) lacked intrinsic value compared to beauty.
He was motivated by aesthetic concerns tthat appealed to Herder and
Lessing, Goethe, Wieland, Heinse as well as later writers. His aesthetic
ideas were in tune with late eighteenth-century progressive thinking. In an
early letter he expresses his belief that nature wished to make a painter of
him, but that his parents inhibited his innate talent. And then he adds:
‘everything I have written becomes as it were a painting.’

The discourse about ‘ideal beauty’ had begun with Bellori. Beauty or
perfection, he says, does not follow from the artist’s whim, or from a
reliance on prior models; it is ‘superior to nature bacause the artist selects
the most beautiful parts from natural beauties. One might well ask: what is
to guide the artist in the selection of these beauties, how will he form the
ideal in his mind? The ideal was defined by Poussin who wrote about art:
its end is to delight ‘sa fin est la delectation’. Painting and sculpture were
only imitations of ideal nature, art deceived the eye and the artist created
beautiful images that made the observer imagine the reality of the scene,
although at the same time knowing that it is but an artificial image.

Winckelmann’s’ ideal beauty idealische Schönheit is an acknowledgment

of the variable and personal nature of aesthetic experience: The beauty of
the Niobe and the beauty of the Torso differ and are not similar to the
beauty of Michelangelo’s David or a painting by Rubens. Winckelmann
thought of idealische Schönheit as a quality that he could define by using
exuberant phrases. It remains doubtful whether Winckelmann meant by
idealische Schönheit a quality that resides as an ideal image in the mind of
the observer or as a static ‘inimitable beauty’ a property of the object, or
perhaps both. His detailed descriptions of late Hellenistic sculpture show
that he seemed to have found many different versions of this ideal. The
muscular Torso [Hercules?] and the Apollo have this quality, according to
Winckelmann, but he does not tell us what it is that they have in common,
except perhaps masculinity and his response. He does not reveal what, in
these sculptures triggered the feeling of admiration that he undoubtedly
experienced, nor can he tell us why he thought that the feelings he
 A Prelude to German Classicism 65

experienced could be transmitted by his text so that the reader would

experience the same or similar feelings without ever having seen the
objects of Winckelmann’s adoration.

Dating perhaps from the beginnings of German Enlightenment, there was

among the German intelligentsia the rather strange notion that the ideal in
art was connected with concepts of freedom and goodness. Pierre Bayle
(1647-1708) professor of philosophy at Rotterdam, for instance mentions
in his dictionary ‘le ideal’ in the form of: bonté idéale intended as
meaning sovereign goodness. [as in the goodness of God?] The Dutch
critic ten Kate (1728) also used the word Idéal as a noun, for him it was La
partie sublime, une harmonieuse propriété, une touchante Unité. This
doctrine played a role in Diderot’s later aesthetics, where le ideal meant an
ideal empirical model, perhaps of an experimental or temporary kind. The
ideal in art was understood as meaning the perfect type, the essence of the
object or scene depicted. This ideal, although perceived as a rational
quality, was thought to be animated in the observer through imagination
and feeling. Ideal beauty was closely connected to moral values as well as
to experience. Diderot was an egalitarian, one of the forerunners of
revolutionary spirits in France:
The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the
laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that
end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what
health is to the individual.

The Enlightenment view, as expressed by Diderot, considered that the

ideal art object comprises an aesthetic maxim and at the same time it
represents the unity and the culmination of a moral principle. But in what
way the ideal was to represent a moral principle was never explained. The
ideal as a noun appeared in the first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.
‘The Ideal’ had a wide spread influence in Germany as a term and as a
doctrine and it became especially fashionable after 1770. Schiller, in his
poem Die Ideale may have been influenced by Winckelmann orby
Diderot. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) expressed his conception of
ideal beauty in his essay: About the sources and connections between the
arts and the sciences. Über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen
Künste und Wissenschaften 1757. He described an argument between
Euphranor, who holds that the pleasure we take in beauty is purely a dark
emotion ein dunkles Gefühl to further our happiness Glückseligkeit and
Palemon, who holds that through beauty man can reach an understanding
of certain rare configurations of reality. For Palemon, the chief quality of
66 Chapter Two

beauty is unity in multiplicity, a quality which does exist objectively,

though only as a simplification of complex reality, an illusion that is
imposed on the real by the aesthetic observer or the artist.

Winckelmann does not follow the Enlightenment idea that art and its
impact can be explained by a process of reasoning. His was a simpler,
more direct view: the artist was in the process of creating beauty, aiming at
inimitable beauty that transmits to the beholder the emotions that
somehow replicate what the creator of the art had felt and what he had
aimed to reproduce in stone or on canvas. From Winckelmann’s earlier
work two different theories of ideal beauty idealische Schönheit) emerge:
first, the natural beauty of the ideal masculine body – an idea perhaps
deriving from Bellori. And secondly, Winckelmann’s own theory of ideal
beauty - an idea that could be closer to the original Platonic theory,
whereby beauty derives entirely from the mind of the artist, ‘the imitator
or enhancer of nature’. The artist did not need any real connection with
experience or even with a model seen in nature.

Winckelmann may have been aware of Giambatista Vico (1668-1744)

who was perhaps the first to conceive of history as a progress through
successive stages. Vico was professor of Greek and rhetoric at Naples. He
published, in 1725 his monumental Prinzipi di Scienza Nuova d’itorno
alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni. Vico argues, like Winckelmann that
civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the
divine, the heroic, and the human. These ages, he thought, were similar to
the human ages of youth, maturity and old age. Each phase, exhibits
distinct political and social features. The giganti of the early divine age, he
thought relied on metaphor to compare and evolve language and thus they
learned to comprehend, to understand human and natural phenomena. In
the following mature or heroic age, mankind developed rhetorical methods
to support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions
characterised by idealized or heroic figures. The third and final phase he
thought to be characterized by maturity and by popular democracy. It uses
reflection with rationality and irony; in this epoch, the rise of reason and
consent leads in the end to barbarism of reflection barbarie della
reflessione’ ‘and civilization descends once more into chaos from which it
rises again in a new poetic era. The problem of defining the ideal, lies in
 A Prelude to German Classicism 67

the impossibility to derive conclusions from general assumptions. All one

can assume are probabilities wahrscheinliche Schlüsse. 16

Winckelmann derived detailed conclusions from general principles and in

reverse, he created general principles from detailed observation of unique
examples. Long before he had seen the examples of sculpture that he
selected, he wrote ecstatically about their inimitable beauty. His general
theory of ideal beauty was based on engravings that he had seen in the
libraries of Dresden and Nöthnitz. And when he reached Rome, his
descriptions of sculpture in the Geschichte tell in great detail of the beauty
of even the smaller parts, drawing general conclusions from the
observation of detail.

We are faced with a problem of interpretation. What experience would

give us access to the inner meaning of an object of art? Works of art in
marble were not accidental or fortuitious creations. They were the result of
laborious, dedicated and ingenious traditional craftsmanship carried out by
groups of artist-craftsmen. These artefacts were made to order by slaves
and metics serving the nobility of the Greco-Roman world and not as
Winckelmann assumed by single and free artists creating images of their
mental picture, the Urbild.

Elsewhere Winckelmann describes how the observation of his chosen

sculptures made him feel in touch with their creators, with the sculptors
who created, in his words an ideal purely created in the mind (ein bloȕ im
Verstand gebildetes Ideal, das Urbild.) And yet, Winckelmann claims that
the Greek artist could find his models in the natural beauty of the Greek
youth inimitable beauty due to the mild climate and the freedom of the
citizen under a benevolent government. We are not told how far the source
of this inimitable beauty was based on natural forms and how far it was
taken from the mind, from the ‘Urbild’ or the inspiration of the artist.

Winckelmann believed that the objects of his admiration were both

naturalistic and at the same time ideal, abstract creations arising in the
mind of the artist. This view of art seems to have been involved in a war
on two fronts: against metaphysical explanations and against empiricism;
and this duality could explain the peculiarly strident character of his
classicism. The artist, although in need of nature as the substratum or raw-

16
Thomas Franke. Ideale Natur aus kontingeter Erfahrung; Winckelmanns
normative Kunstlehre und die empirische Wissenschaft. (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2006) p.26. Also Gedanken, p.12-13.
68 Chapter Two

material, can then purify the image to make it superior to vulgar nature. It.
The term ‘aping nature,’ was applied to art and became a derogatory
expression also for Winckelmann. The idea originated with Bellori who
never tired of amassing proofs that human beings represented in painting
or sculpture were more perfect – at least could be or should be more
perfect than natural forms. In his essay L’idea del pittore. Dello scultore e
del architetto of 1622 Bellori writes eloquently on his interpretation of
ideal beauty. Ideal beauty is but the perfect representation of the natural
qualities of the object. Bellori continues with the introduction of the Deity
into the creation of beauty:
God, the eternal intellect created the primary forms in his mind, in the
spiritual creation process and the heavenly bodies in their eternal beauty
and order are proof of the beauty that resided in the mind of the Deity.

This appears similar to the way Winckelmann saw the artistic creation
process. Were the artists of antiquity better artists than the moderns? Or
were they more skilled? The idea of a normative, judgemental and art-
critical process presumes that the judge (in this case Winckelmann
himself) has divinatory powers and he ‘knows’ what is beautiful and what
is not. Ultimately we are left with the feeling that beauty lies in the eyes of
the beholder and that the human mind can find beauty in the symmetry of
micro- or macro- aspects of nature, in the art of the past and in the art of
the present, in the art of primitives and in the art of the sophisticated.
Panofsky quotes Dürer (1471-1528) in similar vein:
For it is great art that can create forceful art from primitive material and
this art is remarkable. For God grants often inspiration to create something
good which in his time no-one else has created nor in times before him nor
will anyone come after him for a good painter has within himself a host of
figures and if it were possible that he lived forever he would be able to
pour out new art from his inner ideas as Plato wrote.

Denn es ist eine groȕe Kunst welcher in groben bäurischen Dingen ein
rechten Gwalt und Kunst kann anzeigen [ . . . ] und diese Gab ist
wunderlich. Denn Gott giebt oft einen Verstand, etwas Guts zu machen,
desgleichen ihn zu seinen Zeiten keiner gleich erfunden wird und etwan
lang keiner vor ihm gewest und nach ihm nit bald einer kummt [ . . . ] denn
ein gutter Maler ist inwendig voller Figur, und obs möglich wär daȕ er
ewiglich lebte, so hätt er aus den inneren Ideen, davon Plato schreibt,
allweg etwas Neus durch die Werk auszugieȕen.

Pre-classical Greece had developed the notion of Kalo-K’agathoy,

translated as the ’beautiful and the good’ the perfect balance between the
 A Prelude to German Classicism 69

physical and the spiritual, between the beautiful and the natural. It is
reflected in the Delphic middle way between extremes. This idea is also
connected to the growth of class divisions in classical Greece, since the
acquisition of Kalo-k’agathoy was restricted to the aristocratic stratum of
society, to men who could devote their time and energies to the acquisition
of these qualities. Some would claim that members of the land-owning
Greek families were born to rule because of their superior breeding, their
inborn Kalo K’agathy. For Winckelmann also, a great work of art was a
triumph of spirit over matter, or of ideal beauty over the limitations of
nature. The Laocoön group, as an example is a triumph of technical skill,
of the mastery of the stone mason making the hard and unyielding marble
look like animated and soft human surfaces. According to Winckelmann,
the particular components of beauty are somehow transcended by a single
beauty which includes and surpasses its elements. Winckelmann
repeatedly refers to the Greek ideal. He believed that beautiful detail alone
cannot be called ideal:
The aesthetic ideal can not be found in every detail of the human figure
but only in the whole figure since beautiful parts can be found also in
nature but in the whole figure nature must give way to art.

He was concerned with beauty, not with content or with allegorical

symbolism; he continues:
In this view beauty should be like the most perfect water raised from a
spring which is thought to be healthier the clearer it is and freed from all
impurities.

He then describes the quality of idealische Schönheit as Unbezeichnung

(unspecificness?) that he tries to define as:
A figure that is neither specific to this or an other person, nor a certain
condition of the soul or or of the senses or of fervour and which is not
mixing foreign elements with the beauty and thus could interrupt its unity.

Winckelmann describes a kind of rich emptiness or a freedom from

particulars which he thought characterises this ideal beauty. He does not
apply this theory to the Laokoön group with its expression of intense pain.
He believed that this emptiness is also the characteristic of the soul that
experiences this beauty. This experience, he wrote, was somehow a moral
one; it is an experience of the good as well as of the beautiful. In
particular, he often said that the highest aesthetic experience is an
experience of God. Ideal beauty seems to have arisen in the mind of the
Deity and it descended upon the sculptor as he joined the individual parts
70 Chapter Two

of the object into a unity - but how these ideas come from God or from
nature is never explained. Winckelmann argues that the experts and the
imitators of the Greeek masterpieces, the sculptors of his time found ideal
beauty to be originating from a purely intellectual experience.

One may ask: ‘What about God?’ in what way is God the real source of
ideal Beauty? Or does the desire to create beauty arise as an inspiration
spontaneously in the mind of the artist? And the greatest beauty, according
to Winckelmann was created by pagan artists. A further question that is
not asked by Winckelmann or his admirers is the reception of beauty: what
is it that ideal beauty can give us knowledge of? Perhaps the answer is that
it gives us no other knowledge than the recognition of beauty itself.
Arguably, Winckelmann doubted that divine intelligence was involved in
aesthetic experience – he seems to believe that inimitable beauty is
somehow disconnected from other aspects of reality. The relationship
between the real and the ideal was perhaps the notion that the ideal could
only be achieved by unspecific beauty‘unbezeichnete Schönheit. One
might consider whether ‘idealische Schönheit’ is not simply a subjective
quality for Winckelmann, a personal aesthetic experience of his mind in
the presence of beauty.

It may be that the experience of beauty, the joy of beholding beauty, is

somehow related to a religious experience. God descends upon the
beholder, perhaps also upon the artist, the creator of beauty. In an idealist
vain, Winckelmann describes his experience as though knowing and the
known object were but the same thing. Thus Winckelmann, by the
outpouring of his feelings, his ecstasies about sculpture, believed that he
was talking about beauty as such. One might conjecture that
Winckelmann’s references to God were included in order to avoid being
regarded as a free-thinker or worse, a Spinozist by the censors, who could
have prevented the publication of his work in spite of Winckelmann’s
fulsome dedication to his royal patrons.

Winckelmann’s projection of the sublime and the beautiful onto the ideal
male body produces a major structural contradiction in his account of
antique art. On the one hand his readings of individual statues play out a
constant intermingling of the austerely sublime with the desirably
beautiful. But equally, he insists on the necessity of a strict duality as well
as the separation of the sublime from the beautiful. The sublime, for
Winckelmann cannot only be seen in the representations of the male
 A Prelude to German Classicism 71

figure, and he substitutes as an appropriate example of the sublime figure

the draped female Niobe and her daughter.

De-sexualised and modestly draped, these figures are removed from the
category of objects of desire and, being female they can be imagined (by
men) as entirely untouched by the stirrings of desire. In this sense these
female figures are absolutely sublime, according to Winckelmann, because
their de-libidinized form denies the evocative charge that would be carried
by nakedness. Winckelmann singled out a large statue of draped Athena as
one of the few existing works in the ‘sublime mode’; this, he thought
distinguished it from other similar works. Sublimity had little to do with its
grand or powerful presence, but rather with the absence in it of attributes
that would make it sensually or gracefully feminine and beautiful. It was,
according to Winckelmann, the image of virginal chastity, stripped of all
sexuality.

Winckelmann compares the figure of Niobe with the figure of Laocoön.

He considers them as examples of the difference between the de-eroticised
‘sublime’ and the subsequent ‘beautiful’ style. It is surely no accident that
the Laocoön is accompanied by his naked sons and the Niobe by her fully
draped daughter. The faces, according to Winckelmann, show the
difference between the earlier sublime style (Niobe) and the beautiful style
(Laocoön). According to him, the face of Laocoön showed nobility of
spirit:
[. . .] beneath the brow the battle between pain and resistance; it is
fashioned with great wisdom, as if it were brought together at one point,
for while pain drives the eyebrows upwards and apart, the flesh above the
eyelids is thrust upward in the struggle against this pain, pressing against
the eyelid, so that the latter is almost completely covered by the flesh
pushing against it.

Niobe is, in Winckelmann’s view the embodiment of negativity – she is no

heroine. Because she had no self, she has given up the struggle against her
fate. Winckelmann ignores the protective gesture, surely an expression of
her concern for her innocent daughter. The marble statue of Niobe depicts
her at the moment when she is herself transfixed and turned to stone.

Moritz was critical of Winckelmann’s approach; he castigates him for

concentrating on the description of detail, but detail lies at the core of all
Winckelmann’s art-historical classifications. Moritz is rather ‘modern’ in
his realisation that the whole work of art is related to the necessity of its
72 Chapter Two

parts. There is, surprisingly, a lasting sociological aspect to the concept of

ideal beauty which was emphasised by the educational program of the
early stages of the German Democratic Republic, and particularly by
Siegfried Heinz Begenau, the author of a guide-book for the teaching of
art: Studienmaterial für die künstlerischen Lehranstalten of 1955. He
developed the idea of perfection in his notion of completeness
‘Vollkommenheit’ as the guiding quality of ideal beauty, a quality that he
thought was seen and experienced by the enlightened philosophers of the
German literary scene of eighteenth century. It seems that Winckelmann
had created, perhaps unconsciously, a model of descriptive text that
became a resource for later generations.

In addition to the term Schönheit, Winckelmann used the term Grazie

(gracefulness or elegance) to describe the beautiful simplicity that he
admired in the works of late classical sculpture. He wrote an essay: Von
der Grazie in Werken der Kunst where he combined the aesthetic and the
intellectual in the experience of art. Even in late eighteenth- century
German aesthetics, the beautiful was often associated with the notion of
perfection Vollkommenheit. Heinrich von Stein, for example, has shown
how earlier writers on beauty, like Hogarth, even without knowing the
significance of it, would regularly refer to Vollkommenheit as an attribute
of ideal beauty. Beauty had the connotation of being a condition of
intelligibility which was its connection to reality. Heinrich von Stein wrote
that there had been seven constituent elements in beauty, and Mendelssohn
pared down this list, eliminating smoothness and smallness (Glattheit und
Kleinheit).

Winckelmann writes in his essay About ‘Grazie‘ in works of art: Von der
Grazie in Werken der Kunst (KS 157):
‚Grazie‘ is a concept of wide range because it can refer to all actions.
Grazie‘ is a gift of Heaven buit not like beauty, because it only hints at the
possibility of beauty. Grazie is created through education and consideration;
and it can become natural when it is appreciated. Knowledge and
judgment of Grazzie of the human figure and in the reproduction of it in
statues and in painting seems to be different because many find images
acceptable when they would regard them as offensive in real life.

Grazie, according to Winckelmann, is the intellectually pleasing aspect of

beauty. Thus it is the perception of beauty by the observer that defines
Grazie. Grazie is lighter than beauty, it is related to Winckelmann’s ‘noble
simplicity’ and can be found in some Hellenistic sculpture. He then
 A Prelude to German Classicism 73

continues to say that Grazie is also a feature of ‘imitation Nachahmung. It

seems that Winckelmann’s notion of Nachahmung is inherent in all
representational art; art imitates, it is an allegory of reality. And by
Nachahmung of the Nachahmung, he argues that artists can learn how to
reach perfection. There follow six pages of general criticism of
contemporary Italian art including the notion that Michelangelo’s
sculptures lacked Grazie.
Michelangelo has also made large marble sculptures but in such a way that
if they could come to life they would be unable to move because their
limbs and bones are so full of the finest muscles that they could only stand
still.

Winckelmann neither defines nor describes clearly what distinguishes

Grazie from Schönheit. The idea that art was connected to rationality
Vernunft, was only tenable within the concept of definable regularities
Gesetzlichkeiten that could be learned or detected by the observer.
Winckelmann could not have meant ‘elegance’ nor ‘gracefulness’ since
neither the Laokoön nor the Torso that he admired had the simplicity, the
lightness inherent in ‘Grazie’. The Torso in particular, lacked this quality,
being a massive expression of muscular masculinity. The inductive
reasoning of Winckelmann – and particularly his certainties, were in
opposition to the enlightenment principles as formulated clearly by Kant
as a function of Aufklärung, as liberation from prejudice. In terms of the
Enlightenment, it was the process of thinking that inevitably led to the
creation of a uniform scientific world order and the deduction or the
knowledge of reality or Tatsachenerkenntnis from basic principles. The
laws of logic rather than personal emotions were thought to determine the
general relationships within the framework of order. But nothing could be
further from Winckelmann’s intuitive response to art. His experience of art
was not, as he claimed, based on the critical examination of the objects,
nor on his studies of classical literature, but on his emotional (and perhaps
also sexual) response. There is a clear dichotomy between his declared
objective of the critical analysis of art as a historical process and the
emotive text which assumes that the reader would experience the same
instant exultation that he himself obviously felt when confronting the
objects of his review.

Winckelmann’s friend and confidant, Anton Raphael Mengs writes as a

professional painter about the beauty of classical sculpture:
As now the beauty in itself is nothing else than the perfection of every
concept and thus one calls the most perfect parts beautiful; in the same
74 Chapter Two

way one can also regard the works of the ancients; namely that their
beauty can not always be found in the same part; their beauty does not
always reside in the same place, but in the portion that the idea of the
observer has chosen. The most beautiful examples of the highest degree
are the Laocoön and the Torso in the Belvedere; next and of a lesser
degree are the Apollo and the Gladiator of the Borghese Museum The
third and lower category are innumerable and I do not count them at all.

The argument he offers is clearly circular; perfect beauty is the perfection

of every part - visible or invisible. Not every part needs to be perfect, but
the sum total of ‘Schönheit’ is the perfection of the whole. He sees the
highest beauty in the Hellenistic sculptures that Winckelmann described,
and there are lesser beauties, and of bad examples he prefers to say
nothing. ‘Schönheit’ is equal to perfection, but this tells us nothing of the
nature of beauty. The question as to why we experience some shapes as
beautiful in preference to others is not addressed.

In spite of the variety of subjects and expression Mengs thought that the
ancients had beauty as their central aim and that expression Ausdruck was
reduced to the ‘bare minimum, giving way to truth. What he really implied
was a projection of his sense of the beautiful into the sculptures of the past
as if he could know what the artists of antiquity considered as their aim.
This theory became the central proposition of Winckelmann’s history of
art among the Greeks.

The veneration of Hellenistic exuberance was common throughout the

western world of art collectors and art connoisseurs of the last half of the
eighteenth century. There was hardly any serious criticism of the basic
assumptions of Winckelmann. Winckelmann’s biographer Carl Justi
devotes a whole chapter (3: 160-170) to the meaning and development of
the notion of the ‘ideal’ in art. He quotes the painter Raphael Mengs as the
originator of the notion that two factors are at work in the artist’s creative
process: a mechanical one and an intellectual one. The latter is aiming at
the creation of ideal art ‘idealische Schönheit’. A vision of artistic
excellence that the classical Greek sculptors had already achieved. Justi
claims that nature itself was forever aiming towards the perfection of this
inimitable beauty:
Nature herself condemns the ugly and unnatural, the misbegotten and the
unhealthy – they are condemned to infertility and destruction in the
interest of the race. [ . . .] the voice of the race and its preservation depend
on the preservationn of the species in the battle for existance and its
preservation.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 75

The notion that the species Gattung avoids ugliness in the battle for
survival seems to foreshadow later developments of eugenic theory in
Germany. The idea that art aims at beauty to preserve the Gattung in this
case may mean preservation of the ‘style’ or ‘genre’. However, if nature
itself prefers beauty, the creation of beautiful art should be based on nature
itself rather than on the images the artist had in mind, the Urbild.
We are able to accept the terrifying in art as one of the components of the
sublime but it is not restricted to classical art, as is clearly shown by the
great volume of popular Christian representations of martyrdom.17

A more recent approach to the problem is represented by Rachel Kousser

who usess a different approach to ideal sculpture. She argues that the
Romans self-consciously employed sculptures as symbols of their ties to
the past. In her analysis of Hellenistic sculpture she writes:
These works [Roman metropolitan public monuments] are worth studying
because they constituted an extensive, complex and ideologically charged
visual program; they were also, in form and style, insistently classicising.
[. . .] In this way they allow us to see how artists in Rome first
appropriated and adapted Greek forms in monuments closely tied to the
princeps and his circle. Such monuments were most likely created by
artists with Greek names trained to produce the kind of retrospective
eclectic images, working for Roman patrons.

The question arises: how far were the objects of Winckelmann’s choice
Greek, were they made by Greeks for their Roman patrons, or made by
Roman sculptors imitating or copying Greek models. The techniques of
softening and carving the marble blocks selected for sculpture were
developed in classical Greece many generations before the sculptures of
the Hellenistic age were created. These grand objects were not designed to
be museum objects. They were rather an expression of Roman concern
with the enhancement of the city, of its public buildings and of its private
collections. There were few references in Roman literature to the
sculptures that were chosen by Winckelmann. The admiration in the
eighteenth century of huge Hellenistic marbles can be understood as a
form of looking back nostalgically to the general emotionalism of late
baroque art. There may also have been a reaction against the dry and
unemotional aspects of Enlightenment philosophy. The admiration of
ancient art can also be seen as an aspect of a search for a long lost time of

17
Maria Wyke. Roman Bodies (London: British School at Rome, 2005) p.167.
Commenting on Opher Mansour.’ Not torments but delights’ Antonio Gallonio’s
Trattato degli instrumenti di martirio of 1591 and its illustrations.
76 Chapter Two

beauty and peace, of freedom and justice that could be imagined and
imaginatively reconstructed; and by looking back to an idealised past as a
model, history became an expression of hope and of the longing for a
better future.

In summary it can be argued that Winckelmann’s publications do not give

an adequate account of art in antiquity. His carefully chosen examples of
large Hellenistic sculpture that he called Greek fail to demonstrate the
sequence of styles that he proposed. Moreover, his account of the art of the
great river cultures of antiquity does not do justice to their importance in
the evolution of religious art. His contribution to the development of the
German language, as a vehicle for the expression of emotional states,
however, is not in doubt and will be considered in the following section.

2.3 Winckelmann’s Contribution to the German Language

Winckelmann’s classification of the styles of ancient Greek art drew on
analogies of linguistic analysis in two important ways. Rhetorical models
provided him with a notion of style that was conceptually richer than the
indications of style in the sculptures themselves. His use of linguistic
models also had another, more concrete historical basis. The most
suggestive analogies he made between verbal and visual style were
derived from Greco-Roman sources dealing with rhetoric. From these
Winckelmann had been able to gain some understanding of how verbal
style had been conceived in ancient philosophy. Classical references to
rhetoric and verbal discourse were a resource that was more valuable than
the relatively meager references to the visual arts in classical literature.
Clearly, the significance of verbal communication is more immediate;
understanding is generated directly without an intermediate phase. By
contrast, the visual image provides a case of the disjunction between the
mute ‘material’ and its immaterial significance. The visual appearance of a
lump of stone or a splatter of paint on canvas is obviously different from
the significance that might be ascribed to it. Even in antiquity Pliny
reported the Greek writer Athenagoras to have been prompted to remark of
the venerated early statues of the gods: ‘They are but earth and stones and
wood and cunning art’.

In his outline of the history of Greek art which he published in Italian in

his Monumenti Antici Inediti of 1767, Winckelmann drew an extended
parallel between the evolution of ancient Greek art and literature, which
amplified the similarities in a more systematic manner. Art and literature,
 A Prelude to German Classicism 77

he thought, followed the same pattern of development ‘in conformity with

the ‘spirit of the age’.

In most of his published works Winckelmann wrote, against the custom of

his time in the German language. However, his subject and his
environment in Rome turned him into a European rather than a German
writer. Not as a courtier or Rokokohöfling, as Berthold Vallentin tells us
(Vallentin, p.84 f) but as a German imigrant. Winckelmann used his
intensive study of rhetoric and particularly of Cicero, as the instrument of
adapting the rather heavy German language of the time to express his
feelings with as much clarity and brevity as he could. Herein lay probably
the core of his importance, the adaptation of the German language to the
enthusiastic description of visual experience, an interpretation or an
hermeneutic process of describing visual experience in terms of a poetic
verbal mode of interpretation. It was his preoccupation with the impact of
language and his remarkable and constant refining and improving of his
text that made his contribution to the development of the modern German
language perhaps more important than his contribution to the history of
art. His was a constant search for precision in a medium [and a language]
that did not easily lend itself to the expression of emotional states. He
writes about the English writer Roscommon, whose work he had read [and
extracted] during his stay at Nöthnitz. Winckelmann wrote, in his letter to
Muzel Stosch (7.1.1760) ‚‘In every thing that distinguishes the Human
race, the greatest achievement of nature is to write well‘.

The idea that Winckelmann was dreaming of a revival of German national

identity was perhaps a reflection of Goethe’s notion of the dream
Ahnungswelt of Winckelmann, the new Columbus. It is, however,
anachronistic to project nineteenth-century patriotism into the time of
Winckelmann and nowhere in his published works did Winckelmann
express revolutionary patriotic ideas, nor did he refer in his
correspondence to an ambition to create a new German national spirit,
indeed a new Germany. Such notions would have brought him into
conflict with the censors and could even have endangered his income from
the Saxon and later the Prussian court.

Where the essence Grundwesen of Italian might be musical, the essence

the German language might have been poetic, perhaps rhythmical and
adorned with abstract ambiguities. The contribution of Winckelmann to
the German language was part of the tendency in eighteenth-century
Germany for scholarly language to evolve and to separate itself from the
78 Chapter Two

common language of the population. This development of ‘learned

German’ included the use of complex syntactic structures mainly modeled
on Latin, to reflect the multi-layerdness of problems of expression. But
part of the appeal of Winckelmann’s prose is its rhythmical structure,
rhetorical flourish supported by his use of metaphor.

Art critics and connoisseurs of classical art became arbiters of German

upper class taste and the objects of their approval were the ones to be
described, to be copied, to be displayed and treasured. Winckelmann fitted
the image of the perfect tutor of good taste. Not only did he speak German,
Italian, Latin and French, but he had also the undoubted ability to express
his ecstatic feelings about classical art in ways that were approved of by
his literate audience. Winckelmann’s Geschichte soon acquired an
international reputation after it was published in 1764. Initially, extracts
and summaries appeared in literary journals before it was translated into
Italian and French. The book originated from and spoke eloquently to a
cosmopolitan European community for which Rome was a crucial point of
reference. Rome was similarly the centre of Winckelmann’s endeavours,
since he had lived there after leaving Dresden in 1755.

Winckelmann’s Geschichte had a remarkable impact for a scholarly

antiquarian publication. It claimed to represent a comprehensive synthesis
of available knowledge about the visual artifacts of the ancient world, of
the ancient Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman civilizations. It
pretended to be what it was not. The meager insights into cultures other
than the Greek make the work not only incomplete but useless as a guide
to the arts of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Iran. The chapter on Greek art tells
us nothing of the diversity and ingenuity of the products of the Greco-
Roman workshops, products that still form the core of the museum
collections of the West.

Much has been written since by philologists and historians concerning the
relationship of language to human thought and art. For Winckelmann,
language was a major part of his endeavour, of his ambition to
communicate his ecstatic experiences to others. He thought of himself as
an inhibited artist who could have created beautiful things, but had to be
content with the creation of beautiful language. It was his scholarly
language that enabled him to overcome the disadvantages of a frustrating
youth and the narrow and burdensome existence as a school-teacher that
followed. His linguistic position is based on the regional dialect of his
childhood, the language established by Martin Luther, but its later
 A Prelude to German Classicism 79

development falls between the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the

subsequent neo-classical (Weimar-classical) literary periods. Winckelmann
himself was conscious of the importance of his use of the German
language. Already in his Dresden days he wrote:
It was my intention not to write anythng that had already been said by
others, moreover to create something origiinal after I had waited so long
and had read so much that had emerged about the two arts. And thirdly I
wanted to write only what would increase the impat of the arts.

In his letter to Stosch (September 1757) Winckelmann writes:

One can not but write well when one has noted the best writing of the
ancients, if one considers what they wrote and and what one wishes that
they might have written or not have written. [. . .] And if possible to write
only what posterity will recognize as worthy. This is very difficult, but
anyone can try it, and great ignoramuses have written very scholarly.

One can find, with Hanna Koch, a significant difference between

Winckelmann’s language of descriptive prose, fit for publication and on
the other hand the language of his extensive private correspondence. The
latter includes popular turns of speech and many colloquialisms that are
often derived from the Saxon speech of his youth. Winckelmann finds
archaic terms to be useful in his descriptions of large sculpture. For
instance: instead of referring to the bone structure of the sculptures as
Knochengerüst or Gerippe he uses the archaic (biblical) term of Gebeine.
When Winckelmann wrote about classical architecture he had to invent
terms for the components of the canon of temple architecture:
The property of the Dorian Order are the Triglyphs or three-slots on the
middle or the widest portion of the entablature and the so-called teeth hang
under the triglyphs. When the decoration of the architecture meets with
simplicity, beauty is created: for a matter is good and beautiful when it is
what it should be. Thus the decorations of a building should be in
conformity with the purpose of the structure. 18

Winckelmann’s important contribution to the development of the German

language was to turn it into a medium suitable for the description of works
of art. This major characteristic remains with him in everything he wrote,
be it published texts or private correspondence. His prose remained a
model for the tone and character of German art criticism for the next
hundred years, the period during which renaissance classicism crossed the

18
Monumenti II, 441
80 Chapter Two

Alps and found a new home in Germany. The fundamental importance of

language in the exploration of the historical past is emphasized by a
number of linguists and the link between thought and language is a
complex one and lies well outside the scope of this study.

Winckelmann’s visual and perhaps spiritual experience of sculpture is

probably closely related to his declamatory language; he observes and
experiences beauty in the terms of his rhetoric and it is not possible to
distinguish what he saw from what he wrote. The fundamental factor in
Winckelmann’s work was first his interpretation of the nature of antiquity;
this was closely related to the second factor which was the development of
the German language. His researches into Antiquity were only one part of
his accomplishment and his linguistic achievement was its complement.
His area of competence sein Schaffenskreis was much admired in his day.
His linguistic achievement lay in the way that it formed part of the dawn
of a German cultural identity, an identity that in turn formed a significant
part of the awakening of a general national consciousness and thereby part
of a new German patriotism that somehow involved classical antiquity in
the ambitious notions of personal freedom and national justice.
Winckelmann wrote to his publisher that he would rather be regarded as
Roman than as Parisian and ‘among the many things for which I have to
thank God is the fact that I am German and not French.’

There was a fundamental difference in the reception of Greco-Roman

literature and art between the Franco-British Renaissance position and
attitudes in the German speaking world. In the West, there was a gradual
introduction of classical experience and knowledge beginning in the early
sixteenth century and classicism became part of the general knowledge of
the educated upper class. Knowledge of classical literature became part of
the Western education systems and of national culture. In Germany
matters were quite different. Ludwig Curtius writes that in Germany the
development of classicism was delayed due to the Reformation and the
Thirty Years War. Curtius continues with a description of the way that the
Antique was incorporated into the English education system by the great
personalities of Thomas More, Bacon, Pope and Shaftesbury and above
all, the great influence of Milton on the evolution of the English language.
Nothing comparable occurred in the German language area – there was no
uniform language and there was no central education system until the
second half of the nineteenth century.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 81

The idea of a German cultural (and political) identity had probably also
been one of the motivating ambitions of Count von Bünau in his
researches into German political history. This may have influenced
Winckelmann during his period at Nöthnitz where he spent many years
researching into the royal and national history of Germany and of its
emperors. Perhaps one of the problems of German cultural identity
Deutschtum, lay with the absence in German literature of a genius like
Shakespeare, a literary giant who could have been a source of national
history and national language. What united Germans was not a common
belief in a national history, but the identity of language. In spite of
regional differences, Germans in the eighteenth century would have
understood each other.

There were still controversies about the correct way to write German.

Winckelmann regarded these parochial controversies over spelling with

disdain and in his correspondence he castigates the universities for their
concern with such irrelevant detail. 19 The lasting influence of Winckelmann
on the evolution of erudite German was undoubtedly felt by his
contemporaries and the succeeding generation of writers of philosophical
and poetic German.

Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) wrote his own, deliberately complex

essay which he published in the Teutsche Merkur under the title Über
teutschen Patriotismus. He expanded the doubts and hopes of the new
political idea of the ‘Vaterland’ in sentences that demonstrated the
evolution of erudite German that had begun with Winckelmann and
continued towards the end of the century. The German language seems to
develop in two different directions: the commercial language or vernacular
speech with its short sentences and restricted vocabulary and by contrast,
the academic language of literature and science, of exegesis and social
comment. In print, though, Luther’s German was closer to the vernacular
than to the academic language.

This dichotomy did not occur in English ( nor to the same extent in
French), where the linguistic leaders (e.g. Shakespeare, Milton or Molière)
were using a basic idiom that seemed close to every-day usage. An
example of the new erudite German language is given in the following
sentence by Wieland writing about German patriotism:

19
Letter to Berendis 21.2.1761
82 Chapter Two

Nun ist zwar an dem, daȕ es mir bey zunehmendem Alter und Verstande an
Gelegenheit nicht gefehlet hat das Teutsche Reich, zu welchem (wie ich
endlich zu merken anfieng) auch meine werthe Vaterstadt gerechnet wird,
nach seiner ältesten, spätern neuern und neuesten Verfassung, und die
teutsche Nazion, nach allem was sich zu ihrem Vortheil und Nachtheil
sagen läȕt, etwas näher kennen zu lernen: allein ich muss zu meiner
Beschämung gestehen, daȕ mir alle meine, während einem groȕen Theil
dieses achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, erlangten Kenntnisse über teutschen
Patriotismus eigentlich zu verstehen sey, wenig Licht gegeben haben.20

The erudite language of Wieland, his Sprachkunst contrasts with the

common speech of the country – a distinction that remains with the
linguistic evolution of German until modern times. In the new erudite
language Wieland explains in one sentence the doubts he has about the
general public appeal of the new German patriotism; in fact, he may have
wished to express his opposition to Herder’s contemporary patriotism. The
complexities of Wieland’s language and his early doubts concering
German nationalism were imitated and expanded by the next generation of
art-critical writers (e.g. Hölderlin, Hegel, Schiller). The idealization of
classical Greece and especially of Athens is well expressed in the
following passage from Wieland:
And how could it have been different? A common origin, common fame,
common freedom, common Gods and festivals, the temple at Delphi, at
Olympia, at Eleusis and many more that were sacred to all the Greeks, the
great national congresses at the four-yearly festivals - contests that were
sacred to all the Greeks whose main aim was to remind the Greeks of their
common ancestry and relationships [ . . .].

Wieland, as a classicist, would have known that the rhetoric of Isocrates

(436-338 BC) has to be understood in the light of the political ambitions of
the Egalitarian Party of Athens, whose speechwriter (ȜóȖȠȖȡĮij) Isocrates
became in order to earn a living. Wieland must have been aware of the
contradictory nature of his views on classical Greece, since he wrote:
The author is qute justified to write about the nation he describes to tell us
everything that he has seen. Good things and bad, famous and negligible.
From untrue depiction that show only the most advantageous side or
erroneous ones that only depict the good [. . .] the world does not benefit.

Neither Winckelmann nor Wieland applied such critical thoughts to their

descriptions of classical Greek society and art. Perhaps this failure could

20
DTM 1783, 2:34f.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 83

be understood as part of the intensive search for an ancestral Golden Age –

an attempt to overcome the lack of a universal German national identity.
There might also have been a memory of the tragedies of the Thirty Years
War and its aftermath, with perhaps the realisation of the absense of a
feeling of a common historical past of the German speaking lands.

There were at the time Winckelmann wrote his text other writers (mainly
Christian Gottlob Heyne and Herder, Wieland and Heinse), who also made
their contribution to the way the German language could express the finer
shades of meaning needed in the field of art criticism but few men have
had a greater impact on the culture of their native country than
Winckelmann. The ‘Greek revival’ in which he participated, profoundly
altered the course of German literature: many of its most influential
writers from Lessing to our own times would have written differently
without his model and example, particularly those authors who had a
strong interest in the visual arts. His use of extended metaphors may have
been an echo of national anxieties and his style as well as his ideas were
regarded as classic in more than one sense of that word. The cult of Greek
simplicity which he derived from the grandure of Homeric poetry also
affected concepts of musical theatre (e.g. Gluck’s opera Orfeo et Euridice)
as well as literature, and of course sculpture, painting and architecture.
Indeed it has influenced the whole history of Western taste.

He had, with Herder and Wieland, a profound influence on the writing of

history. In his view of a culture developing ‘organically’ through an
irreversible series of periods he was halfway to the historicism of the
nineteenth century. After he settled in Rome in 1755 his fame became a
European as much as a German phenomenon; through translations, articles
in journals and the enthusiastic reports of travellers returning from Rome,
it radiated rapidly over Western Europe. Perhaps the most remarkable
thing about his fame was its duration; the first uncritical vogue of
Winckelmann died down rather soon, but the impact of his central
concepts persisted with modifications, into our own time.

There is a strange dichotomy between Winckelmann’s posture in favour of

men’s dignity and artistic freedom and his lifelong self-abasement before
his patrons in language which was servile even for the eighteenth century.
As interpreter of ancient Greece, he never reached Greek soil; all the
Greece he saw was in Italy, in classical literature and in his mind. His
idealization of Greek art may have had a further component that found
84 Chapter Two

expression in his intense admiration of the naked masculine form; this

aspect will be considered in the next chapter.

2.4 Eroticism and Ambiguity

Winckelmann was unable to put into unambiguous words the notion that
his artistic judgements were influenced by his clearly erotic response to
the depiction of the naked male. Any such reference could have brought
him into immediate conflict with the censors and with the universal and
rather draconian state of the laws against non-conforming sexual
orientation. His works abound with enthusiastic descriptions of pubescent
boys kouroi and the juvenile figure known as the Antinous. The homo-
erotic aspects of Greek art were well known in Winckelmann’s time and
were demonstrated more recently by K. J.Dover. 21 He illustrates his thesis
with pictures from classical vase paintings often showing an older man
approaching a pubescent boy with a gift. In classical Greece, as in Rome,
there was undoubtedly a preoccupation with the beauty of the pubescent
male body. It was well expressed by Plutarch and Winckelmann would
have been familiar with the description Plutarch gave of Alcibiades:
As regards the beauty of Alcibiades, it is perhaps unnecessary to say
aught, except that it flowered out with each successive season of his bodily
growth and made him alike in boyhood, youth and manhood, lovely and
pleasant.

In 1760, the government of Rome decreed that the ancient statues of naked
men had to have their genitals covered by suspended tin sheets.
Winckelmannn strongly objected. Particularly significant for our reading
of the often implied eroticism in Winckelmann’s account of Greek art is
the prominence accorded to emotionally invested relationships with other
men in the accounts he gave of himself in his letters to friends. A
passionate and at times public commitment to male friendship he stated to
have been an ideal of his life. Few writers of his century made such an
eloquent case for what today we call homosocial. The projection of
friendship in Winckelmann’s letters is interesting above all when seen as
writing of the self and its desires and not just as a reflection of what was
‘really going on’ in his life. Letters are necessarily addressed to or about
someone who was absent and Winckelmann was often projecting an
imagined or remembered relationship along with a projection of himself in
that relationship. These relationships might well have been defined in

21
K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality. (London: Duckworth, 1978).
 A Prelude to German Classicism 85

writing rather than through other forms of intercourse that we might call
sexual.

To what extent the notion of friendship was used in this context, perhaps
as coded reference for what we might call homosexuality is a question that
allows of no simple answer. The facts of his sexual identity were
significant although they cannot be seen as a simple cause or explanation
of his unusual dramatization of the values and emotions at play in the
Greek ideal as he saw it.

It is likely that Winckelmann was familiar with the works of the Greek
orator and statesman Aeschines (389-314 BC). Translations of his orations
were available in the libraries of Dresden and Rome (Some had been
translated into Latin by Reiske). Aeschines tells of the Athenian laws
governing male homosexuality especially in the oration Against
Timarchos, which cites a great bulk of Athenian law. It documents the
nuanced view which the Athenians took of relations between older men
and youths. Such relations were considered to be part of the young boys’
education and as long as contacts were based on desire and persuasion
they were not regarded as unnatural. Interestingly, Aeschines describes his
own flings with boys, his fights over them and the poems he addressed to
‘A Beautiful Boy’. The sons of registered citizens could be prosecuted if
they had been receiving money for their sexual services (they could then
be barred from holding public office). Metics and slaves who formed the
great bulk of the Athenian population were free to sell their boys to the
older citizens. The income derived from this form of prostitution was
taxed at one Obol per Drachma - one sixth.

Aeschines reveals that male prostitution in Athens was not an especially

clandestine or disreputable affair. To be a prostitute was hardly a noble
profession for a boy but to hire one was not regarded as shameful. The
nonchalance with which the orator invites his audience to picture a male
brothel implies that such an establishment was a familiar and recognizable
feature of the urban landscape. It conducted its business openly,
unprotected from the knowing gaze of passers by. Both male and female
prostitution was legal in the city of Athens and was taxed equally.
Particular districts of Athens were specially favoured by male prostitutes.
The comic poet Theopompus (c.368 BC) in his play The Mede singles out
the Lycabetus hill, a desolate region as a locale where ‘Lads gratify their
mates’. Seclusion seems to be preferable to the Symposium-situation
where hired ‘entertainers’ both male and female were popular. Prostitution
86 Chapter Two

was not restricted to ghetto situations or to wealthy citizens and it seems to

have been an ordinary feature of daily life in classical Athens. The
preference of both male and female clients was for youths between the age
of puberty and the time of the growth of facial hair. Such youths as are
also represented in Winckelmann’s selected sculptures of the Apollo, the
Laocoön and the Antinous.

Greeks in classical times believed in their literary mythologies as historical

facts and Winckelmann seems to have adopted this classical view of an
imaginary ideal heroic past. Male friendship and nostalgia for a heroic
national past served to reinforce the rule of the powerful landed families of
Greece who claimed to be the descendants of gods and heroes. The search
for such a past would have appealed to both the German traditionalists and
the innovators. Traditionalists would have found the aristocratic status of
the Homeric heroes appealing and the reformers would have seen the
Greek ideal as an expression of the freedom of the citizen. In his private
correspondence Winckelmann could be more specific about his sexuality
and he wrote to his friend Friedrich von Berg (on the ninth June 1762) in
tones of heightened endearment:

My noble friend
Just like a tender mother unconsolably cries for a beloved child which a
violent prince has kidnapped and placed into a battlefield for instant death,
in the same way I lament the separation from you, my sweet friend with
tears that flow from my very soul. An incomprehensible attraction to you,
from the first moment I saw you, made me feel a trace of harmony beyond
human conception. This divine impulse, unknown to most is ill understood
by many. Love, in the fullest degree of its strength must find expression in
many forms:

I thee both as man and woman prize

For a perfect love implies
Love in all capacities. 22

of Theseus and Pirithous, of Achilles and Patroklos.

And this is the foundation of the undying friendships of the ancient world,

22
Abraham Cowley, (1618-1667), Pindarique Odes: an epic based on King
David’s Odes.Biographical Dictionary of English Literature (London: J.M.Dent &
Sons, 1998).
 A Prelude to German Classicism 87

Praise of male friendship as well as protestations of ardent devotion to a

friend are frequent in his letters and he wrote to Berendis (July 25th 1755)
that ‘freedom and friendship’ were his highest personal goals. His
friendships were exclusively with male partners and in his extensive
correspondence there is no mention of a female friend. Winckelmann’s life
in Rome may have been somewhat pathetic, however, the profound love
and admiration he felt for representations of the male torso require some
explanation and one can speculate that this was a profound aspect of his
creative life. The intensity of his emotional response to classical (male)
sculpture can be seen as a triumph of his genius over his neurosis. From
his extensive correspondence with his friends we learn that his life was
dominated by a single longing, inadequately realised, for affection. This
burst out in repeated, always disappointing and in the end perhaps fatal
attachments to men who he loved more intensely than they loved him. If
intimate masculine friendships were forever unattainable to him, or at best
imperfect, they had existed in a pure form in ancient Greece and it was on
ancient Greece that he expended all his imagination, all his hard-won
learning, all his exceptionally developed sensibility. There is also an
indication that ideal companionship and the experience of art were
somehow connected. ‘the friend’ became for Winckelmann an object of
admiration and adoration perhaps similar to the experience of the creative
process. Winckelmann believed that the emotional connection that the
painter or sculptor experiences towards his work is somehow similar to the
loving relationship between friends.

Any description of the age of Winckelmann needs to take into account the
remarkable fact that men of diverging sexual proclivities participated in an
enthusiasm for classical Greece and within it, the idealisation of male
heroic friendship. Almost without exception the male producers of culture
up to the age of Goethe were inhabitants of a virtual, semi-intimate
private/and public space of homosocial and homoerotic encounter,
imagined or otherwise. Individuals reputed to have liaisons with other men
and boys freely mingled with men for whom this was out of the question.
Such a milieu might be termed tolerant and the designation would not be
out of keeping with Enlightenment principles. Nevertheless, an unnecessary
distinction is implied between those who tolerate and those who are
tolerated. It may be more accurate to speak of a network in which the
participants were virtually and potentially linked in friendship according to
a Greek model of varying and blurred dimensions.
88 Chapter Two

Several individuals served as hubs or points of reference for this extensive

homosocial network in Germany. Among them king Friedrich II ( the
Great). In Halberstadt lived one of the great poetic writers of the age:
Johann Wilhelm Ludwig (Father) Gleim, whose active life stretches from
the time of Frederic to the early nineteenth century. Gleim was a great
admirer of the Prussian King as a devotee of male friendship and his
poetry reflects his great admiration for his contemporaries: Wilhelm
Heinse, Ewald von Kleist and Klopstock. As Gleim grew older, he
surrounded himself with young men, his protégés, who remained with him
as his house-guests and who relied on his patronage. Gleim established a
Temple of Friendship, two rooms of his garden house (in Halberstadt) in
which he mounted portraits of his friends, among them a portrait (pastel)
of Frederic II. By the time of his death in 1803 he had accumulated more
than 120 portrait paintings of his friends. Lessing came to Halberstadt on a
visit and inscribed the Wallpaper of the Sanctuary with a Greek
inscription.

Mankind’s desire for friendship as the source of civic order and love was
beautifully expressed by Schiller in his ode to Joy: All mankind will
become as brothers where your gentle wing comes to rest Alle Menschen
werden Brüder wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt - and the telling phrase: One
who has gained the great prize to become the friend of his friend: Wem der
groȕe ‘Wurf gelungen eines Freundes Freund zu sein. Vallentin, in his
biography of Winckelmann devotes a whole chapter to the homo-erotic
and homo-social environment in Germany during the middle of the
eighteenth century. He writes:
The natural and elementary urge for friendship was unknown in the period
of Winckelmann and none of his admirers were aware of the powerful
influence and the determining power of his sexuality. Not even in the
criminal process against his murderer, not even by the accused was this
aspect touched upon. What Winckelmann felt and experienced, the total
human sensual friendship, the homo-erotic heroic ethos did not exist.

Winckelmann’s private affairs and his sexuality are of interest only in as

far as they may have affected his aesthetic sensibilities. In addition, his
reception by the art-critical German readers may have been influenced by
his sexuality. In Winckelmann’s writings one can sometimes meet
incidental facts that make the influence of his eroticism clearer. For
example, he thought the highest beauty in nature’s creations was to be
found in the bodies of presumed hermaphrodites and in Castrati whom he
befriended. Their bodies revealed a flowing line without any of the
 A Prelude to German Classicism 89

particular features characteristic of either sex. In his words, they showed a

noble indefiniteness Unbezeichnung. But why he thought it ‘noble’ is not
explained. Such aesthetic qualities he also found in the Hellenistic
sculptures that he selected for historical essays. For instance, Winckelmann
describes the Medici Bacchus as sensual, supremely natural, an androgyne,
a creature eternally poised between sleep and consciousness, between
dream and reality, childhood and adulthood, between femaleness and
maleness. The problem of gender-identity preoccupied Winckelmann in
his early years in Rome. In his Florentine manuscript he notes:
Baal is sometimes called a God and sometimes a Goddess, and on the
other hand Astarte is sometimes called a Goddess and sometimes a God.
The reason for this variety is that the Hebrews did not recognise the sexual
difference in their gods – the Venus whom the Babylonians called Mylitia
was hermaphrodite and was therefore dressed as a man or a woman.

Winckelmann was not familiar with the religions of the Near East; Baal
had his female consort Baalat and the Babylonian Venus was most likely
Ishtar, Astarte Astaroth of the Bible. Winckelmann writes in heightened
terms about the statue of a hermaphrodite:
The image of a pubescent boy who crosses the boundary of the springtime
of life when the erotic impulses begin to arise like the tender point of a
budding flower. He seems as if he were between sleep and awakening he
remembers the sweet images that he has been dreaming about. He still
collects his thoughts as if he could make them reality. His features are full
of erotic sweetness and yet his cheereful soul is not yet shown in the face.

This idea is reminiscent of the philosophy of the mean, of the Delphic

notion of equilibrium and the avoidance of extremes but it is not clear why
Winckelmann thought that it showed or contained sweet innocence and
nobility. Winckelmann believed that Greek sculptors succeeded in creating
an ideal form of indeterminate gender through their use of eunuchs as
models. Winckelmann himself writes:
Beauty is nothing else than the mean between two extremes. As the middle
road is in everything the best, it is also the most beautiful and to know the
mean one has to know also the extremes.

For Winckelmann the classical Greek sculpture of the hermaphrodite

becomes an object for contemplation, gaining life from the viewer’s
attempts to resolve the tension of the image’s indeterminacy.
This form [Hermaphrodites] is distinct from the male form and also from
female figures. It is the mean between the two. The ancient artists chose
90 Chapter Two

this form to express the mixture of the two genders to express the greatest
beauty, an image of the ideal.

Clearly the relationship between viewer and statue in Winckelmann’s

writings is an emotional or sensual relationship. What can be more
seductive than Winckelmann’s aesthetic androgyne, the hermaphrodite and
its many descendants? The androgyne is an imaginary construction with
no corollary in real life, thus, intangible in life, but seemingly tangible in
the tantalizing contours of a marble statue, it is a notion without reference
to reality. Winckelmann attempts to grasp the elusive bisexuality of the
hard stone representing soft flesh, by using water metaphors, fluid and
mutable. There are parallels in classical literature: ‘panta rhei’ everything
is in motion.

Winckelmann’s aesthetic depends critically on the subjectivity of the

viewer or reader of his descriptive text, a person who engages with the
notion of the fluidity of the contours and who allows himself to be seduced
by the beauty of the text and of the images it describes. Close to the
imaginary androgyne is the idea of the castrate as a model of undetermined
sexuality. Winckelmann wrote in the Geschichte:
Attention by the Greek artists was directed to the most beatiful parts of the
most beautiful people. It waas not restricted to the male or the female
youth. Their attetion was also directed at the beauty of castrates, boys of
great beaty were chosen. These ambiguous beauties where the mascullinity
has been removed by the removal of the scrotum created softer and
fleshier rounded limbs.

The eunuch suffers from a double loss; he has neither breasts nor genitals,
but he is a crossing of the male and female form: the hard determinate
contours of the male body are softened and filled; his ‘youth’ is preserved.
There is a memorable passage in Winckelmann’s Abhandlung von der
Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst (where he describes
the experience of beauty:
‚The true sense of beauty is similar to a liquid plaster which has been
poured over the head of the Apollo and which touches him in every part.’

According to Winckelmann, the sculpture arouses in the viewer intense

emotions that cause viewer and statue to become locked in an intimate
ccontact. The viewer seems to desire petrification in order to achieve a
perfect union or fusion with the statue. In due course the plaster will
 A Prelude to German Classicism 91

harden, embracing and encasing the statue. Admirer and admired become
one like Hermaphroditus and his beloved.

There is a further aspect of Winckelmann’s emotional response to male

nudity. This is the revolutionary aspect of the experience of the human
body as an object of enjoyment. The generally accepted Christian view of
mankind had included (for many hundreds of years) the dichotomy
between the spirit and the flesh. The spirit in life and after life was the
essence of being and the God-given breath of life. The body, by contrast
was the harbinger of desire, of evil, the seat of satanic impulses and of
pain. Into this environment came the enlightened views of Voltaire, of
Diderot and the Encyclopaedists who accepted the human body as equally
God-given, as a source of joy and celebration. Winckelmann adopted this
enlightened view in a new form and by taking his historical sources from
pre-Christian times he was able to protectt his aesthetic notions aganst the
religious constraints of his time.

The general acceptance in Germany of Winckelmann’s aesthetics and the

wide distribution of the Geschichte, was perhaps influenced by the quality
of the vignettes. The drawings and etchings of naked males that he
included in his text. They were pre-christian, thus there could be no
objection to their publication. Moreover in Italy and particularly in Rome
there was a more balanced view of human sexuality among the clerics of
the higher levels of the Papal hierarchy. Acceptance of Winckelmann’s
eroticism is also shown by Herder who compares Winckelmann’s rapture
over the Apollo Belvedere to Petrarch gazing into the eyes of his beloved
Laura, thereby mapping heterosexual and homosexual captivation and
putting them on a par with each other.

Wilhelm Heinse, in the generation following Winckelmann, wrote about

the inadequacies of representational art except for the depiction of
nakedness that he called the ‘flower of perfection’. Heinse expands
Winckelmann’s eulogies about the beauty of the naked male. He closes his
monologue with a short reference to an imagined companion who seems to
need convincing that beauty is beautiful; Heinse’s opponent maintains that
all representational art is only a deception and an imitation of nature,
which is the one God-given model of beauty.

For Winckelmann, the classical Greek statue of the hermaphrodite became

a cult object, gaining life from the viewer’s unresolvable struggle to solve
the statue’s indeterminacy. He thought that the ambivalence of the
92 Chapter Two

androgyne might liberate us as fully integrated human beings. Schiller

described the androgyne as ‘der mittlere Zustand’ in his essay About the
aesthetic education of mankind.Über die ästhetische Erziehung des
Menschen.

Thus the androgynous ideal of beauty is set apart from the natural world; it
becomes the cipher for a mystical union of the sexes, a composite being in
whom the genitalia of both sexes are present, corresponding to
Winckelmann’s seamlessly blended aesthetic ideal. By the year 1760, five
years after his arrival in Rome, Winckelmann had seen an enormous
amount of antique sculpture in the collections of his patrons and relatively
fewer examples of ancient paintings from Herculaneum, paintings that he
thought not to have been of the same high standard as the statues and the
reliefs. It is therefore not surprising that he could hardly contain his
excitement when he was fortunate enough to be privy to a clandestine
showing of an antique fresco thought to have been illegally removed in
pieces from an unknown place and smuggled into Rome. (Illustration 11)
He confides this event in a letter to his Danish friend Hans Wiedewelt, a
sculptor with whom he had lived and travelled in Italy in 1757.

My Friend!

I will give you news that apart from myself and four others nobody
knows. Near Rome was found a painting (but I do not know the exact
place) which is the most beautiful painting that has ever been brought to
light from antiquity. It shows Jupiter in life-size kissing Ganimede with an
expression and an execution that can not be found n any other painting of
the period. It is al Fresco, because if it were Tempera as most of the ones at
Portici are, it would not have been preserved. Here the many pieces have
been put together secretly, but it had been badly put together by someone
who did not understand it and it has been broken up again.
 A Prelude to German Classicism 93

Fresco attributed to Anton Raphael Mengs. Reproduced by courtesy of the

University Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Winckelmann’s joy at this discovery is overwhelming; he has found at last

an artwork that could match the Laocoön, even as it duplicated to some
extent the circumstances of its discovery. The scene represented is a rare
visual motif of the Ganymede story, Jupiter actually kissing the boy.
Perhaps no other motif would have appealed so strongly to Winckelmann’s
interest and desire. Six days later, Winckelmann reported the same news to
94 Chapter Two

his friend and sometimes patron, the Baron von Stosch, a person to whom
he was accustomed to confide personal matters. His description of the
painting is again marked by his enthusiasm.

When Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst first appeared there was a

description of the Ganymede painting in the section entitled Von der
Malerey der alten Griechen.
The darling of Jupiter is without dooubt one of the most beautiful figurres
that have been preserved from antiquity and there is no other painting that
can be compared to the beauty of the faces. There is ao much sexual desire
there that his whole life seems to be centred in the kiss.

The scandal of the Ganymede fresco is, of course, that it is a forgery.

Winckelmann was duped either by his friend Anton Raphael Mengs, who,
on his deathbed, is said to have confessed to having forged the Jupiter and
Ganymede, urgently requesting that his cheat upon antiquity be made
public. However, it has recently been argued cogently that it was a forgery
by Giovanni Casanova, brother of the famous Venitian adventurer who did
execute at least two other forgeries with the express purpose of
Winckelmann’s humiliation.

Winckelmann never acknowledged that the Ganymede was fake, though

he was outraged by Casanova’s prank and he sought to have all mention of
the forgery that had fooled him expunged from the second edition of the
Geschichte. The Ganymede concentrates a great many of the pertinent
issues of Winckelmann’s aesthetics. This is not surprising, since whoever
executed the forgery was an excellent reader of Winckelmann both of his
character and of his work.

The forgery was so good, that it produced the perfect embodiment of his
aesthetics in Winckelmann’s response. Among the issues raised are, first
the question of the integrity of his conception of antiquity. If he was so
easily fooled by this painting, is not his entire vision of antiquity seriously
compromised? It seems as if the Ganymede were the most accurate
representation of Winckelmann’s counterfeit antiquity. The second
concern was the relation between aesthetics and the expression of homo-
erotic desire. If Winckelmann was so easily deceived, can his finely
worked essays and judgements be considered generally valid? Or were
they just expressions of his homo-erotic response to masculinity?
 A Prelude to German Classicism 95

The Ganymede fresco stands at the point where the biographical, the
historical and the aesthetic meet. Are we to follow Winckelmann’s
adoration of the erotic in ancient art, or should we take a wider, less
personal view when we enquire into aesthetic values in the art of the pre-
Christian world? The following chapter will further explore the impact of
the classical ideal on Winckelmann and his contemporaries. Five examples
are presented to explore the place of Winckelmann’s work in the
development of German art-critical literature of the late eighteenth century
and of its echoes in more recent times.
 CHAPTER THREE

NARRATIVES ON SCULPTURE:
FIVE CASE-STUDIES

It is the aim of the following five case studies to identify the place of
Winckelmann’s eloquent aesthetic historicism in the art-critical milieu of
his time and to show the ways in which his views were echoed or criticised
by his immediate successors. How far can we accept his unstinting praise
for large Hellenistic sculpture and how do we tend to see these objects
today? As already indicated Winckelmann’s art-historical insights were
unreliable, but his prose style and his emphasis on a subjective response to
art influenced the development of neo-classical literature in Germany.

It was not uncommon, even before Winckelmann, to see the highest and
purest manifestation of the antique ideal as Greek rather than Roman. But
this distinction was only rarely seen as a historical one. ‘Greek art’ was not
considered to have been created earlier in date than Roman art. Sculptures
were thought of as Greek if they were ideal representations of
mythological figures, distinguished by their nudity, by idealised drapery or
by personal attributes. Greekness was, above all, a generic quality and at
times the mythological figures were identifiable by their attributes, by
dress or posture. According to Winckelmann, modern societies have
suppressed natural instincts and thus have become alienated from the true
sources of art and life. For one seeking aesthetic inspiration, he argued
there could be no more direct route than through the vision of antiquity
itself:

It is clear that the beauty of Greek sculpture is more easily discovered than
the beauty of natural forms. The study of nature would be a longer and
more arduous path to the knowledge of perfect beauty than the study of
antique sculpture.

Already in his first published work, Winckelmann proposed that the study
of ideal beauty can best be pursued not by studying nature but by the study
of late Hellenistic sculpture. The focus of Winckelmann’s critical
98 Chapter Three

judgement on large sculptures was perhaps due to their better preservation

and the fact that so many of the pieces he describes were easily accessible
in Rome where they could be visited and admired. Of the few remaining
examples of Roman painting he says little, perhaps because the large
number of examples of wall paintings from Roman Pompeii had not yet
been uncovered and the great number of painted ceramics in private and
public collections (called Etruscan at the time) were not regarded by
Winckelmann as works of art.

Winckelmann’s discussion of Greek archaic sculpture provides an intriguing

instance of his complex conception of style. His ideas touch on the
relationship between the form of a representation and the nature of its
meaning and of its allegorical function. He argued that the clear and
emphatic, perhaps rather crude articulation of constituent parts in the
archaic style was a necessary prerequisite to the flowing, beautiful
merging of one part into the other in the art of the subsequent ‘heroic’
period.

Was it, perhaps, a form of predestination, of a phase of art that prepared

the ground for the emergence of the truly great next phase? This seems a
facile argument; looking back at classical times, one can easily project the
notion of progress into any human activity one chooses. Here Winckelmann
was, perhaps drawing on the theory common in German speculation on the
early history of language, according to which the true knowledge of things
required in the first instance a sharply defined or emphatic, even
disconnected mode of verbal expression. The idea that art evolved from
the simple to the complex is today no longer accepted as we have become
aware of the great diversity and intricacy of so-called primitive art.
Perhaps there was, in the Germany of his time, a traditional attitude to
human progress, the notion that primitive societies were simple and
ignorant, although they were the necessary foundation for the achievement
of complex modernity. The significance of the myths, the stories that the
sculptures illustrate was of little importance in Winckelmann’s analysis,
compared to the question of their aesthetic significance. He does not ask
why the sculptors selected the terrible moments when the victims of the
anger of the gods were facing imminent death. Nor did he investigate the
place of display and the purpose of the Greek originals –their ‘Greekness’
assured them a display in museums.

The examples Winckelmann chose to support his theory of the evolution

of Greek art were historically Roman rather than Greek. They were
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 99

depicting ritualised violence, a feature of Roman and medieval art but not
of classical Greece. Winckelmann seems to have assumed their Greekness
purely on the basis of his passionate response to this art form. He never
realised that these objects tell us more about Roman taste than about the
Greeks, about the preoccupation of the Roman public with heroic sacrifice
and the moment of imminent death. The Roman theatre had evolved from
the Greek prototype to present the audience with bloody combat rather
than with human dilemmas. The sculptures themselves were originally
dispersed widely among the buildings of the Roman cities. Temples and
theatres, forums and villas were decorated with freestanding sculpture as
well as reliefs.

Rachel Kousser describes the stage of Greek artistic development of the

fifth century BC as a foreshadowing of the great things to come an
Ahnungswelt. Winckelmann regarded this early classical period as a search
for realism Suche nach Realismus, without defining what he meant by the
word. He ends with the statement that the Greek sculptors expressed the
essence of being die Essenz des Daseins. But this ‘essence‘ seems to have
consisted mainly in depicting suffering meted out by jealous deities. The
intensity of his feelings becomes clear from his text and with remarkable
intensity he proclaimed the general validity of his experience as a guide
for others, whose eyes might be opened by his text. The five examples of
Winckelmann’s narratives that follow demonstrate his fervour for large
Hellenistic sculptures that were on display at the Vatican.

3.1 The Apollo Belvedere

Of all Winckelmann’s essays on classical sculpture, the five existing texts
dealing with the Apollo Belvedere are more a series of hymns than
descriptions. He avoids dry descriptive text and textual precision and
instead he uses poetic language to express his overwhelming emotional
response to the sight of the sculpture.

In his essay: Foundations of the aesthetic principles Festigung der

aesthetischen Grundbegriffe he gives a description of the Apollo of
Belvedere:
I am undertaking the description of an image which lies at the summit of
all concepts of human beauty; an image far removed from sensuality. A
heavenly poet from the time of human perfection would be able to
describe such an image from the wealth of a thousand Greek beauties in
nature and in art. From all the heavenly figures that had been designed to
100 Chapter Three

the highest ideal and been executed with the greatest skill this one alone
has been preserved.

Engraving by Claude Randon (1674-1704) published in Racolta di statue antiche e

moderne by Domenico Rossi and Paolo Alessandro Mattei. Roma: 1704, pl.2.

The Apollo is, according to him, a figure from the realm of extra-corporeal
beauty; the sight of the marble lifting us to heavenly regions of ecstasy.
‘Where remained’ asks his biographer Carl Justi ‘the critical artistic focus
and where the objective evaluation of the image?’ However, it is
Winckelmann’s contribution to the development of German literature that
made his descriptive essays of importance and a number of quotations will
show how eloquently he was able to express his emotional response to the
visual experience of classical beauty.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 101

In his letter to Öser he explained:

The description of the Apollo will cause me as much effort as would
writing a heroic poem. The description of the Apollo demands the highest
style, an elevation above all that is human.The effect of the sight of the
sculpture is indescribable.1

He sees his mission in terms of literary rather than historical or

archaeological objectives. The description of the Apollo was for
Winckelmann a true labour of love. He prepared five different versions of
his description of the Apollo. All that the five attempts can tell us about
the statue is Winckelmann’s emotional response to the sight of it. His
descriptions of the posture, face and expression are in reality only aspects
of his extreme response. The act of putting his ecstatic feelings into words
perhaps engendered the five texts.2

The actual posture of the Apollo is assumed to be the instant after he had
loosened the arrow that killed the dragon Python; but that seems of little
interest to Winckelmann who sees the figure as theophany, as the descent
to earth of the Deity:
From my own experience when I first saw this work, my soul which was
naturally gifted with the ability to experience beauty felt an emotion that
can be described as delighting in the experience of beauty that exceeds
nature. With devotion my breast semed to swell and expand, I took up an
elevated posture in order to observe with dignity. Unexpectedly I saw
myself transported in spirit to Delos and to the Lykian meadows, places
that Apollo had honoured with his presence and I believed to see the most
beautiful of the Gods with his bow and arrows, the one the Muses desired
to embrace and who made the other Gods tremble when he rode among
them as they rose from their seats.

The rapturous phrases do not tell us why the figure is ascribed to Apollo.
His hands and forearms are missing, the quiver he carries on his shoulder
is a modern addition. He is shown naked but his shirt (Chiton) is draped
over his left arm as if he had the intention to carry it with him as he strides
forward.

Winckelmann continues:

1
Rehm , p.2 l etter to Oeser, 20th March 1756.
2
The very act of writing about his emotional states.might have been cathartic,
recalling his ecstasies could have been gratifying.
102 Chapter Three

The irresistible attraction of delightful tenderness plays with the proud

structure of his limbs [. . . ] Just like the summit of the highest mountain
hides in shadow the fertile valleys of Thessaly, where the ashes forever
became the play of the breezes, thus serenly and untroubled by emotions
rises his brow.

The idea that the beauty of youth envelops the figure with enchanted
tenderness cannot be regarded as serious art criticism and the ‘proud
structure of his limbs’ is difficult to detect today. Winckelmann then tells
us:
The pride in the face of the Apollo is expressed mainly in the chin and the
lower lip: the anger in the nostrils and disdain in the opening of his mouth;
in the remaining parts of his celestial head live the Graces and his beauty
remains pure and unadulterated like the sun whose image he represents.

Der Stolz in dem Gesicht des Apollo äuȕert sich vornehmlich in dem Kinn
und der Unterlefze: der Zorn in den Nüstern seiner Nase und die
Verachtung in der Öffnung seines Mundes; auf den übrigen Teilen dieses
göttlichen Hauptes wohnen die Grazien und die Schönheit bleibt bei der
Empfindung unvermischt und rein wie die Sonne, deren Bild er ist.

He sees pride and anger in the face of the statue, contempt of an adversary
unworthy of his anger. Much of this discourse is quite unreasonable and
what linguists call ‘phatic’, meaning communication that is about
communication itself only expressing Winckelmann’s emotional state. He
tells us in effect little about the Apollo and much about himself. His ability
to express in words the feeling of euphoria engendered by the sight of
classical art was, however, his most valuable contribution to the
development of German literary language. In the second section of his
Geschichte he writes:
The highest concept of ideal masculine youth is particularly expressed in
the Apollo where the strength of adult years is joined by the forms of the
spring of youth. These forms of youthful unity are not just those of a
youth, a darling reared in cool shadow and who, according to Ibycus had
been raised on a bed of roses but of a youth born to nobility and to great
deeds; hence Apollo was the most beautiful of the Gods.

His text tells us little about the sculpture’s origin or position in the history
of art but much about his feelings towards it. Winckelmann’s stylistic
excesses may have been due to, his longing to recapture the rapture that
might have been experienced by the creators of this art. Was Winckelmann
really, Pygmalion-like ‘in love’ with the statue? Or was he rather in love
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 103

with describing it? In the first text he explains that the physical presence of
the statue expressed the intention of the sculptor (Seine Absicht sichtbar zu
machen) and he continues in his letter to Öser:
The Apollo seems a spiritual being that has been formed out of its own
material and not any solid matter - a form created purely in the intellect
and that had not been influenced by solid matter.

Does he really see the statue, over two metres tall and made of local
marble as immaterial? Not created of solid rock? A purely spiritual
presence? There was a tendency in classical literature, of the sculptor
falling in love with his work. And Winckelmann, dreaming of a spiritual
identity with the sculptor, finds himself in a hightened state of awareness,
indistinguishable from homo-erotic love, in the presence of an artificial
human such as the Apollo. In his description of 1764 Winckelmann writes:
The statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art among the works of
antiquity that have escaped destruction. The artist has built this work
entirely on his ideal and he has taken only just enough material as
necessary to make his intention visible.

According to Winckelmann, Apollo has a human form, but one which is

refined to remove all evidence of earthly provenance. The effect of the
statue, he thought, is to prevent us from reflecting upon human inadequacy
menschliche Dürftigkeit and to draw us into the realm of abstract ideas das
Reich unkörperlicher Ideen. In order to do justice to the work we have to
become creators Schöpfer ourselves. Observers must become creators and
the observer, although experiencing the statue through his senses, makes
contact with the super-sensual realm of ideas. Winckelmann makes this a
little clearer in his letter to Bianconi where he sees the perfect beauty of
the work as due to the inspration of the Deity rather than human effort:
La perfezzione essendo incompatibile coll’umanità e solo en Dio e
dall’uomo non potendo essere realmente concepito che quello che cade
sotto i sensi perciò il Creatore sapientissimo ha in prontato nell’uomo una
idea visible della perfezzione e questa è quello che chiamiamo Bellezza.

The extreme response of Winckelmann is somehow related to the noble

soul that he detects in the state of aesthetic calm of the sculpture.
The calmer the posture of the body the more it is able to reflect the true
character of the soul and postures that diverge too much from the state of
calm show the soul not in a state that is truly its own but in a forced and
artifivcial state. Clearer and more typical will the soul appear in a state of
104 Chapter Three

emotional stress but great and nobler will it be in the state of unity and
calm.

Je ruhiger der Stand des Körpers ist, desto geschickter ist er, den wahren
Charakter der Seele zu schildern: in allen Stellungen, die von dem Stande
der Ruhe zu sehr abweichen, befindet sich die Seele nicht in dem Zustande,
der ihr der eigentlichste ist, sondern in einem gewaltsamen und
erzwungenem Zustande. Kenntlicher und bezeichnender wird die Seele in
heftigen Leidenschaften; groȕ aber und edel ist sie in dem Stande der
Einheit, in dem Stande der Ruhe.

The posture of the Apollo is not static; it is the traditional one of the
forward striding legs that emanate from a stable torso (Contraposto).
Brunilde Ridgway writes:
The distinctive feature of the Belvedere Apollo, whatever its actual date –
I believe it to be Roman – is a split movement: the god moves to his right
while looking and gesturing to the left in diagonal movement. The
hairstyle of the Apollo has a distinctive bow-knot coiffure that does not
occur on any of the Pergamene sculptures, despite the fact that it was used
extensively in the late fourth century. 3

One can only wonder why Winckelmann thought he saw in the figure an
example of static calm. What he saw tells us less about the aesthetics of
classical sculpture but more about the state of exultation he experienced
that may be compared to the experience of music, of the heightened state
of being, of a moment of ecstasy. The Florentine Manuscript gives a
number of pages in which Winckelmann describes in some detail the parts
of the figure and their interaction. He writes about the asymmetric
position of the neck above the chest.

The statue, presumed to be of Apollo, today stands in the Vatican

Museum, Cortile del Belvedere. It is almost certainly a Roman work of the
time of the emperor Hadrian, perhaps a copy of a Greek model of the
fourth century BC. The suggestion that the originator was Leochares has
never been substantiated. The evaluation of the statue was much reduced
when Raphael Mengs demonstrated that the statue was of Carrara marble
and thus at best a local Roman copy. 4

3
Brunilde Sismmondo Ridgway. 2000. Hellenistic Sculpture II, (Madison WI:
University of Wisconsin Press) p.133
4
(Vatican Inv.1015); it is 2,24 m tall. It was displayed in the palace of Giuliano
Della Rovere in 1471 and was later moved to the church of S. Pietro in Vinculi.
When Giulliano became pope in 1503 as Julius II it was moved to the present
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 105

Winckelmann did not realize that the sculptor was removing material in
stages, leaving the protruding parts untouched until the deeper portions
were formed. Winckelmann proposes that the Apollo was a prototype for
the depiction of other gods, particularly Mercurius (Hermes) and Mars
(Ares). Perhaps he was not really responding directly to the sculpture, but
he loved describing it responding emotionally to his own rhetoric initiated
by his erotic response to the figure of the naked young male. Winckelmann’s
idea that the statue of the Apollo was used as a prototype for later
sculptures of the martial gods was probably based on his recognition that
there was, in Greco-Roman art, a general style of the male nude with only
minor variations, such as beard, posture and equipment.

The problem of the representation of invisible deities had occupied some

stoic philosophers of late antiquity. For instance Chrysippus, of the late
third century BC, said that it was childish to represent the gods in human
form and at later periods some teachers of rhetoric in Rome declared: since
the gods were invisible they could not be properly represented in visual
form. This question figures explicitly in the writings of Dio of Prusa
whom his contemporaries called Chrysostomus (Golden Mouth). Among
his surviving eighty speeches, the twelfth oration deals with sculpture and
painting. He writes in praise of the statue of Zeus by Phidias and then he
lets an imaginary plaintiff ask the sculptor: ‘Was the shape of the statue
appropriate to a god and worthy of the divine nature?) He then asks
whether the shape makes visible the nature of the god. Dio replies: Men’s
images of the gods are derived from three sources: from an innate picture
dwelling in the soul and from the images derived from the poets. The third
source is the idea in the mind of the artist. Dio makes Phidias say: ‘let us
name a fourth, derived from the plastic arts and from the work of skilled
craftsmen. ‘But what’, Dio then asks, ‘is the nature of this powerful
image? Where did the artist take it from? It is divine inspiration that
shapes the image in the artist’s mind. [Surely this is Winckelmann’s
‘Urbild’]. Winckelmann is not the first and by no means the last admirer
of the sculpture of Apollo. G.B.Marino wrote in 1913 a fulsome poem
praising the Apollo as the marble archer from Delos:

Quant’ è bello e vezzoso

questo marmoreo arcier, nume di Delo,
tanto fiero e sdegnoso,

position. (after major restoration and addition of two forearms and a quiver by G.
Montorsoli).
106 Chapter Three

Marino sees the figure not so much as a model, a prototype for later
sculptors but as a picture of disdain, of anger and vengeance. Perhaps the
sculptor did not intend to show anything like God-like calm, but only the
arrogance of the victorious youth. There is a more general problem here,
addressed by Hübener about the God-likeness of human beauty. Die
Aseität des gottmenschlich-schönen Individuums. He talks of the self-
sufficiency of the image, not being dependent on or related directly to
nature and the natural world but to a world created and sustained by the
deity in the mind of the artist. This mirrors Winckelmann’s thoughts and
Hübener continues by defining God-likeness Aseität as the self-
createdness Aussich-selbst-heraus–sein of the deity, of the uncreated
creator who is self-sufficient and who has separated himself from the
world of causality; the connection with the sensory world is broken.
Hübener writes:5
The Apollo is purified from disturbing emotional stress, freed from the
pinching of what Winckelmann described as human inadequacy.

Purifiziert von beunruhigenden Affektpotenzialen, befreit von den Zwengen

dessen was Winckelmann als menschliche Notdurft bezeichnet.

A critical voice was raised one generation after Winckelmann by Karl

Philipp Moritz who wrote penetratingly on Winckelmann’s Apollo text.
He finds that Winckelmann’s description of detail detracts from the
impression of the whole:

Winckelmann’s description of the Apollo Belvedere tears apart the whole

impression of the work of art. It is more than just a poetic description of
the Apollo it has damaged the reputation of this work more than it has
improved it because it has diverted the attention from the whole of the
work to the detail. It makes the descriptions of Winckelmann a collection
of fragments when he writes that the forehead is like Jupiter’s and his eyes
are like those of Juno etc. This detracts from the impression of the whole.6

To the modern eye, the figure of the Apollo Belvedere seems rather
unbalanced.] His right leg Standbein had to be strengthened by leaning
against a tree trunk and his left, the Spielbein seems considerably longer
than the other. He is not, as Winckelmann tells us, in a static pose stille but

5
Thomas Hübener, 2008. Winckelmanns Schönheitsideal (Hannover: Wehrhahnverlag)
p.28ff
6
Karl Philipp Moritz (n.d.) Werke (ed) Horst Günther (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel
Verlag 1993)
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 107

he is in motion, striding forward. His hips are in horizontal equilibrium in

spite of the forward moving legs. Where the thighs meet the trunk there is
a typical diagonal swelling, anatomically probably incorrect but quite
common in Greek sculpture of the fourth century BC. His left arm, which
is a modern restoration, might have held the bow, and is supported and
connected to the body by a drape, the fine folds of which betray the
Roman rather than Greek origin. The cloth is shaped like a toga rather than
a chiton. Neck and head are moved far to the right, giving great
prominence to the left shoulder and pectoral region. The facial expression
seems stern or haughty rather than benevolent or noble. There is a strange
ambiguity about the beardless face above the adult body. Is Apollo
adolescent or has he shaved?7 Apollo seems often bearless and a mosaic
floor from Roman timres represents of Daphne turning into a tree as she is
fleeing from a beardless Apollo.

It is unclear how Winckelmann would have imagined that a bow could

have been attached to the left hand unsupported by a connection to the
base. The idea of a marble bow would have been absurd. The bow might
have been of cast bronze somehow attached to the hand or perhaps there
had been a wooden replica. The quiver that protrudes above his shoulder
(seen in the engraving) was an addition by the restorer Montesori. In
Homeric poetry, Apollo supported the Trojan side against the Greeks,
hence, if the statue really represented Apollo, it would have been
significant and attractive to Roman religious sensibilities rather than
Greek.

If the sculpture had been a copy of a lost Greek prototype, there would
probably have been some reference in literature to the original or perhaps
to other instances of the subject in the large repertoire of the Greek
sculptors and vase painters. The question of the religious significance of
the statue was not addressed by Winckelmann, nor did he refer to the
possible place where the statue might have stood if it had ever been in
Greece. The God-like beauty that Winckelmann saw was unrelated to the
polytheism of classical Greece; for Winckelmann it was an image of a
monotheistic, perhaps even Christian Deity, a vision he projected into the
classical past.

7
Roman fashion would make shaving a normal practice among upper class men,
but it would certainly not have been common practice for Greek men in classical
times.
108 Chapter Three

The story of Apollo killing the snake with an arrow is reported by Ovid
[43 BC-12 AD (Metam. bk 1, lines 425 ff)] but there is no classical Greek
source for the tale. Neither Homer nor Hesiod nor Apollodorus mention
the episode. If the statue or its Greek prototype had ever been in Greece,
the hair-style would suggest that it might have depicted an Olympic victor
in the naked running race rather than Apollo.

There is an anatomical difficulty in the stance of the Apollo: the posture is

relaxed and calm but the chest and stomach muscles are shown in high
tension. It is the same tension that is also shown in the Laocoön figure
struggling agains the serpents and in many other examples of late
Hellenistic male sculpture. [e.g. the Belvedere Torso, the Barberina Faun,
the Capitoline Dying Gaul and some of the figures of giants at the Zeus
temple at Pergamum. Hübener writes eloquently on the subject the Apollo
and Winckelmann’s ‘beautiful style’:
If we look at Winckelmann’s angle of view regarding the Apollo
Belvedere we find a number of human aspects cumulatively joined so that
of their contemporaneous presence a God-like personality can be deduced.
This figure seems to contain the whole of the multi-faceted macrocosm of
Winckkelmann’s aesthetic philosophy.8

Hübener is trying to combine the opposites; the figure is both human and
superhuman at the same time. He cannot seriously believe that the Apollo
sculpture is of celestial difference (von theomorpher Unterschiedenheit)
when it is in reality a massive piece of stone carved in the shape of a youth
in traditional Hellenistic posture.

The texts of Winckelmann are excessive and Hübener’s expansive prose is

somewhat misdirected, since in the ‘high style’ Winckelmann also finds
beauty, and in the ‘beautiful style’ he finds grandure. To the modern eye
the criteria he selected to define the difference between the two styles are
not significant. It is true that in late Hellenistic times the ideal masculine
body is seen as rounder, perhaps more delicate or effeminate; however, it
is a matter of degree rather than evidence of stylistic change.
Winckelmann’s and Hübener’s notion of the two styles does not seem to
apply to representations of the female figure – Aphrodite is often shown
naked in late Hellenistic and Roman sculpture; in mainland Greece,
goddesses are usually clothed, rarely naked. (However, Heterae are shown
naked, for instance the flute player of the Ludovisi throne).

8
Hübener 2008as above.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 109

Rachel Kousser writes on the question of Roman ideal sculpture:

The [Hellenistic types] tended to have their apogee in the Hadrianic/
Antonine-period, and this result seems to reflect the circumstances of the
era; it was the time of the empire’s greatest wealth, extent and stability,
and (not coincidentally) of its most prolific artistic production. The most
familiar examples of Roman ideal sculpture – the Apollo Belvedere, the
Esquiline Dioscobolus and so on – date to this period; they and masses of
their less famous equivalents populated the grandiose public spaces of the
imperial metropolis and of aspiring cities throughout the empire.9

Apollo, in the Iliad, was the protector of Troy and there is a duel between
Ajax, the Greek champion and Hector, the Trojan hero. (Iliad, VII. 268 ff)
Ajax throws a stone at Hector who falls to the ground. Apollo intervenes
and quickly gets the Trojan on his feet again. To the Roman nobility, the
Iliad was of biblical importance and Apollo would have been seen as
protector of Rome as well as of Troy. Like the unfortunate Laocoön,
Apollo was supporting the side of Troy like Aeneas, the founder of Rome
and thus a suitable subject for display in Rome.

Apollo, the eternal beardless kouros had the most prominent male
relationships of all the Greek gods. That might be expected from a god
who was god of the ‘palaestra’, the athletic gathering place for youth who
competed in the nude. Many of Apollo's male lovers suffer tragic deaths
resulting from accidents. ‘Hyacinthus’, for instance, was one of his male
lovers: a Spartan prince, beautiful and athletic. The pair were practising
throwing the discus, when a discus thrown by Apollo was blown off
course by the jealous Zephyrus and struck Hyacinthus in the head, killing
him instantly. Apollo is said to have been filled with grief and out of
Hyacinthus' blood Apollo created a flower named after him as a memorial
(the hyacinth). (The bulb of the flower was believed to have delayed the
puberty of Hyacinthus.) The link between the Apollo figure and the claim
of absolute power by the French aristocracy was explored by Renate
Reschke who wrote:
Apollo as he God of light and as a figure of dominance was symbolic of
the man who declared he was the state. His person was the focus of all
power and the magnificence of the world. In such a position the ancient
god made his final move. He became the ideal personification of the ruler

9
Rachel Meredith Kousser.2008. Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
110 Chapter Three

in Versailles and through him the univeral image of the basileus, the
absolute ruler; a model for all the despotic rulers of Europe.10

To recapitulate: the ‘Apollo’, if we assume that the figure is that of the

god, appears today neither noble nor proud. He seems to be immensly self
confidently saying: ‘Look at me!’ like an actor on the stage or perhaps like
an orator striking an attitude before he begins to speak. The static calm
that Winckelmann admired cannot easily be detected today. The sculpture
shows an idealised form of masculinity, a figure of slender youth, without
facial hair but with a muscular adult body. His elegant legs are striding
forward but his hips are shown in horizontal equilibrium. Thus the Apollo
figure is truly super-human, a figure of celestial rather than physical
humanity. It is difficult today to fully comprehend the feelings of euphoria
that caused Winckelmann to write the five passionate acclamations of the
figure of the Apollo. This enthusiasm is only explicable as part of his very
personal emotional, perhaps sexual experience that some of his readers
have found appealing.

3.2 The Niobe Group

Winckelmann gives a telling heading to his third chapter of the
Geschichte: Of the growth and fall of Greek art wherein four periods can
be detected:
Von dem Wachstume und dem Falle der griechischen Kunst, in welcher
vier Zeiten und vier Stile können gesetzt werden.

He then continues to stress the ‘High Style’ of the Niobe group, which
distinguishes it from sculptures of the ‘beautiful style’ which he dates to
the following period. He sees simplicity Einfalt and elegance Grazie in the
Niobe, but this beauty, he tells us is not experienced by the senses but is
created in the mind of the sensitive beholder - of the person who can
appreciate the design Zeichnung and the outlines Umrisse of the group. He
writes:
The principal, and one can say the only work in Rome of this period of the
High Style as far as I can see it are the Niobe and her daughters in the
Villa Medici. This group is a worthy representative of the great artists of
the time and our judgement can be confirmed by the presence of the head

10
Renate Reschke. 2009.Die Erfindung eines Gottes aus dem Geist der
Aufklärung: Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Apollon im Belvedere. Eds. Feit Elm
et al in Die Antike der Moderne (Hannover: Wehrhahnverlag)
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 111

in its entire original beauty. The same has not been damaged even by a
sharp breeze but it is pure and gleaming whereby it shows the
characteristics of the High Style which shows a certain hardness that can
be easier sensed than described.

Engraving by Robert van Audenaard (1663-1743) entitled: “Niobe, dolente della

morte de’ figlioli” Originally in the Villa Medici in Rome, now in Florence,
Gallerias degli Uffizi. Inv. Nr.291.293

He admits that the loss of other works of the time makes it impossible to
generalise but then he does so by imagining that there was a general style,
less beautiful and more harshly expressive, that preceded the beautiful
112 Chapter Three

style in sculpture. This notion of a threefold or fourfold history of styles

was based on the division of human growth and decline; childhood,
adolescence, adulthood and old age. This projection of Winckelmann’s
philosophy of art was in tune with other concepts of human history that
were popular at the time.11

The sculpture group known as the ‘Niobe and her daughter’ was probably
known to Pliny. It was first thought to be by Skopas or by Praxiteles, but is
now no longer dated to their period [the fourth century BC]. The group
had once formed part of an open group of sixteen sculptures described by
Pliny as ‘Niobe, her 14 daughters and the pedagogos. Pliny places the
group at the temple of Apollo Sosianus in Rome. This arrangement is hard
to visualise. The main group, stands today in a separate room in the Uffizi
gallery in Florence. It is rather florid and the exaggerated play of draperies
could date the piece to Roman times. The figure of a draped woman that
stands by her side at the gallery probably also belonged to the Niobid
groupthat Pliny described. The Roman writer asserts that during the 156th
Olympiad (ca.296-293 BC) art ended (cessavit deinde ars) to revive (ac
rursus reuixit) only ca.156-153 BC. This pronouncement is followed by a
list of Hellenistic artists who are, according to Pliny distinguished by their
limited ability. These masters worked within set categories eos qui
eiusdem generis opera fecerunt. Pliny does not describe in more than a
few words the sculptures he assigns to this group. None of them can be
clearly identified today.

According to Winckelmann, the Niobe group is an example of the ‘high’

or ‘sublime’ style, which he dated to the late fifth or early fourth century
BC. Winckelmann refers to the group as originating ‘from the time of
heroes’. Under the heading: Expression of the figures of the time of heroes
Ausdruck der Figuren aus der Heldenzeit he writes:
Generally: in representations of heroes the artist is more limited than the
poet since the latter can paint them according to their time, a time when
the emotions were not constrained by the artificial prosperity of the
poeticised quality of the age and the status of mankind but had no relation
to the true figures. The former, however since he has to chose the most
beautiful of beauties is limited to the amount of emotion he can show to
avoid the pitfall of ugliness.

11
The beginning of a tendency or a style, and the end or change to another form,
were definable, and what was neither the start nor the end belonged to the middle
period.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 113

(Allgemein: [. . .] In Vorstellung der Helden ist dem Künstler weniger als

dem Dichter erlaubet: dieser kann sie malen nach ihren Zeiten, wo die
Leidenschaften nicht durch die Regierung, oder durch den gekünstelten
Wohlstand des Lebens, geschwächet waren, weil die angedichteten
Eigenschaften zum Alter und zum Stande des Menschen, zur Figur
desselben aber keine nothwendigen Verhältnisse haben. Jener aber, da er
das schönste in den schönsten Bildungen wählen muȕ, ist auf einen
gewissen Grad des Ausdrucks der Leidenschaften eingeschränkt, die der
Bildung nicht nachtheilig werden soll.)12

The idea here appears to be that the artist is restricted in the representation
of emotions or the poetically imposed qualities angedichtete Eigenschaften.
He is duty bound to represent the highest form of beauty. This constraint,
Winckelmann thought, did not apply to the poet who can express the full
range of emotions. He declares that the Niobe represents a work of the
‘high style’, which he believes to be defined by a beauty that is not created
by the senses unerschaffene Begriff der Schönheit. It is difficult, for the
modern observer to accept the Niobe as being in a state of the ‘uncreated
concept of beauty’ and to follow Winckelmann in his view that ‘this
beauty is like an idea that is’ not received through the senses’etc. The
statement that the Niobe group was created earlier than the Apollo or the
Laocoön group can only be accepted as his opinion.
The Niobe and her daughters must be regarded as undoubted works of this
“High Style” but one of the charactereistics of this is not only the
semblance of hardness. This beauty is like anidea not created by the senses
it has been created with the highest understanding and the fortunate
inspirastion which had elevated the statue to the highest unity of form and
outline. She was not created through the labour of the artist but like a
thought is awakening she seems to have been created by a breath of air.

Die Niobe und ihre Töchter sind als ungezweifelte Werke dieses hohen
Stils anzusehen, aber eins von den Kennzeichen derselben ist nicht
derjenige Schein der Härte [ . . .] Diese Schönheit ist wie eine nicht durch
Hilfe der Sinne empfangene Idee, welche in einem hohen Verstande und in
einer glücklichen Einbildung, wenn sie sich anschauend nahe bis zur
göttlichen Schönheit erheben könnte, erzeugt wurde. In einer so groȕen
Einheit der Form und des Umriȕes. Sie war nicht mit Mühe gebildet
sondern wie ein Gedanke erweckt und mit einem Hauche geblasen zu sein
scheint. 13

12
Chapter IV, DD of the Geschichte, ed. by L. Borowsky, p.209
13
Geschichte, p.210 The paragraph appears also in the Florentine Manuscript
(Lines532-550).
114 Chapter Three

A modern observer might wonder what it was that Winckelmann found in

the expression of Niobe that gave him the emotional impetus to write as he
did. Niobe is shown to be a woman ‘in extremis.’ She is suffering the
wrath of the deity she had insulted by proclaiming her superior fecundity,
probably a case of ‘hubris’. But the arrows of Artemis and of Apollo were
not directed at her alone but also at her innocent daughters and sons. It is
hard to detect today the noble simplicity edle Einfalt in the group which
Winckelmann saw there and the quiet grandure stille Gröȕe. These notions
seem to be disconnected from the objects themselves. The beauty of the
group, according to Winckelmann, is not like an idea received through the
senses, not created by a sudden inspiration but it seems to have been
created by a breath of air. mit einem Hauch It is difficult to explain this
extreme notion of ‘immaterial beauty’ of a huge marble sculpture nearly
three metres high and wide in proportion.

A modern view of the sexless and ‘perfect’ Niobe and her daughters is
given by Michael Bachtin:
In classical antiquity the human body is entirely enclosed and complete. It
is a lonely singular body distanced from all others. Therefore all the
indications of growth, of incompleteness and procreation are removed and
the eternal imperfection of the body is hidden, conception, pregancy and
birth hardly occur. The accent lies on the complete autonomous
individuality of the body.

The strong lines of demarcation, the boundaries of the human body of the
Niobe are disguised by the heavy drapery. Rachel Cousser describes this
feature as part of the Hellenistic convention. Winckelmann dealt with the
Niobe as a unique and earlier work of the Heldenzeit dated by him to the
time of Alexander the Great. Kousser writes:
In the Hellenistic era, the [. . .] Herculaneum Women formed part of an
extensive repertoire of statue types created to represent ideals of Greek
femininity: heavily draped, constrained in their movements by enveloping
mantles. [. . .] the Large Herculaneum Woman type was distinctive for her
imposing mature presence, with a rather heavyset body and often a veiled
head.14

Winckelmann seems unaware of the many other sculptures of draped

women. The Niobe group was found in 1583 near Sn. Giovanni in

14
Kousser illustrates an example that comes from the theatre at Herculaneum and
is now in the Staatliche Skulpturensammlung in Dresden. (Ill.Nr.68 p.144).
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 115

Laterano on the Esquiline Hill of Rome and was moved to the garden of
the Villa Medici. Modern research has dated the group as a Roman work
of the second century AD, possibly after a Greek model dated variously to
the fourth or first century BC. No other representation of the Niobe story
has been uncovered, nor does her image appear in the mythological vase
paintings of classical Greece.

Niobe was the daughter of Tantalus and she became the wife of Amphion
of Thebes. They had a large family; the numbers vary in the accounts:
Homer tells of six children of either sex, seven of either sex according to
Ovid, five or ten in other versions. Niobe boasted that she was superior to
Leto who had only one son (Apollo) and one daughter (Artemis). So Leto
called her two children to revenge the insult, whereupon Apollo killed all
her sons and Artemis all her daughters. Some authors believed that there
were one or two survivors. Niobe, ‘worn out with weeping’, was turned
into stone (on Mt. Sipylus in Magnesia), an image of everlasting sorrow,
with water flowing down her face like tears. The rock, according to
Pausanias was a natural formation looking somewhat like a woman.
Winckelmann wrongly places the figure in Greece and he dates it to the
time of Alexander, in the fourth century BC. He ascribes the figure to the
hand of Scopas, who lived a generation before Praxiteles who, so
Winckelmann thought, was creating sculpture in the beautiful style.
Winckelmann had been able to examine a plaster copy of a former head of
Niobe (the original being lost) and he noticed that the plaster cast showed
a more angular form of the brow ridges which he thought was an earlier
version. The current head has a more rounded form, yet he considers it to
be earlier than the beautiful style. The head of the Niobe has been
replaced; the fissure is clearly visible and for this reason any stylistic
analysis of the group would have to ignore facial features, but
Winckelmann does not do so. He feels confirmed in his dating of the
group by the eyebrow ridge of a plaster cast that he thought had been a
former head of the Niobe. He dates the group and the missing head to the
‘Heroic Age’ of the last quarter of the fourth century BC.

To the modern observer the group represents an example of the

preoccupation of the Roman public with the moment before death. Niobe
appears in the frightened, wide-eyed and frozen expression of the
realisation that her death is imminent. The head and the long neck may
have been made by a different hand at a different time. Her bulging eyes
are reminiscent of the classical Greek ideal of ‘The cow-eyed Goddess’
(Aphrodite). The heavy drapery conceals more than it reveals and this
116 Chapter Three

alone would date the piece to the 2nd or even third century AD. Gisela
Richter in her ‘Handbook of Greek Art’ omitted all reference to the
sculpture; she probably considered it to be Roman rather than Greek. The
daughter that Niobe clasps to her abdomen is dressed in a shirt that looks
as if it were wet and her heavily restored foot is shown protruding from the
group. Niobe’s arm protecting the embraced child is somewhat balanced
by the other arm which is curled upward as if intending to pull the drape
over her own head or over the child. The forearm of this upper limb is
extremely short and swollen. The thin tunic worn by the child shows the
form of her body which is strangely adult. The proportions of the figures
seem also unusual: Niobe’s head is much too small for the massive volume
of her draped body; her right arm is much larger than her left; and it is
difficult, today, to join in Winckelmann’s enthusiasm for this representation
of suffering womanhood. One misses any notion of sympathy or even
understanding of Niobe’s plight in the descriptions of Winckelmann. Such
sympathy was not part of his mind-set. There is a certain irony in the idea
that Niobe has been turned to stone, perhaps to the very stone that we can
admire.

The violence of the Gods that is represented in Hellenistic sculpture shows

them as the enforcers of the Fates. This may have been an aspect of the
mythological explanation of disease in pre-scientific thinking. In the Iliad,
for instance, Apollo sent his arrows at the Greek forces (he supported the
Trojan side) and no doubt the massed troops among the Greek ships were
living in unsanitary conditions, so they fell victims to disease, perhaps a
plague.

Walter Benjamin discusses the Niobe group as an example of mythological

violence:
Mythic violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the gods,
not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but
primarily a manifestation of their existence, The legend of Niobe contains
an outstanding example of this. True, it might appear that the actions of
Apollo and of Artemis are only a punishment. But their violence
establishes a law far more than it punishes the infringement of a law that
already exists. Niobe’s arrogance calls down fate upon her not because her
arrogance offends against the law but because it challenges fate [. . .].15

15
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Medium through which Works of Art Continue to
Influence later Ages.‘ Selected Writings, Vol.1 (1913-1926), ed.by Marcus Bullock
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 117

The cruelty of the vengeful gods is ignored by Winckelmann who finds the
figures heroic; he feels no compassion for the innocent children, he has no
sense of Mitleid for the petrified Niobe. In the fragment headed Zur Kritik
der Gewalt, Walter Benjamin examines the connection between religious
violence and the stability of the law. He describes how the fear of violence
is claimed by many religions to be at the core of civic obedience and calm.
Perhaps it is the imperative of the preservation of the rule of law that is at
the root of the mythology of violence. It is possible that Winckelmann’s
selection of images of extreme violence may have been part of this
tradition. Medieval religious painting was much concerned with the
depiction of violence and in some of the Books of Hours of the
Netherlands we have examples of the use of mythological violence in the
sevice of the church.

According to R.R.Smith, the Niobe group belongs to the same set of

sculptures as the Sperlonga group, the Laocoön and the Farnese Bull – all
are dated to Late Hellenistic or Roman times. There are similarities also
with the sculptures of the ‘Ara Pacis’ of Augustus, the great marble altar
set up between 13 and 9 BC on the Campus Martius in Rome. Niobe has
been guilty of ‘hubris’ and her punishment can be seen as educational, her
weeping effigy a warning to potential transgressors. The origin of her
name can be explained as a corruption of latin snow nivis, Greek nipha
and Robert Graves suggests that her effigy on a mountainside in Asia
would show tears when the snow above melted in spring.

The Niobe group is the only example Winckelmann could find to be of the
heroic period, the Heldenzeit. In fact, his entire theory of the threefold or
fourfold historical setting of classical sculpture relies on this group being
earlier than works he classified as belonging to the ‘beautiful style’.
Winckelmann offers his readers two contrasting theories. Either the story
that he tells of the picture of the Greek ideal is mere fantasy or it is a
vision of a lost truth. Clearly, his history of ancient art might be just the
product of his imagination. He may be mourning the loss of an art that can
never be recovered. On the other hand, his theories could be bringing to
life a lost ideal that was once actually realized and could be recaptured by
imitation. The power of Winckelmann’s historical analysis is that it
externalizes these tensions in the fabric of its unfolding.

& Michael Jennings, trans. by Rodney Livingstone. p.248 (Berlin: Suhrkamp –

Insel Verlag Taschenbuch Nr.225, n.d.).
118 Chapter Three

The huge sculpture now stands near the end-wall of a small gallery (Nr.42
of the upper story of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence) and walking
behind the group one can see the lack of detail in the drapery of the back.
This indicates that the group was created not as a free-standing sculpture
but backing against a wall or a niche. Similarly, the Laocoön group has to
be seen from the front, the back view is not elaborated nor is it
meaningful. An interesting comparison can be made with the sculpture
known as ‘Winged Victory of Samothrace’ that stands in the Louvre. The
drapery that clings to her body is shown to be of a thin material and is
similar in design to the drapes of the Niobe. Her size is impressive. The
figure alone is nearly 2.5 m tall and she stands on the prow of a ship. She
is dated to about 200 BC and she may have been created to celebrate the
naval victory gained by Antigonus II Gonatus over Ptolemy II Philadelphus
near the island of Cos.

The Niobe group is assigned by Winckelmann to a time when, so he

thought, the sculptors made the eyebrow ridge more sharply defined.
However, examining the illustrations of Greek sculpture in the
comprehensive catalogue published by Reynal & Company. there is no
case where his doctrine could be confirmed. 16 On the contrary, many of
the late Hellenistic heads show sharp ridges and others, dating from earlier
times, have softly rounded eyebrows. (e.g. the Schöner Kopf from
Pergamon, dated to 160 BC which has soft eybrow ridges.

To summarise: the Niobe group is a massive evocation of suffering

femininity; whether the sculptors were Greek or Roman is irrelevant, their
work was made to Roman taste and to Roman perceptions of Greek art.
Winckelmann’s descriptions show his lack of sensitivity to the anguish of
Niobe, to her protective gesture, to her sorrow and guilt. This lack of
awareness of the aesthetics of pain may be related to the popularity of the
great collections of earlier Christian art that showed in minute detail the
sufferings of the martyrs and the death-agony of the victims of violence in
medieval Europe.17

16
Great Sculpture of Ancient Greece ( New York : Reynal ,1978).
17
Andrew Hopkins and Maria Wyke (eds) Roman Bodies (British School at
Athens 2009) p. 180.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 119

Engraving by Claude Randon (1674-1704). Antinoos was the favourite of emperor

Hadrian. Statue in the Vatican Museum Cortile del Belvedere, Inv. Nr. 907. The
pedestal and head are not original.
120 Chapter Three

3.3 The Belvedere Antinous

Winckelmann’s description of the sculpture is interesting because he deals
not only with this work but he also refers to the Capitoline Antinous and
other heads of young men. He believed that these faces were portraits of
living models. The Capitoline figure, he believed to have been a portrait of
the young Meleander or of Hadrian himself which would make the date of
its creation about AD150. Antinous was the lover of the youthful Hadrian.
However, incongruously, Winckelmann dates the Belvedere Antinous to
the best Greek classical period – that would make it a statue perhaps of
Mercury. But none of the attributes of Mercury (Hermes) such as winged
sandals and a winged helmet are present in the sculpture. Winckelmann
thought that the statue was one of the most beautiful and perfect examples
of the ‘beautiful style’ of classical Greece - not because of its over-all
design but because of the beauty of its parts. The legs and feet, however,
he thought, were far inferior in form and workmanhip to the remainder of
the figure.

An extended quote of Winckelmann’s account of this sculpture demonstrates

his descriptive method. He describes and criticises parts interspersed with
praise for the whole sculpture. His assessment of the sculpture is an
example of his praise and adoration, his emotional response to youthful
masculinity.

The erroneously named Antinous in the Belvedere is regarded generally as

the most beautiful example of art under the emperor Hadrian because of
the mistaken notion that it represents his lover. It is, however, the likeness
of Meleager. The head is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful youthful
heads of antiquity. In the face of the Apollo dominates majesty and pride,
but here we have a picture of youthful beauty and flowering youth together
with gentle and pleasing innocence without any indication of passion
which could disturb the coherence of the parts and the youthful stillness of
the soul that is in the process of development. The eye is like the eye of
the Goddess of love but without desire; it is moderately rounded and
speaks with attractive innocence; the rounded mouth of small size breathes
emotions without seemingly experiencing them. But in the forehead we
note the presence of more than youth, it announces the hero in the high
splendour as it grows like the forehead of Hercules. The chest is mightily
curved and the shoulders, sides and hips are wonderfully beautiful.18

18
Geschichte ed. by Borowsky p.361; also Geschichte trans. by Malgrave, p. 341.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 121

The nobility he sees, and the unfeeling stillness, are probably projections
of Winckelmann’s general attitude to immature masculinity which is also
evident in his descriptions of the Apollo. Moreover, this Stille is a concept
that can be related to the Pietist notion of the inner calm and repose that is
prerequisite or could become perhaps a path to the experience of the
divine. The statues that Winckelmann admired, he felt had silent grandure
stille Gröȕe in posture and expression Stellung und Ausdruck. Since God
himself had stillness - removed from time and space, the soul that was
God-given also had the quality of inner stillness. In Pietism, this concept
of Stille contains the absence of desire, or perhaps expresses the distancing
of the individual from the temptations of life. It was a form of
introspection that enabled the faithful to forget the self, to find, like the
meditating Buddhists, an inner calm that was part of the religious
experience.19 Pietist Stille also meant a state of obedience, of acceptance
of God’s will without resistance. One sought to empty oneself sich
entleeren of all thought of self so that mystically, God could enter the soul.
The Passion of Christ was seen by Pietism as an example, where Jesus, in
spite of external turmoil and extreme suffering was able, with God’s help,
to retain his inner calm in preparation for union with the Holy Spirit. Such
quiet grandure was also shown by Laocoön; his sighs are expressions of
greatness in the face of death; this greatness lies in submission rather than
in strife or combat.

The idea that the gods of classical Greece were seen as essentially calm
and dignified is clearly contradicted by the Homeric texts which
demonstrate the fierce and unrelenting nature of the gods – vengeful and
jealous, they were neither reasonable nor dignified; however, they were,
like human beings, often unconcerned about the havoc they had created.

The stylistic extravagance of Winckelmann’s description of the sculpture

can not be accepted by modern standards as an art-critical essay about this
Greco-Roman sculpture. Winckelmann, in his homo-erotic vision is
expressing his response to an image of the adolescent beardless male. He
calls the youth noble edel and his lips as breathing emotions without
experiencing them - without seeming to express desire. It is difficult to
accept this text as a serious attempt to describe this work of late
Hellenistic art. The posture is traditional, the head and neck are probably
by a different hand, perhaps a later addition. A similar youth is illustrated

19
One might suggest a parallel in the Quaker ritualistic silence, a state of
tranquility, of stillness that leads to or is part of the religious experience.
122 Chapter Three

by R.R.R.Smith in the Pasitelean Group which he dates to the late first

century BC.

Rachel Kousser describes and illustrates a similar standing youth dated to

the time of the creation of the Roman Forum (c.42 - 2 BC), known as the
Ares Borghese.

According to Heinse the Antinous is a typically Greek juvenile beauty’full

of spiritual attraction voll geistigen Reizes and of sweet nobility. He
glances sensitively to the ground as if he were in contemplation which girl
he might honour with his attention.

The statue is displayed in the Vatican Museum, but it is not today regarded
with the fervour that it aroused in Winckelmann. The body is rather
effeminate; the beardless head is small and pensive. It was possibly
modelled after a figure of Hermes. It was found near the Castello Angeli in
Rome in 1543. It was probably made under Hadrian, perhaps a copy of a
Greek original of the fourth or first century BC. But the way the stomach
muscles and the fleshy hip are shown would place it in Roman times. The
figure is standing in the ‘contraposto’ position with the weight on its left
leg; the muscular torso has well defined pectorals in high tension. The
position of the forward striding legs is somewhat similar to the legs of the
Apollo described above. Striding legs have very ancient roots: Egyptian
funerary statuary (wooden or stone) includes many examples of forward
striding men, naked or clothed; their posture is sometimes described by
Egyptologists as the ‘wheelbarrow stance’, the Schubkarren Haltung and
they symbolise “coming forth from the tomb”, i.e. resurrection.

It is difficult to summarise the view that Winckelmann presents of this

sculpture since it is so intensely personal. His metaphor-driven prose,
however, deserves our attention as it represents the growing tendency in
German literature of the late eighteenth century to express deep emotions
– foreshadowing the Romantic and the Neo-classical movements in
German art as in literature.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 123

Engraving by Claude Randon (1674-1704) after the restoration (before 1700)

Belvedere Museum Nr. 1056, 1064, 1067. Without the restored arm it is 1,84 m
tall. Found in 1506 on the Esquiline Hill of Rome.
124 Chapter Three

3.4 The Laocoön Group

The Laocoön group in the Belvedere collection of the Vatican is probably
the most widely discussed work of sculpture we possess from antiquity. It
made a spectacular reappearance in January 1506 in the ruins of the
Domus Imperatoris on the Esquiline Hill of Rome and was immediately
recognised as quello è Lacoonte di cui fa mentione Plinio’. The learned
community of the sixteenth century saw in the group a unique masterpiece
of classical sculpture and accepted the name Pliny gave to the group. The
origin of the group’s seven blocks of marble is unclear. The earliest report
of the sculpture is probably by the above mentioned Pliny the Elder (23 –
79AD) who wrote:
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 125

The reputation of some [artists] distinguished though their work may be,
has been obscured by the number of artists engaged [. . .] This is the case
with the Laocoön, in the palace of the Emperor Titus, a work superior to
any painting and any bronze. Laocoön, his children and the wonderful
clasping coils of snakes were carved from a single block in accordance
with an agreed plan, by those eminent craftsmen Hagisander, Polydorus,
and Athenedorus, all of Rhodes.

Pliny does not tell us the age of the sculpture nor the place where it had
been displayed; the names of the Rhodian sculptors have recently been
identified on a block from Sperlonga which dates from first century AD.
The story of Laocoön was mentioned by Vergil in the Aeneid. (The
original manuscript remained incomplete at his death in 19 BC). Vergil’s
elegant Latin deserves a full quote:
Hereon another,weightier, and by far more dread occurrence meets us in
our woe, and spreads dismay in unexpectant breasts. Laocoön, to Neptune
priest by lot, was at the wonted altars offering a mighty bull, when lo!
from Tenedos- I shudder as I tell- over tranquil depths, two snakes with
monstrous coils speed over the main and side by side are making for the
shore;their breasts amid the billows stand aloft their blood-red cests
uprising over the waves; The other part tracks through the sea behind, and
their huge backs glide serpentine along. We hear the splash of foam, and
now they reach our fields, and with their glowing eyes suffused with blood
and fire, lick round with quivering tongues.

Hic aliud maius miseris multoque tremendum

Obicitur magis, atque improvida pectora turbat,
Laocoön, ductus Neptuno sorte sacerdos,
Slemnis taurem ingentem mactabat ad aras.
Ecce autem gemini a Tenedo tranquilla per alta
(Horresco referens) immensis orbibus angues
Incumbunt pelago, pariterque ad litora tendunt:
Pectora quarum inter fluctus arrecta, iubaeque
Sangguineae exsuperant undas: parsera pontum
Pone legit sinuatque immensalumine terga.
Fit sonitus, spumante salo: iamque arva tenebant,
Ardentesque oculos suffecti sanguine et igni
Sibila lambebant linguis vibrantibus ora. [. . . ] 20

From the time of its discovery the group has had a major impact on the
late baroque artist communities and copies or engravings were prepared

20
The earliest extant manuscriptof the Aeneid is Codex Latinus 3225 in the
Vatican library;dated to ca 400 AD.
126 Chapter Three

and circulated widely throughout the western world. Gisela Richter

ascribes the group after Pliny to the hands of the Rhodian sculptors
Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanodorus, dated to c.175-150 BC. This
would date the group’s origin over a hundred years before Vergil’s
account of Laocoön. The group found immediate admiration in Italy
among the late renaissance art critical community. For instance Jacobus
Sadoletus of Modena (episcopus carpentoracensis) wrote in 1538 De
Lacontis Statua: (translated by H.S.Wilkinson)

[. . .] What shall begin and what shall end my lay?

The hapless father and his children twain?
The snakes of aspect dire in winding coils?
The serpents’ ire, their knotted tails, their bites?
The anguish, real , though but marble, dies?
The mind recoils and pity’s self appalled,
Gazing on voiceless statues beats her breast.
[. . .]

The group had many admirers in the eighteenth century, north and south of
the Alps. Small plaster or terracotta copies and even bronze models had
been prepared and sold in the regions. Winckelmann devoted much effort
and detailed attention to the sculpture group which he regarded as the
repository of many of his ideas about art, of beauty and of Greekness
Griechentum in general. He assumed its Greekness based on his belief in
the seminal nature of Greek artistic achievement and in the Greek
sculptors’ conversion of natural forms into ideal types. He thought that
they had the ability to transcend and express extremes of feeling through
‘dignified monumentality’. He was blind to the obvious contradiction: the
group was not dignified. Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812) wrote
about the Laocoön that it depicted in macabre detail the death agony of
Laocoön and of his innocent sons.

The following three examples of art-critical remarks concerning Laocoön

pre-date Winckelmann and are significant because they may have
influenced his unstinting praise of the group. Montfaucon quoted Pliny in
1702, writing in his Diarium Italicum describing the group as being of a
single block of stone. The question of clothing interested the art critic
Roger de Piles (1635-1709) who wrote in his notes to Du Fresnoi of 1708:
Please note that the light and thin drapes were not given only to the
feminine sex, the ancient sculptors avoided as far as possible to dress
figures of men like that etc.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 127

Remarquez s’il vous plaît, que les draperies tenders et légères n’étant
données qu’au sexe feminine, les ancient Sculpteurs ont évité autan qu’ils
ont pû, d’habiller les figures d’hommes; parce qu’ils ont pensé, comme
nous l’avons déj̫ dit, qu’en Sculpture on ne pouvoit imiter les étoffes et
que les gros plis faisoient un mauvais effet.

Greek priests did not make offerings to the gods naked, as was the custom
in the east; they were clothed and they wore garlands or wreaths as a sign
of festive activity. The nakednes of the three members of the group would
have been a vehicle for the sculptors to demonstrate their skill in creating
an illusion of soft human surfaces in hard stone. Laocoön is sitting on his
shirt Chiton. The older son has thrown his shirt over his shoulder.

In 1728 the English portrait painter Jonathan Richardson (1664-1745)

composed a critical essay about the philosophy of painting and sculpture.
He wrote about the group: ‘Dreadful screams he raises to the stars:’
however, the Roman sculptors decided to depict the moment when his
strength is near its end and he is prepared to submit to the weight of his
destiny. His mouth is half open and his eyes are turned to the heavens as if
he were pleading for sympathy or help from the gods and at the same time
he seems to be dispirited and despairing. This creates space, Richardson
believes, for a beautiful expression that is not only noble but appropriate
for his priestly nature. The powerful emotion shown by his face would not
have been expressed so well had the sculptors chosen the same moment as
the one Vergil described.

Many artists of the seventeenth century saw in the group a model of

human restraint in the face of the anger of the gods. For instance
Domenico Theotocopuli (1548-1618), surnamed El Greco because he was
born in Crete, painted the death of Laocoön and his sons in c.1610, with
additional standing figures and the city of Toledo as background. When
Peter Paul Rubens came to Italy in 1603 and 1605-1608 he drew the full
group and prepared sketches of many details. He seems to have been
particularly fascinated by the muscular body of the father whom he drew
from all sides and by the younger son. In these drawings Rubens caught
the desperate convulsions and the hopeless resignation as well as the
excitement and agitation of the violent action. While the general
admiration of the group persisted as an example of unrestrained Baroque
pathos, Winckelmann and his many followers saw in the group an example
of noble restraint in the face of imminent death. The pain in the body and
the greatness of the soul are distributed and so to speak balanced
throughout the entire frame with equal strength.
128 Chapter Three

Early in the eighteenth century, Montfaucon wrote an essay on the history

of the Laocoön group proposing its inclusion in a catalogue of ancient
masterpieces.
The famous group of Laocoön should not be omitted from this work.
According to Pliny, this piece of sculpture seemed preferable to all the
other works that we have seen so far. It seems that the workmen
Agesander, Polydore and Athenedorus have created a monument that was
the source of the description by Virgil who reported that Laocoön had
attacked the Trojan Horse. Etc.

Le group célèbre de Laocoön ne devoit pas être omis dans cet ouvrage.
Selon Pline, ce morceau de sculpture étoit preferable à tout ce qu’on avoit
vû jusqu’alors. Il semble qu’Agesander, Polydore et Athenedore qui en
furent les ouvriers, aient travaillé comme à l’envie, pour laisser un
monument qui répondît a la incomparable description qu’a fait Virgile de
Laocoön, du coup qu’il porta contre le cheval de bois, & de sa mort
tragique [. . .].Laocoön étoit Prêtre de Neptune, et alloit lui sacrificier un
toreau, lorsque deux dragons monstrueux, qui jettoient par les yeux feu &
flames, traversent à la nage le bras de mer qui est entre l’Isle de Tenedos
et le continent.21

Montfaucon shows much more sympathy for the victims of the gods’
anger than either Winckelmann, Lessing, Heinse or Christian Heyne. He
mentioned that Pliny thought highly of the group, ‘the best we have seen
so far.’ But it was not Neptune but rather Poseidon or Athena [Patron
Gods of the Greeks] who could have sent the monsters to revenge the
insult perpetrated by Laocoön. Winckelmann showed no sympathy for the
suffering of the trio and describes the group in chapter IV of the
Gedanken, in purely literary terms:
The general and excellent distinguishing feature of the Greek masterpieces
is their noble simplicity and their quiet grandure as much in their posture
as also in their impression. Just as the depth of the ocean always remains
calm however the surface might rage, thus the expression of the Greek
figures expresses the deepest turmoil of the emotions but retaining a great
and calm soul. This soul is shown not only in the face of the Laocoön but
in the whole body.

The hardness, he continues, was not really hard, it was the semblance of
hardness ein Schein der Härte a hardness that could be experienced

21
B. De Montfaucon.1719-24.L’Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures.
Livre VI, chapter IX p.242
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 129

empfunden rather than described. The beautiful style, as exemplified by

the Laocoön group was identified by the softer curve of the eyebrows and
by greater elegance and gracefulness. The sharpness of the brow-ridge was
smoothed and this gave the eye and the look a greater gentleness.

In his Geschichte, Winckelmann suggests:

This statue was one among the thousands of examples of the works of the
most famous sculptors that had been brought to Rome from their place in
Greece. It was appreciated here as the high point of art and the artists and
the wise can learn here and both will be convinced that in this image there
is more hidden than what the eye can disscover, that the understanding of
the Master was yet higher than his skill.

Characteristically, Winckelmann writes with special fervour in praise of

restraint; it is tranquility which evokes his keenest feeling. Particularly in
his evocation of the Laocoön, ethical and aesthetic judgments are
interwoven. Laocoön is here the archetype of ‘stoic virtue’. Winckelmann
feels classic serenity rather than Christian compassion. In his concept there
is an Epicurean strain along with the stoic one; it appears most clearly in
his delineation of Greek life. The Greeks were the most joyful people,
blessed by a sunny and moderate climate, uninhibited by bourgeois
conventions, free of the scourge of the more unpleasant modern diseases;
they could devote themselves to art, to athletics and to leisure. They were
free in politics and in their customs; it was perhaps the latter freedom that
impressed Winckelmann most.

He believed that the ancient Romans regarded ‘Greek art’ as the highest
artistic achievement and that the ‘lowly posterity’ could not produce
anything remotely comparable. He did not consider Renaissance art as
important, nor did he think highly of his contemporary artists. The painter
and companion of Winckelmann, Anton Raphael Mengs wrote in 1786
about the way the muscles and tendons are shown to express tension and
suffering. It is difficult to recognize in the sculpture the structures Mengs
had seen and he makes his strange view only a little clearer when he says:
’Sometimes in the Laocoön figure an enormously strong expression of
emotions can be seen, neveretheless there dominates the agreeable and the
beautiful of the forms without forceful or unnatural postures.’

To return to Winckelmann and his description of the ‘Laocoön:

130 Chapter Three

It was not the pain alone shown in the sculpture, the artist gave him an
action that was characteristic of the nobility of his soul combined with the
expression of pain (etc).

This extract is difficult to understand. Pain is not expressed by itself, but

given an aspect of nobility of the soul, a state of calm close to the state of
pain. But this calmness must be shown in a way that is not indifference or
sleepiness.
der Künstler gab ihm daher, um das bezeichnende und das edle der Seele
in eins zu vereinigen, eine Aktion, die dem Stande der Ruhe in solchem
Schmerze der nächste war. Aber in dieser Ruhe muȕ die Seele durch Züge,
die ihr und keiner anderen Seele eigen sind, aber nicht gleichgültig oder
schläfrig bilden.

Winckelmann sees tranquility where pain and struggle meet; did he

identify with the suffering priest? Or was he really finding pleasure in
observing the stoic resistance of the father?

Foremost among Winckelmann’s contemporary critics was Lessing. His

work with the name Laocoön is primarily an attempt to define the
boundaries and limitations of the visual arts and of poetry. He accepts
almost without comment, the euphoric judgements of Winckelmann, but
as a dramatist and poet he is taking a different approach. He discusses the
origins of the Laocoön story and he suggests that the story in Vergil might
have been the model for the sculptor. On the other hand, there might have
been an earlier version of the story that both had taken as their source.
Quintus Calaber, (fourth century AD Roman poet) as Lessing suggests,
might have used the same source but his account differs considerably from
Vergil. Lessing doubts Winckelmann’s dating of the group to classical
Greece and suggests a date in the Roman empire. It is surprising that
Lessing’s highly critical attitude to contemporary drama and poetry
did not lead him to regard Winckelmann’s prose as excessive.

Lessing rejected Winckelmann’s theories of the edle Einfalt und stille

Grösse’ as the principal component or Wesensmerkmal of both visual art
and poetry. Lessing had planned to add further chapters to the Laocoön
essay in praise of Winckelmann, but this plan never came to fruition.
Instead, Lessing writes at the start of chapter 29 of the Laocoön:

Winckelmann approaches his task with his impressive literary knowledge

and the greatest knowledge of ancient art. He worked with the grand
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 131

confidence of the ancient artists who concentrated all their effort on the
main subject and they treated minor aspects with a certain intentional
negligence. Some left theses matters to a foreign hand. It is not a small
matter of praise to have only made such errors as anyone might have
avoided.

But in the following pages, Lessing critically examines minor deficiencies

in Winckelmann’s Gedanken. There is a fundamental difference between
Winckelmann’s single-minded praise of the works he chose to describe
and Lessing’s more critical and logical approach; an intellectual rather
than an emotional approach to art, be it visual or literary. But Lessing was
not an art-connoisseur, he does not primarily engage with the visual arts.
Moreover, throughout his critical writings and letters he uses restrained
language to examine the work of others in theatrical and poetic matters.
The ecstasies of Winckelmann would have been quite strange to Lessing’s
level-headed and logical approach to art. Thomas Höhle writes of
Lessing’s limitation in matters of the visual arts and even in the
descriptions of nature, e.g. the beauty of the landscape in spring. As to the
immeasurable erudition of Winckelmann, it is worth mentioning that his
literary references and his quotations were largely copied from Franciscus
Junius’ compendium of 1649.

Winckelmann describes, in the Florentine Manuscript, his impression of

the Laocoön:
The whole detail of the face looks very like the face of Neptune or Jupiter
only modifed by the expression ecept the nose which could not retain a
straight upper surface while expressing pain. The neck is beautifully bent,
the shoulder wide and great. The upper arm and the toes of the foot are
restored everything else on the figure of the father is antique except the
head of the snake that bites his thigh.

Winckelmann does give us many details of his examination of the group,

including the fact that the head of the serpent was a restoration; perhaps
the monster was never intended to bite, but to kill its victims by
encirclement and squeezing. His enthusiasm for the group is clearly based
on his emotional response to the torment and stoicism of the father figure.
The following examples will show how Winckelmann’s German admirers
in succeeding generations saw the Laocoön group as an ideal
representation of classical aesthetic and moral excellence. Herder, for
instance, wrote about his impression of Laocoön and his heroic bearing,
his resistance to pain until ultimately he is overwhelmed. Herder speaks
132 Chapter Three

with understanding of the poor suffering priest, an aspect of the sculpture

that Winckelmann never expressed. Laocoön, after all, was only doing his
duty and was punished severely by the unfeeling Gods. 

Karl Philipp Moritz writes about the Laocoön in the report on his journey
to Italy. He, like Herder sees the group with sympathy and with the
recognition of the undeserved violence and the severity of the anger of the
Gods. Moritz understands the struggle of the father to go to the aid of his
sons, an aspect that never occurred to Winckelmann. Winckelmann’s
eulogy of the group is reflected in Diderot’s Encyclopédie which gives a
concise description of the group:
Laocoön, c’est un des plus beaux morceaux de sculpture grecque que nous
posédions; il est de la main de Polydore, d’Athénedore et d’Agesandre,
trois excellens maîtres de Rhodes, qui le taillerent de concert d’un seul
bloc de marbre. [. . .].

Diderot then quotes long passages from Winckelmann’s Geschichte

(translated into French) without comment and he agrees with him on the
dating of the group to the time of Alexander the Great.

After Lessing, perhaps the most important critic of Winckelmann was

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1744-1799). Lichtenberg was an astronomer
and experimental physicist. He was also a rigorous critic of art and
literature. As satirical writer, he is best known for his ridicule of
contemporary metaphysical and romantic speculations. His criticism was
probably significantly in advance of the general aesthetic notions of his
time. Lichtenberg mockingly wrote:
I am, from time to time not adverse to believe that Winckelmann had
inspiration from some benevolent spirit or poltergeist or that a dragon or
pixy had dictated his words.[. . .] his spirit trembles and adores where it
should judge. In the long legs of the Apollo he sees divinity and in the well
–drawn general aspect of the static posture Winckelmann sees divine calm.

Lichtenberg sees the inadequacy of Winckelmann’s enthusiasm and he

castigates him for his complex language: To write simpply requires
perhaps the greatest attention and effort Simpel schreiben erfordert
vielleicht die gröȕte Spannung der Kräfte. Lichtenberg cannot find this
noble simplicity in Winckelmann’s prose. He misses the critical and
logical approach. One may indeed demand more from Winckelmann; his
claim to erudition and his use of quotations from Greco-Roman sources
would warrant a more critical and analytical approach to his sources.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 133

The time of Alexander, proposed by Winckelmann was in the first quarter

of the fourth century BC. It was the time when, according to Winckelmann
Griechentum reached the ideal of freedom for the citizens and the artists.

But the historical reality was quite different. At the time of Alexander and
in the following three centuries there was not a single republican
(democratic) government in the eastern Mediterranean regions. Seleucids
and Antigonids, Ptolemies and Atalids formed dynasties and their
absolutist regimes were in force throughout the Greek speaking world.
Winckelmann’s idea of civic freedom and independence of the Greek artist
was in conflict with the history of the Hellenistic world and Winckelmann’s
historical studies should have made him realize the utopian nature of his
Griechentum.

Wilhelm Heinse (1749-1803) travelled to Italy in the generation that

followed Winckelmann and Lichtenberg. He sees in the Laocoön figure an
example of the intelligent and obedient citizen, an aspect that is difficult to
detect in the anguished features of this rebellious citizen. Heinse believes
that the flesh was marvelously and beautifully designed and that the
muscles protrude from the surface like the waves of the storm-tossed
ocean. Laocoön, he thought, has finished screaming and is about to take a
deep breath. The picture of human suffering was always a subject for the
artists of antiquity and one only has to think of the Niobe, of the dying
Amazons and of the example of the art of suffering such as the torment of
‘Peter the Martyr’ by Titian. Heinse wrote a diary of his travels in Italy
(1780-83) which was not published until 1924. He was probably the first
to write a more profound critique of the group, thinking that the three
victims of the wrath of the gods were like the figures in a macabre dance
of death.

Friedrich Schiller considered the idea of resistance to the expression of

pain in his treatise Vom Erhabenen (1793). He, like Winckelmann, does
not explain why he thought pathos to be sublime erhaben. He does find
the suffering of Laocoön to be an example of the ‘glorious’ expression of
the independence of the spirit of mankind, an independence that acts
against the animal instincts. He tells us that the moral power moralische
Macht is to be judged by the strength of the attacking force – but why they
thought of it as a matter of morality to suffer pain is not made clear by
Schiller, nor by Winckelmann.
134 Chapter Three

Was this attitude perhaps, an echo of the Christian notion that pain had a
cleansing effect on the soul? It was not so long ago that tortures inflicted
on heretics, witches or agnostics were a form of public entertainment; the
well documented excesses of trial by torture had continued throughout the
seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth.

Carl Justi wrote, about one hundred years later and he projects into the
figure of Laocoön feelings that are based on Winckelmann’s eulogy. Justi
thinks that the father figure was concerned about the fate of the sons but
one would have to look very hard indeed at the face of Laocoön to find
signs of fatherly concern. Justi continues with his imaginative re-
interpretation:
Laocoön has fulfilled his duty as citizen and by warning of the deception
of the wooden horse he has attracted the anger of the grecophile gods. In
the knowledge that he was brought to his fate through love of his country
he had no reason to feel conscious-stricken before gods or men.

Carl Justi invents the patriotic posture of Laocoön, perhaps because he

wished to expresss the need to strengthen the emotional foundations of the
recently created German nation. There are also more recent views that
amplify Winckelmann’s eulogy. In the introduction to his recent publication
on marble sculpture, for instance, Christoph Schmälzle explains:
The Laocoön group maintains its exposed position in the growing corpus
of antiquities and it functions as a leading example in the debates about
proportion, appropriateness and foremost: expression. Until 1755 the
masterly example in the Belvedere was famous because it was a canonical
expression of pain. But since that date it was famous because it clearly
expressed the resistance to pain. The Laocoön of Winckelmann’s
descriptions is interesting toaday not because he is suffering but because
of his fortitude.22

Another interesting recent view on the Laocoön group is expressed by the

writer Peter Weiss (1916-1922). 23 He sees the ugliness of the tortured
priest; having himself survived the Holocaust (in Sweden) he was aware of
the artists’ skill in expressing pain and anguish.

22
Christoph Schmaelzle (ed). 2006. Marmor in Bewegung: Ansichten der
Laocoöngruppe (Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld)
23
Peter Ulrich Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance. (Newhaven: Yale University
Press, 1981), p.58.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 135

To the modern eye the group appears as a laboriously contrived technical

conundrum. The material is Carrara marble which is carved into complex
shapes that display the remarkable craftsmanship and special three-
dimentional imagination of the sculptors. The group, consisting of seven
blocks is cleverly integrated into one unit. It has to be seen from the front
only, as if it had been designed as part of a building – backing onto a wall
or niche like a relief. It might have fronted a theatre, temple or palace. The
emotional content that inspired Winckelmann so forcefully no longer
appeals to the same extent to a critical observer and the nobility of
suffering has lost its attraction for the modern enthusiast. This may be
because in this millennium we have become more aware of the ugliness of
pain and of the amoral aspects of the classical gods.

The mortality of Laokoön is on display; it is perhaps part of the baroque

within the classical, the ‘memento mori’ within the beautiful. The size of
Laocoön would be about 7 feet were he able to rise from his pedestal; the
size of the sons is small by comparison. We look in vain for an expression
of sympathy or understanding in Winckelmann’s text. Herder and Wieland
showed some sympathy Mitgefühl for the unfortunate Trojans. Laocoön
was the innocent victim of the anger of the deity. His fate was undeserved;
after all, he was a son of Priamus, the king of Troy and he was quite right
to guess that the deception of the wooden horse was to spell the ruin of his
city. Was it not his civic duty to throw his spear at the monster?

And as to ‘quiet grandeur’ that Winckelmann detected, it is hardly possible

to find it in the anguished contortions of the three unfortunate martyrs of
the Trojan cause. Modern visitors to the Vatican rarely respond
enthusiastically to the mixture of realism and pathos that inspired the
sculptors and that was praised by eighteenth -century critics. The technical
achievement of the group is there for all to see, but the emotional content
is no longer seen as worthy of the extravagant words of praise that
Winckelmann lavished on it. The stoicism of Laocoön in facing death with
fortitude does not seem today to show nobility but rather the uncritical
acceptance of his fate. This submissiveness is also evident in the Niobe,
and it may be that in Winckelmann’s time obedience was considered to be
a civic virtue, perhaps part of the ‘noble soul’.

The idea that the gods punish by sending snakes to kill offenders is Roman
rather than Greek. Greek gods punish by madness, by illness or by
transforming their victims. The snake was Athena’s ‘familiar’ - she is seen
in the Pergamum altar covered with the coils of snakes, perhaps to
136 Chapter Three

emphasize the snake-like legs of some of the giants of the Pergamene

Gigantomachy. The tale of Laokoön had special meaning in Roman
mythology as he was, like Aeneas, a heroic Trojan, linked to one of the
myths of the founding of Rome.

Brunilde Ridgway dates the group to the second century BC strongly

influenced by the Pergamon Altar. Perhaps it was a copy of an earlier
work in bronze. She continues to describe the problems of copies. The
style, she tells us, reflects the Baroque traits of the Pergamon Altar:
pathetic expression, exaggerated musculature, straining poses, great size
and postures, dramatic situations. She states that the sculptors of Rome
had every style available to them and they could choose what was most
appropriate to the subject they wished to portray. For this reason stylistic
analysis is not an adequate indication of the date of origin of a sculpture. It
may not have been the sculptor who decided what was to be represented
and what stylistic attributes were to be used but the sponsor, patron or
promoter.

Simon Richter describes the twofold meaning of the group; the realism of
the anguish and the idealism of the beautiful male bodies. This dichotomy
exercised the minds of some writers on aesthetics of the late eighteenth
century and the Laocoön retained its importance as an object of discussion
and admiration well into the next century.

Raimund Fridrich, for instance recounts how Winckelmann’s descriptions

were echoed and imitated by his contemporaries and successors.24 Lessing
published his essay Laocoön in 1755; by then it had evolved into an
extensive exploration of the aesthetics of poetry and the visual arts in
general, rather than the Laokoön group iself – perhaps because Lessing
had not seen the group in Rome but had only had access to engravings.

The discovery, in 1957, of a collection of marble fragments at Sperlonga

(mentioned above) has given rise to further questioning of Winckelmann’s
dating of the group to the time of Alexander the Great. Sperlonga is a
promontory village halfway between Rome and Naples. The emperor Titus
(Titus Flavius Vespasianus 79-81 AD) had built a villa there which
included in its grounds a number of grottos. In one grotto a number of
carved marble blocks were found recently and among the blocks was one

24
Raimund, M. Fridrich.2003.Sehnsucht nach dem Verlorenen: Winckelmanns
Aesthetik und ihre frühe Rezeption (Bern, Wien: Peter Lang)
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 137

that carried the names of the Rhodian sculptors mentioned by Pliny as the
creators of the Laokoön group. The Laocoön group is made of Carrara
marble, possibly after a Greek original. The sculpture consists, as above
mentioned, of seven separate blocks, cleverly integrated into a complete
group. It is now thought to date from the early first century AD. Two
restorations are on display at the Cortile del Belvedere, an earlier one with
the arm of Laocoön raised above his head and the later (post 1960) version
that uses the fragementary arm bent behind the head.

The title itself Laocoön serves many purposes. It entitled the work to an
acknowledged, reverential identity; it related the sculpture to a recognised
subject matter and it also proclaimed the power of its imagery. The group
begins its post-antique life as a museum object, elevated to a high level of
aesthetic value and to stand as a palpable, material example of the
historical connection between classical and modern culture. This link was
part of the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance that underlined the
continuity of history in spite of the great chasm of the so-called Dark
Ages, a period that separated Greco-Roman culture from the modern
world. In addition, the figures demonstrate the helplessness of humanity
faced by the wrath of the deity, the extremes of pain suffered by mankind
when faced with the anger of God. The technical skill of the sculptors has
at all times been greatly admired because it would have been extremely
difficult to create the dramatic and complex interweaving of lines in hard
stone. Dating the group to the Hellenistic period is based on the treatment
of bulging muscles and dramatic content.

Winckelmann’s dating of the group is undermined by the style and the

dating of a somewhat similar group from Pergamon in Asia Minor. There,
as part of the frieze of the ‘Altar of Zeus’ a deeply carved group shows a
naked youth struggling in the coils of a serpent.25 The Laocoön group is
certainly not Greek art at its best. The subject can be seen as offensive, for
it shows the cruel and unjust death inflicted by a god upon an entire
family. The treatment is emotional in the extreme. All the figures are
undergoing utmost mental and physical torture. To the taste of modern
times the Laocoön can be described as a clever monstrosity. Why did
Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe and many others admire it so deeply? The
first reason is the most obvious. Technically it is a marvellous piece of
work. The anatomy is superb; the carving, in spite of the formidable
difficulties of the subject is masterly. Viewed purely as a pattern the

25
Pergamum Museum, Berlin, restoration of the Altar reliefs.
138 Chapter Three

figures are demonstrably balanced and well proportioned. The intricate

interplay of all the different limbs and muscles and snakes might have
been a confused mêlée instead of the harmonious complex which it is. The
sculptors’ problem of making the work live in three dimensions has been
perfectly solved for the struggling figures lean backwards and forwards
and aspire upwards while being held together as a coherent structure.

Yet, this was not what Winckelmlann and Lessing admired. They praised
chiefly the qualities that we can scarcely detect today: dignity and noble
restraint. Winckelmann and his followers were never tired of pointing out
that the father’s lips were just parted although he did scream in Vergil’s
poem. But the sculptor could not have given Laocoön an open mouth since
this would have been considered ugly. This tension between the beauty of
the bodies and the horror of the situation seems to have been the main
attraction. The emotional charge seems excessive. Yet Lessing is right: the
figures are suffering but they are not ungraceful. At the moment they are
still fully human; in the next instant they would have been twisted out of
shape and dying. Tension as strong as this was never portrayed in classical
Greek art of the great period, when death itself (Thanatos, the twin of
Hypnos, the God of sleep) was the bringer of eternal calm. Moreover,
Greek sculptors and painters depicted victories, however difficult to
achieve, rather than defeats and the Laocoön group shows total defeat.

Baroque art was mainly focused on the expression of tension, the polarity
between extreme passion and extreme control. It was this tension that
Winckelmann was not the first, and by no means the last, to admire.
Although it was part of the taste of a dying age Winckelmann looked at the
group with a new insight. He taught the world to see it and other Greek
statues, not with the cool and sometimes patronizing eye of the
Enlightenment, but with the enthusiasm and love which make great
criticism and which became an intrinsic element of the subsequent era of
art criticism.

There are yet some other aspects of the Laocoön group that could be
considered: the education of Greek young men in the martial arts was
carried out through the official appointment of an older man to be a father-
figure, lover, educator and companion of the adolescent boys. The
Laocoön is thus an example to the two young men of manly restraint in the
face of pain and the imminence of death; an example of ideal heroic and
stoic masculinity. Moreover, in Greco-Roman religious procedures, there
was the notion of the ‘willing victim’; this was the idea that the sacrificial
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 139

animal would indicate its willingness to be sacrificed by nodding its head

before the butcher would strike. Laocoön is tied by the serpents, he is the
sacrificial victim to appease the anger of the god; he indicates his
acceptance – he looks up to the deity and accepts his fate. There is no
evidence that Winckelmann was aware of this aspect. The group was dated
to the year 25 BC by C. Blinkenberg who thought it was brought to Rome
by Titus in AD 69. He believed that Vergil had not seen the sculpture as he
would surely have commented on it had he seen it.

3.5 The Hercules Torso

Perhaps the most remarkable sculpture in the Belvedere collection is the
masculine torso. Its style and the treatment of the muscles of the chest and
stomach areas are reminiscent of the Pergamon marbles which would date
the piece to the second century BC, possibly an East Greek import. The
name of ‘Apollonios’ has been added at some stage to the base of the
figure. Winckelmann reflects on the resurgence of art after the end of the
Peloponnesian wars:
Artists of this period and particularly Apollonius, the master of the Torso
in the Belvedere [which is] extremely damaged and maltreated, without
head, arms and legs; yet it shows to those who are able to appreciate how
to look into the secrets of art a glow of its past beauty.

Künstler dieser Zeit und besonders Apollonius, der Meister des Torso im
Belvedere [. . .] auf das äuȕerste gemishandelt und verstümmelt und ohne
Kopf, Arme und Beine wie diese Statue ist, zeiget sie sich noch itzo denen,
welche die Geheimnisse der Kunst hineinzuschauen vermögend sind, in
einem Glanze von ihrer ehemaligen Schönheit. 26

The following two pages of Winckelmann’s text describe the ideal

masculinity of the figure, the way Hercules was purified by fire to become
immortal. He sees the torso as representing the demi-god who is no longer
subject to earthly needs. Winckelmann believed that it showed Heracles at
rest Herakles Anapayomenos. He compares the Torso with a Hercules
figure in the collection of the Villa Albani and he continues in this vein for
further pages, dating the torso to the last period of Greek independence but
at the same time he writes that the Torso is of the period of Alexander. He
then engages in a polemic, arguing that others had misunderstood the
value of the Torso and that it is a masterpiece without parallel.
Winckelmann seems to have little doubt that his ecstatic experiences of

26
He assumes that the inscription ǹȆȅȁȁȅȃǿȅȈ is genuine.
140 Chapter Three

beauty were experiences of what really was in the work of art. He believed
strongly in his divinatory power and this process can best be described by
the formula: ex pede Herculem as if, from a fragment of an ancient work
of sculpture he could reconstruct the original whole. He claims to be able
to do this by divining the intention of the sculptor. This enables him to
imagine the completed work. These are the more mystical aspects in which
Winckelmann viewed the experience of art.

Winckelmann’s description of the Laocoön had contained a subjective,

strongly imaginative element but it is neither as impressionistic in style
nor as fervent in tone as his essays on the Torso. Winckelmann states first
that one must know to what degree and why an object is beautiful, but
characteristically he deals with this problem not by deduction but by an
attempt to bring vividly before our eyes the contours of the absent
shoulders, and the muscles of the torso with constant and eloquent
reference to the myth of Heracles. [He seems to be anticipating Stefan
George: The body of a God and the God of a body. den Leib vergottet und
den Gott verleibt.’]

The Florentine Manuscript contains three different versions of his

description of the Torso. It seems that the act of writing these drafts was
for Winckelmann somehow a cathartic activity and his poetic excesses
seem to result from his great need to make himself understood:
One finds the celestial being in this body that no longer needs human food.
The fluid outlines of an Apollo can be found also in the outlines of the art
of this piece. Yes, I can say that it approaches nearer to the best time of art
than the Apollo itself. In its form it is magnificent and in the working it is
tender. The anatomy is understood perfectly and displayed with such
economy that the wise can recognise it and the simpleton can neither find
nor experience it. This shows that this sculpture without doubt represents
the celestial Hercules.

In the eyes of Winckelmann, the stone has become the god and he
continues to describe the back of the torso in great detail: the way the
muscles and the shoulder-blades interact. He writes of the tenderness with
which the tendons merge with the muscles. The artist, he tells us, has
worked with the highest degree of understanding of the human body.
Winckelmann continues to praise the Torso for two more pages of
manuscript. There is a touch of arrogance when he claims that only he, as
the enlightened observer could see the beauty of the figure and that the
ignorant visitor would not.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 141

When Wilhelm Heinse, in the generation following Winckelmann described

the Torso, he made his narrator see it as the body of a wrestler. Raimund
Fridrich, in 2003 comments on Winckelmann’s description as a
dynamisation of the human body through his text:
What does Winckelmann’s point of view tell his readers? He does not
simply describe what he sees but what the vision means. Every muscle
points to a mythical meaning and this gives Winckellmann the opportunity
to relate again some heroic tales of the Heracles cycle. His vision of the
heroic struggles does not consist simply of a paraphrase of the tales but
trough his words he becomes a creator of the dynamics of the Torso.

Winckelmann responds to Lessing’s criticism of the visual arts, (that they

can only depict one moment in time) by letting his descriptive text roam
freely through the Heracles mythology. Winckelmann’s text seems to aim
at uniting the mythological past and the present in the mind of the reader
and Fridrich extends this idea into suggesting that the impact of the torso
is dynamically extended by Winckelmann’s text and he tells us:
The proportions of the remaining thighs of this torso make us realize that
he must have been of the greatest and most beautiful proportions. Towards
the knees the massive thighs are lost in a very elegant way. The knee-caps
are indicated and the beginning of the legs makes us weep over their loss.

The history of the Torso is uncertain. It carries the name of Apollonius,

but the date of the inscription may not be the same as the date of origin of
the sculpture.

Today, the torso is displayed in the Vatican Museum, (Cortile del

Belvedere Inv. Nr. 1192). It has been placed there by Pope Clemens VII
(1532-1534). It stands today 1.59 metres high. The name of Heracles was
given to the torso by Ciriaco of Ancona between 1432 and 1435.
Michelangelo first held the object in high esteem. Many suggestions have
been made as to the posture and meaning of the work. Was it part of a
group? Were the arms raised above the head? Recently it has been
discovered that the skin covering the pedestal of the figure was not that of
a lion as it would have been, had the figure been of Heracles, but that it
has the markings of a panther. The date is equally uncertain, it may be,
like the Laocoön, a work of the second to first century BC, perhaps
contemporary with the altar frieze of Pergamum. The piece is not as highly
regarded today as it was at the time of Winckelmann. However, its
importance at that time was clear and it became an attraction for the
142 Chapter Three

tourists who flocked to Rome as part of their cultural education.

Winckelmann was not alone in his admiration of the Torso. Michelangelo
had drawn attention to the beauty and masculine perfection, particularly of
the bent back of the piece. Goethe, in his descriptions of his visit to Rome,
saw the torso and thought it was a masterpiece of classical sculpture.

If it were indeed a representation of Heracles and not some other

mythological figure, he would have held a club and been covered by the
pelt of a lion, his head looking out of the open mouth of the lion. The
reason why Winckelmann chose the Torso as an example of beautiful
manhood may have been an instinctive identification with the demi-god.
Heracles was seen in Greece primarily as the present helper of the
common man - the Olympians were thought to be more distant, they were
aloft and hard to please. Herodotus recommends (in Book 2 of Histories)
that Greeks should worship Heracles in two forms: first they should make
offerings to him as a god, but then they should ‘offer worship as to a hero’.
There were inscriptions on door frames that proclaimed: ‘Heracles lives
here, no evil thing may enter’. Heroic Heracles killed the eagle that
devoured the liver of chained Prometheus and similarly he might also
come to the assistance of an afflicted petitioner. Most other heroes were
only worshipped locally. At Athens, for instance, each district phyla had
its own hero but Heracles was performing an important function
throughout the Greek-speaking world as mediator between gods and men.
His worshippers expected as much from him as from the Olympians: he
would be asked to effect cures, provide protection and he would deal out
retribution for any act of disrespect. Many factors combined to create the
great popularity of Heracles and of his lore, his God-like presence, his
human failings, the victorious hero who ensured stability, being also
volatile and prone to errors.

Winckelmann was familiar with the works of Apollodorus and he would

have known some of the Greek myths he related including the terrible
story where, in a fit of madness, Heracles kills his wife and children.
(Apollodorus p.361) But Winckelmann was not concerned with Greek
religious imagery. He regarded all Greek representations of the human
figure as expressions of the divine, especially those large pieces that
triggered his emotional response.

There remains the question whether it is ever possible to come close to an

art object in a different medium, such as language, when language has its
own art-world, its own hermeneutic processes and poetic structures. And if
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 143

it were possible, what conditions and what rules might one use to transmit
– of course not the object itself, but its description in terms thought
appropriate to art and of the experience of art? The more emphatic the
experience of art, the more difficult it becomes to speak about the visual
impact in prosaic or unemotional tones and Winkelmann’s art historical
descriptions have been formulated in heightened prose, an art form in
itself, in order to transmit to the reader the special aesthetic experience of
the author.

An example of his eloquent prose can be found in the Florentine

Manuscript where Winckelmann sketches a description of the Torso and
his experience of the sight of the block:
When I look at the Torso I do not know whether I should be more sad
about the loss of the beautiful limbs or be happy about the wonderful body
that has been left to us.

Winckelmann then attempted to reconstruct verbally the missing parts,

starting with the slender neck that he assumed would have supported the
small head. The eyes would have been round and the brow ridges sharp.
From the remaining torso, which he praises in ecstatic terms, he could
reconstruct the whole magnificent figure. The artist, he tells us, has
concentrated on the most essential features of the human body:He then
laments the lack of arms in the work, and is consoled by the thought that
no other arms preserved from antiquity could match those he imagines had
been lost.

It is probable that the figure represents not Hercules but an athlete,

comparable to the famous bronze sculpture of a boxer Faustkämpfer in the
Museo delle Terme in Rome. This is dated to about 50 BC. The seated
bronze figure is 1.30 m tall, and were the fighter able to rise from his seat
he would reach about two metres. His damaged head is turned upward
from his muscular body. The cuts and bruises are inlaid with copper. There
might also be a rather tenuous connection with the discus thrower - much
admired and illustrated.

The heroic male in classical Greek sculpture is always shown hollow-

backed with protruding buttocks; the thighs are ample ending in stylized
knees. Small changes in style seem to occur simultaneously on the Greek
mainland, the Anatolian coast (Ephesus, Miletus, Pergamum) and in Sicily
(Syracuse, Acragas, Selinus). Emphasis on these small changes may only
144 Chapter Three

reflect attempts by art historians to demonstrate stylistic progress in the

face of great diversity.

The five cases quoted above are examples of Winckelmann’s choice of

marble sculptures that he used to illustrate his aesthetic theory. The
sculptures are all of late Hellenistic-Roman times and their preservation
has been due to the fact that Roman high-society had imported or copied
what they admired. Roman taste for bloody contests ( as at the circuses) is
reflected in their selection of sculptures that are mainly concerned with
muscularity and with the imminence of death. Apollo has just killed,
Laocoön is on the point of death and poor Niobe is turning into stone
before our eyes. In mainland Greece little remains of late Hellenistic
sculpture and the main examples of works that have escaped the fury of
Gothic and Islamic violence are the reliefs of the temple platform at
Pergamum27 and the remnants of the temple of Mausolos,(from
Halicarnassus) now in the basement of the British Museum in London.

The problem of Roman copies or replicas of Greek originals is addressed

by Ridgway. She demonstrates that the second century BC saw considerable
expansion of Roman conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean, with the
result that great amounts of booty were brought to Rome. Such ‘imports’
were in tune with the taste for large sculpture among the political and
military leaders. They could show their wealth and power in the form of
displays and by the embellishment of their villas, gardens and cities.
Imports included marble columns, Pillars of Egyptian Granite and capitals
as well as huge craters and other decorated ceramics with didactic
narrative or epic scenes that were much appreciated, indeed demanded for
the creation of an ambience of Roman wealth and culture.

It was important for the Romano-Italic aristocrats to have something on

show that looked Greek, whether it was a portrait head of a philosopher or
a large sculpture. Statues of Greek gods were popular. It is impossible for
us today to tell whether a motif or concept was inspired or copied from a
Greek source or imitated by a local sculptor whose parents might have
originated anywhere in the Greek-speaking Hellenistic world. The
sculpture group from Sperlonga is an example of the importance of
‘Greekness’ – the names of three Rhodian sculptors were found carved in
the rudder-box of the ship. But the authenticity of the inscription cannot be
taken for granted; it might have been added by the Roman owners of the

27
Now restored in the Pergamom Museum in Berlin.
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 145

group to demonstrate the greekness of the work. The display of booty (or
what looked like booty) was part of the political symbolism of triumphal
processions. The public was reminded of the conquests of foreign lands by
the display of imported sculptures on public buildings and fountains.
Victories in foreign lands had become part of imperial Roman philosophy
of government and the proud display of Greek or pseudo-Greek statues
had become a part of this eminently successful political strategy.

In his evocation of the Belvedere Torso Winckelmann combined

description, and mythological references to produce a number of prose
poems. Thinking that the mutilated fragment was a torso of Hercules he
felt free to weave the myths and homilies associated with the demigod into
his interpretation. He warns us that the statue has been shattered like some
ancient oak; that at first glance we may descry merely a misshapen stone
but on closer examination we may see the flank of Hercules as an
Olympian. One may well object that Winckelmann’s method here is
disturbingly literary rather than historical. Indeed it is. Although he
repeatedly stressed the importance of close, concentrated observation, his
interpretative enthusiasm swept him along, here as elsewhere. His inner
vision proved decisive; we have less the picture of the Torso than a poem
occasioned by it. Winckelmann’s problem was perhaps similar to that of
Rilke who described another mutilated classical statue in similar terms:

Archäischer Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften.

Rilke wrote as a poet in the early twentieth century and not as historian
and like Winckelmann he was attempting to take the perception of art from
the visual to the literary and poetic realm. (Rilke had been secretary to
Rodin in Paris and was familiar with the sculptural conventions of his
time.)

The feelings of ecstasy that permeate Winckelmann’s descriptions of

sculpture of a bygone age can be seen as part of his attempt to provide a
philosophical and emotional basis for a general aesthetic that he thought
could become a guide to the artists and the connoisseurs of succeeding
generations. The five examples given above demonstrate how far the
philosophy of art has changed in the 250 years that have elapsed since
Winckelmann wrote his texts. These changes were led by artists such as
Piet Mondrain, Kandinski, Braque and many others of the early twentieth
century who moved the experience of beauty from the vision of the
146 Chapter Three

idealised human body to the realm of abstract, often geometric shapes and
the use of strong colours.

To summarise: the significance of Winckelmann’s reconstruction of the

Greek ideal had a double aspect. On the one hand his writing enjoyed great
success because it provided a synthesis of received wisdom about the art
of antiquity since it brought together within a single book a vast body of
knowledge about the visual artefacts of antiquity. It showed how ancient
classical art related to what was known about the political and literary
history of the ancient world. It also offered an unusually eloquent notion
of his personal vision of the Greek ideal and its aesthetic significance. On
the other hand it offered a new synthesis adding further lustre to a long
standing historical cult surrounding the art of ancient Greece. By giving
this art a historical specificity that it did not have before, he pointed the
way to making it a model for emulation in the present and the future.

Winckelmann’s historicising of antique sculpture had one other important

dimension. His Geschichte der Kunst represented the Greek ideal as an
integral part of the fabric of early European art and society. His success
lay in giving so-called Greek sculpture this added resonance for an
audience that was looking for a history-based utopia. This was to match or
counter-balance the Judaeo-Christian view of history as a theological
phenomenon. Winckelamm was familiar with Aristotle’s Nicomachaean
Ethics and with his Poetics. He could have realised the cathartic effect of
the observation of pain and the experience of sympathy. His own poetic
language was intended induce emotional responses in his readers.

Winckelmann’s early and most important works earned him almost

immediate fame and recognition and they formed, for the remainder of the
century, a point of departure for the philosophical discussion in Germany
of classical culture and the aesthetics of beauty. Winckelmann introduced
not only fundamental aesthetic theories, but he also created descriptions of
classical art that remained examples of art- historical writing for the rest of
the century. This period saw a definite change in the way that objects of
art were described. Beauty came to the forefront of the descriptive
narratives rather than realism or moral content. The essence of art, the
individual aesthetic value of the object in the cultural context of its time
became the subject of art-historical discourse. It was Winckelmann and
also Mengs who introduced a new historical perspective into their
descriptive texts. They saw the singular qualities of the object embedded
in the dimension of the time of its creation and it was their aim to
 Narratives on Sculpture: Five Case-Studies 147

understand, to employ linguistic means to interpret the place of the object

in history expressed in terms of the present.

The statues of the Apollo of the Belvedere, of the supposed Heracles

Torso and the Laocoön became canonical models in Germany of ‘good
taste’ in subsequent periods. Winckelmann’s explanatory texts served as
proof of the superiority of late Hellenistic sculpture. The beauty of the
Greek models, Winckelmann argues, can be traced to the immediacy and
harmony of their contact with nature and with the divine. The influence of
a mild climate and a society devoted to art, athleticism and the free
depiction of nudity combined to produce images of beauty that he thought
were both true to nature and to the ideal. The following chapter will
identify areas where his theories fell short of the fulsome claims that he
made to support the validity of his art-historical scheme.
 CHAPTER FOUR

WINCKELMANN’S PROFOUND LIMITATION

4.1 His Narrow Perception of ‘Art’

The main theme of Winckelmann’s Gedanken was the apotheosis of large
freestanding sculpture and much of his analysis of this art was
concentrated on the few objects of his choice. But there were, in Italy
many other sculptures and groups that he decided not to include either in
the Gedanken or in the later Geschichte. This may have been because they
would not have confirmed his threefold scheme of the evolution of
classical art. Foremost among the omitted sculptures is the marble group
of Mars and Venus with so-called ‘portrait heads.’ It had first been
displayed in the Forum Augustum but it was found in Ostia and is now in
the Museo delle Terme. It is securely dated to the Augustan period and it
fits well within the repertoire of Augustan court art and in particular the
‘Neo-Attic’ sculptures executed by artists with Greek names working in
Rome. A further example of omission by Winckelmann is the statue
group, also in the Terme Museum (8064), that was signed by the sculptor
Menelaos. The group is nearly two metres heigh and shows a youth
embracing a female figure. It is known as the ‘Menelaos Group’.

Excluded from Winckelmann’s work was also the large marble sculpture
group of ‘Mars and Venus’ (illustrated by Kousser p.52). Mars (Ares) is
standing naked in ‘contraposto’ and Venus (Aphrodite) is by his side
facing him. She has a drape hiding her hips and thighs. The myth of Ares
and Aphrodite, the capture of the adulterous pair in a net, originated in the
Odyssey. The story was also popular in Rome; it was recorded by Ovid
and also by Propertius. Winckelmann also excludes the ‘Ares Borghese’
now in the Louvre (No. 866) and on his visit to Naples he could have seen
and noted the pair of unnamed figures (Pasitelean Group) now in the
National museum (No.6006). There were innumerable Greco-Roman
portrait heads of the Roman nobility in the private collections of Dresden
and Winckelmann could have included these works in the Geschichte, but
150 Chapter Four

he chose not to mention them. They may have seemed to him not
sufficiently ‘Greek.’

Many illustrations of classical sculpture of the unclothed Venus or

Aphrodite figure can be found in Geoffrey Grigson’s work. 1 These
heavily idealised female figures show the goddess in a style somewhat
similar to the idealised figures of naked youths: an adult body crowned by
a youthful head. Winckelmann would have known of these examples of
Hadrianic marbles; for instance the ‘Venus Amphitheater’ in the Museo
Nazionale, Naples. (No.6018) But he omits all mention of near-naked
female figures.

He does not include the innumerable examples of Greek painted ceramics

that adorn the classical galleries of our museums, although they would
have been much more easily classified into historical groups than the
sculptures chosen by Winckelmann and his successors. He was involved in
the preparation of the important catalogue of vases by Hamilton who
engaged him in Naples in 1767 to provide text for some of the
illustrations. Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803) was ambassador of
England to the Court of the Two Sicilies in Naples. He had amassed a
major collection of painted antique vases to exhibit in his palace. The
vases were mostly found in Italy and they were thought at the time to have
been Etruscan. Haamilton decided to publish a catalogue of pictures of the
vases in his collection. He employed Pierre Francois Hughues (also known
as Baron von Hancarville) to prepare the 400 illustrations. Winckelmann
was in Naples in 1767/8 to see the excavations at Herculaneum. He met
Hamilton and Hancarville in 1767 and in the following year the first
sumptuous folio-size volume of the vases appeared under the title:
Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines tirés du cabinet de M.
Hamilton, envoyé extraordinaire et plénipotentiare de S.M. britannique en
cour de Naples. The first volume contained a short article about the
Etruscan treasures followed by colour prints of about 100 classical vases.
One of Winckelmann’s descriptions was used in the printed first volume.
The succeeding three volumes published in 1777 contained also pictures of
vases in the Vatican collection and in the villa of Count Caylus. In these
succeeding volumes only coloured drawings were displayed, without text.
The artist provided each tableau with a frame – acanthus leaves or rosettes,
and clothing was added where appropriate. These exquisitely formed and

1
Geoffrey Grigson, The Goddess of Love: The Birth, Triumph, Death and Return
of Aphrodite (London: Constable, 2001)
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 151

painted classical ceramics were available to Winckelmann during his long

stay in Rome and during his visits to Naples and Florence but decorated
ceramics were not included in his concept of classical art. 2

Winckelmann thought that the Greek (black and red) figured vases were
painted with fine brushes onto the porous fired clay. He made no enquiry
of the local potters who could have explained the practice of wax-resist
painting to him. The craft of carving carnelian pebbles to make sealstones
was not regarded by Winckelmann as an art form and the few examples of
intaglios that he mentions cursorily in Gedanken are probably of late
Roman date.

There were also innumerable examples of Roman and Greco-Romano

funerary sculptures available to Winckelmann, such as carved stone
coffins and small free-standing sculptures, also funerary reliefs that depict
the mythology of grief and loss. But these works of classical art were
ignored by him. He refers briefly to painting telling us that the fury of man
has robbed us of nearly all examples.

Everything that can be said in praise of Greek works of sculpture would be,
in all probability also true of Greek painting. One can admit, he writes, that
the Greek painters knew design and expression but that they were ignorant
of perspective and of composition and colouring.

Winckelmann, like Lessing, did not regard the use of colour and shading
to be of the same importance as design, as Zeichnung and Allegorie. He
would have known that the sculptures he admired had been coloured in
antiquity; a very clear example is given by Homann Wedeking.3

Winckelmann thought of relief carving and of mosaic work with disdain:

he would have been familiar with the great Roman deep-cut reliefs of
Trajan’s column. Perhaps he found that the scenes were concerned with

2
One set of the volumes of Hamilton’s illustrations and descriptions was sent to
England where it reached the hands of Josiah Wedgewood (1730-1795) who was
potter to her Majesty Queen Charlotte Sophia.2 Josiah Wedgwood used the
‘improved’ versions of the Huncarville drawings as a basis for his designs of his
grecicising motifs. The Hamilton collection of Etruscan vases was sold to the
British Museum in 1772. The systematic study of Greek vases in England was not
begun until the mid 20th century with the work of Sir John Beazley (1885-1970)
and continued under John Boardman in recent times.
3
Kopf einer Kore. Attisch, um 510 v. Chr. Marmor mit roten und schwarzen
Farbspuren. Athen, Akropolis Museum.
152 Chapter Four

actions and not with the calm, the Stille that he admired. He did not regard
them as ‘Greek’ and he did not look more closely at the work. He could
have seen the wall paintings at the so-called ‘Basilica’ that had been
recently excavated at Herculaneum. The painting is dated to the mid-first
century AD and has been thought to be a copy of a Greek painting of the
fourth century BC.

In his Explanation of Thoughts Erläuterung der Gedanken Winckelmann

writes that the images created by Greco-Roman artists contain allegorical
truth in two forms. First those representations that contain references to
mythological or historical events. He calls them pictures of epic grandure
and secondly, those that contain images of virtues or vices and give the
viewer an emotional or intellectual experience. It is likely that he meant
the sense of pleasure which he finds in the observation of beautiful bodies.
Winckelmann’s aesthetic theory can be summarised in a statement that art
is to be seen as an allegory of nature, as a transformation of natural forms
by the artist who imposes his idea of absolute beauty on the material. This
notion of a consummate or absolute aesthetic value in the form of beauty
is probably related to Winckelmann’s belief in the communicability of
aesthetic experience.

A useful contribution to the discussion of art was provided by Walter

Benjamin (1892-1940) who wrote extensively about absolute judgements
in art. His major essay on art history is: Works of Art in a period of
technical reproduceability. (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit) (1936). Walter Benjamin was involved in the attempt
to describe a theory of art that would be useful for the formulation of
revolutionary politics of art. In the absence of any traditional or ritualistic
value, art in the age of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based
on the practice of politics. He might have thought that Winckelmann’s
efforts to explain the experience of the beautiful was only the irresponsible
perception of an absolute value Die unverbindliche Erkenntnis eines
Absoluten. He thought that mechanical reproduction would lead to a
decline in the cult-value of art, perhaps towards a non-fascist or
progressive art. Benjamin takes the view that allegory is a distractive
force:
If the object under review with melancholy becomes allegorical, life flows
away and it remains as a corpse yet in eternity assured of a place; it lies
prone before the allegorist, handed down to him for well or ill. That
means: it is unable to radiate meaning or sense; it is only able to express
what the allegoricist allows.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 153

It may be true that Winckelmann, as Allegorist achieved his great ambition

to give the objects that he admired a lasting epitaph, a reality that they did
not have before, nor could have gained without his texts. His descriptions
may be excessive but his striking allegories found an echo in the minds of
the literary readers of his time, an allegorical reality that the objects
themselves could probably not have achieved. In Benjamin’s view, the
symbolism of the sculptures is like an idea veiled in uncertainty, but this
uncertainty is not an aspproach that Winckelmann could have taken since
his didactic posture was one of surprising certainty throughout his written
work,

Winckelmann seemed to add a new dimension to art critical writing by

introducing a gap, a difference in the audience between the phrases that
moved their feelings and the observation of the objects themselves. This
separation of verbal style from the observation of art can be clearly seen in
Winckelmann’s rhetoric. There is a second dichotomy here since the skill
of the sculptor should be acknowledged but it is then ignored by
Winckelmann and never stressed in forming his judgements. The reason
for this view may be Winckelmann’s ignorance of the physical realities of
the work of the sculptor a labour that aims to create soft life forms in hard
marble. His emotional intensity of language at times obscures the lack of
content and the reader is left with the knowledge of his fervour rather than
knowledge about classical art. Winckelmann does not refer to the methods
used by the ancient sculptors, he was probably ignorant of the way the
stone was treated before it was carved with a variety of bronze and iron
drills and chisels.

Winckelmann’s travels through Italy were usually in company with one of

his friends, but neither his letters nor his publications give any indication
of his experiences of the landscape or of the art treasures he could have
seen in the country estates of the local nobility. His journeys, as well as his
experiences in Rome remain unknown and his biographers were faced
with a meagre base of letters that may not truly reflect the circumstances
of his life. As an immigrant from Germany he seems to have failed to
adapt his way of life to the climate or to Italian mores, to Roman attitudes
and lifestyle. He did dress in black garb and he was addressed as Abbé, but
he had no religious duties. He spent many months in Florence working on
the engraved sealstones of the Stosch collection. He could have seen much
Renaissance art had he wished to make enquiry. He would have walked
past the massive bronze gates at the east doors of the Baptistry in the
centre of Florence that had been cast by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455)
154 Chapter Four

with relief scenes of biblical mythology. Winckelmann did not comment

on these monumental examples of early Renaissance art. None of this
widespread artistic activity was recognized by Winckelmann who saw
little beyond the massive sculptures in the Belvedere museum and in the
private collections of Rome.

It was characteristic of Winckelmann that he did not seem to have shown

interest in new experiences but that he visited many times the same chosen
monumental sculptures. In his narrow vision of antiquity he found the
feeling of ecstasy that he tried to express in his work. Reading his
published works one can detect a unique preoccupation with the objects he
chose at the beginning of his art-critical work. He did not raise his vision
to the great diversity and ingenuity of the artistic production of his chosen
period. He visited the sculptures of the Belvedere many times alone and in
company with his students – it was in the nature of pilgrimages to the
adored marble sculptures. Had he, like Pygmalion, fallen in love with the
works he described, or was he, perhaps, in love with the act of describing
them?

Winckelmann discussed briefly ancient beliefs and customs in the second

part of the Geschichte and he believed in an Egyptian monotheism
deduced from Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride. He also had access to
engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) who had included
more than 2000 engravings of real and imaginary Egyptian and Roman
buildings, statues and ornaments in his collection, but none of the objects
depicted by Piranesi were mentioned by Winckelmann in his texts.
Classical small art (klassische Kleinkunst) and even art-crafts like mosaic
and funerary reliefs were not included in his art-critical texts. Nor did he
mention the innumerable ceramic figures known as Tanagra Figures.

There were many musical events he could have experienced in Rome, in

Florence or Naples but he made no mention of music as an art form.
Winckelmann’s musical education in Germany had not included an
introduction to the great developments that had taken place in the Italian
peninsula during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Italian
opera was created with its traditional vocal divisions.4 Musical instruments

4
The words soprano and contralto have masculine endings, as these parts were
sung by castratos. Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1750) composed over fifty operas,
Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) achieved world-fame as virtuoso cellist and Vivaldi
wrote more than 50 operas in the period of Winckelmann’s stay in Rome.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 155

including keyboard instruments (harpsichord and clavicord) as well as the

viol-group were further developed at Cremona and Vicenza, cities near to
Florence. 5

It was not only his lack of musical experience that was somewhat ‘out of
tune’ with his life in Italy, but his historicity lacked a systematic approach.
It consisted of extracting and copying selectred portions of classical
authors, regardless of their significance or age. These classical literary
sources were not concerned with the evaluation or with the classification
of objects of art.

Hellenistic Rome had become the centre of political, military and financial
power. From the conclusion of the second Punic War in 202 BC Roman
art and Roman artefacts followed the expansion of Roman dominion to all
parts of the Mediterranean lands. The silver mines of Spain worked for
Rome and for Roman coinage. The spoil from the conquests of the East
were brought to Rome to be displayed in triumphal processions. In 189 BC
Lucius Scipio, fresh from his victory over Antiochus of Syria, ‘brought
luxury to Italy’. The furnishings of his triumph included 1,400 lbs of
ornamented silverware and 1,500 lbs of golden vessels. In 146 BC the fall
and destruction of Corinth delivered to Rome the wealth of Greece. As the
centre of political, economic and military power moved from Alexandria
towards Rome in the second century BC, the literary and artistic focus also
moved westward.

This limitation of Winckelmann’s cultural awareness may be connected to

the dichotomy between his theoretically projected ‘free’ life in Rome and
a negated solipsistic or inward-looking emotional life. Perhaps he sought
to preserve a childhood feeling of a lack of autonomy by denying desires
for anything beyond his immediate reach. An empowered ‘utopian’ free
self seems, as it were, split off from his eloquently projected literary self.
Even in his most productive period, between 1755 and 1760, he wrote and
re-wrote his fundamental motifs without raising his sights to any other art-
form. Freedom may have been there for him, but for unknown reasons he
never lost his sense of servitude, his Knechtschaft and although he moved
in Rome among the great and the good he was not able to achieve the
economic freedom and independence of his patrons.

5
Nicolo Amati, Stradivari, (1644-1737), Pietro Guarneri (1695-1745).Many lesser
makers of string instruments were active during Winckelmann’s stay in Rome.
156 Chapter Four

To add to Winckelmann’s frustrations, his ambition to become the tutor of

future sculptors was not to become a reality; perhaps it was never meant to
be realised. The following section of tis work will address the problem of
Winckelmann’s notion of aesthetic education.

4.2 Aesthetic Education – An Illusion?

Winckelmann meant by the term Bildung the handing down of cultural
values which included the appreciation of beauty. He saw aesthetic
education as restricted to a narrow circle of potential students and he
mentions a number of qualifications which would enhance a student’s
prospects of responding positively to carefully selected pieces of classical
art.

Viewed from a twentyfirst-century perspective, these constraints seem

elitist but on closer examination they merely reflect aspects of eighteenth-
century social structure, combined with some of Winckelmann’s personal
preferences. For example, Winckelmann saw the matter of art appreciation
as something which was demanding of the individual’s time and energies.
This meant that it was largely the preserve of the upper classes since only
they had the freedom and the leisure to satisfy such demands.
Winckelmann made this clear in his essay about the ability to experience
beauty: Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen. This
work was tellingly dedicated to Friedrich Rudolph von Berg, an aristocrat
and close friend. The argument about the exclusive qualitires he expected
from his students were expressed as those who have the ability, the means,
opportunity and leasure welche, nebst der Fähigkeit, Mittel, Gelegenheit
und Muȕe haben.

The ideal amateur must be possessed of noble character, innate aesthetic

sensitivity and leisure. Above all he must have within himself the
tranquility inherent in the work he is contemplating. Winckelmann must
have been thinking of aristocrats or those who, like himself, were enjoying
their patronage. Within the exclusive group from which Winckelmann
chose his pupils there was a separate meritocracy based on the ability of
the student to respond to Winckelmann’s enthusiasm. In the Abhandlung,
Winckelmann gives the example of a British nobleman of the first rank
vom ersten Rang who did not even step out of his carriage while
Winckelmann made a speech about the beauty of the Apollo and other first
class works.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 157

In Winckelmann’s concept of the ideal pupil he describes, (in the

Abhandlung) how the talented pupil must trust his first and immediate
impression of a work of art: Ready and quick [the pupil] must be because
the first impressions are the strongest and precede the consideration and
what we then experience is weaker. He proposed that the teaching of the
aesthetics or of art should be focused on the observation and admiration of
Hellenistic statues of humanity rather than on the German (or Dutch)
traditional process of finding beauty in nature.

The teaching of art and its practice in Germany up to the eighteenth

century was at all levels entirely dependent on the support of the ruling
nobilities. Artists and even their critics were all relying on the financial
support of their aristocratic sponsors, ecclesiastic or lay and any
expression of dissidence or even innovation could have had severe
consequences. Universities, museums and churches were not financed by
national taxation but had to rely on complex and detailed negotiations
between officials of the autocratic rulers and representatives of the
institutions. Individuals like Winckelmann, who were unaffiliated to an
academic institution had to please their sponsors to secure their livelihood.
Winckelmann had been engaged by Count Bünau for many years in the
antiquarian research of the Roman Empire of the German Nation and its
legendary emperors. This work may have influenced Winckelmann in his
ambition to revive German art on the basis of its supposed classical Greek
antecedents rather than on the art of the Germanic, Dutch or Italian past.
He saw himself as an educator, his primary role as didactic:
I believe that I have come to Rome in order to open the eyes a little of
those who will come after me (Ispeak only of artists) since all the Nobility
comes here as fools and they go away again as asses. This generation of
men does not deserve that one should instruct them or teach them. A
Frenchman is incorrigible - Antiquity and the French are incompatible.

It was a tragic misapprehension that artists would flock to his lectures and
share in the admiration of his chosen subjects; the German gentry
Kavaliere that came to Rome were clearly not responding to his
enthusiasm. Anton Raphael Mengs, Winckelmann’s friend and artistic
confidant was the only practising artist to have responded to his texts; not
a single sculptor of the large number practising in Italy responded to his
theories of artistic education in his lifetime.

Winckelmann’s stay in Rome was financed by the Saxon (later the

Prussian) court and by Cardinal Alessandro Albani. He also received
158 Chapter Four

stipends from the Vatican as Scrittore de la libreria Vaticana and as

President of the Antiquities of Rome. What revenues accrued by the sale of
his publications is not known. We have no information about the
remuneration or gifts that he received as a guide of the antiquities of
Rome. His work at the Stosch collection of carved gems in Florence was
surely remunerated, but we have no information on the amounts involved.
There was clearly a strong incentive for Winckelmann to remain on good
terms with his sponsors and thus he had to take care to remain within the
limits of political and religious acceptability.

The theory of artistic education proposed by Winckelmann lacks

credibility since it would have been unrealistic to expect potential students
of art to come to Rome to learn from Winckelmann how to absorb
classical aesthetics. Nor would the aristocratic and ecclesiastic nobility
who sponsored the artists have come to Rome to be taught by
Winckelmann. He did not consider the art of the Italian Renaissance
worthy of study or of imitation but instead he thought that the study of
selected classical sculptures by his contemporary German artists would
somehow lead to a renaissance of aesthetic consciousness, perhaps a return
to an ideal art in a less than ideal society of aesthetically uneducated
citizens. But without the classical background it is difficult to see how the
German or Italian artists of his century could have rivalled classical
sculptors.

Winckelmann’s avowed aim of aesthetic education raises a number of

additional questions. He argues at length in Chapter 4 of the Geschichte
that the Greek environment had a fundamental influence on the artists of
the time. However, the notion that the climate of Greece and the political
environment had a fundamental effect on the development of classical art
seems to contradict the notion of applying ‘Greek’ principles to the
aesthetic education in Germany of his time. Unlike the mythological skies
of Greece, German skies are not always blue and the political scene in
Germany did not include the notion of the ideally free citizen/artist. Such
persons he imagined to have been the creators of classical art.
Winckelmann writes in the Erläuterung:
Meanwhile - the happy position of the land was at all times the
fundamental cause and the differenent air and sustenance made the
difference between the Athenists and their nearest neighbours the other
side of the mountains.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 159

This idea had its origin with Plato who voiced the notion (Timaios 24 c)
that the founders of Athens had chosen that site because it had benefited
from such seasonal changes in climate as tended to produce the most
intelligent citizens. Even long before Winckelmann, the idea of the
beneficent influence of the Greek climate was accepted as fact. (Aristotle
also distinguished the character of different nations as due to the
difference in climate.) How then, could a contemporary German artist
hope to emulate or imitate the classical artists, when the preconditions in
Germany were so different from those of classical Greece?

Herder writes on the subject of imitationof the classics in his essay on

Shakespeare:
Here and there to expect Greek drama to arise as “natural” (we do not
speak of imitations) is worse than to expect that a sheep could give birth to
a lion. It is foremost and in the end the question: What is the quality of the
soil? What can it produce? what can be seeded in it? and what could it
bear? And Heavens! How far distant from Greece!

Herder was concerned with the creation of a German national literature

and Winckelmann’s writings harmonised with this concenpt both on the
aesthetic and political level. There was a hidden agenda in the proposition
of aesthetic education. That is the assumption of a moral content of beauty
and of art. Through art and its education the moral standing of the artist
would be raised and thus also his standing in society, in the nation. To
follow de Piles, art could simultaneously entertain and instruct. An
understanding of art came to imply a high moral character in the viewer;
the study of art became in effect a study of one’s own notions of virtue.
The assumption of the moral basis of art clearly put more pressure upon
the viewer to exhibit good taste since a lack of taste would imply a lack of
moral understanding. It was assumed that ‘ taste’ in the fine arts went hand
in hand with the moral sense to which it was thought to be allied.
Winckelmann uses this reasoning to persuade the reader towards a
particular standard of taste, to share his own vision of the ideal in art. At
that time, in the middle of the century, art had become an important aspect
of the newly wealthy citizens and of the ever growing circle of nobility
who could display in their homes paintings and sculpture to demonstrate
the good taste of the family. Private collections of ‘beautiful things
became popular as part of the well-bred citizens’ domestic scene and
Winckelmann’s ‘artistic education’ meant in reality the confirmation of
well-known prejudices in the form of a programme of Greco-Roman
artistic and thus by implication, also moral supremacy.
160 Chapter Four

The study of art and of its history was seen by many as a purely
intellectual pastime. It offered the intelligent observer an opportunity to
apply his learning from other fields like history, philosophy or literature
and it also established some criteria for judging the intrinsic merit of
works of art. Collecting objects of art would demonstrate knowledge of the
techniques of the artists, of the symbolism and the hidden meaning of
[mainly religious] representations. The educated collector of art could
demonstrate that art was subject to reasonable explanation and not just a
matter of personal taste. But to this end education and experience were
necessary and Winckelmann was aiming to provide his chosen followers
with both.

Winckelmann’s proposed aesthetic education was not likely to have been

meant as a practical proposition since he did not describe the procedure the
trainee artist would have to follow to gain access to the classical models.
Perhaps this is, in essence, the difference between aesthetic and artistic
education. Moreover, he did not recommend that the student artist begin
by copying or drawing the ancient models. The student was expected to
observe the models and feel what Winckelmann felt. He expected students
of art to travel to Rome where, under his guidance, they would be able to
learn about classical beauty. Would the student then be expected to create
similar works of art? Works of art that could be displayed in museums or
in the drawing rooms and gardens of the wealthy?

The benefactors, the paymasters of the artists who had not received this
aesthetic education, would they somehow learn to accept the classicism of
their artists on the assumption that ‘inimitable beauty’ would be self-
evident? And if it were self-evident, the students would not have needed
Winckelmann’s instructions. Winckelmann’s presumption is astonishing;
he believed that his own experience of exultation that he describes so
vividly would somehow be transmitted to his readers and his admirers by
his text. There is an almost ‘Lutheran’ belief in the power of the word – of
his word! To some extent he was perhaps justified in the belief that some
of his readers would accept his personal judgements as absolute values and
general truths.

The fundamental notion that sensitivity Empfindung can be transmitted

assumes that the models used to instruct would have regularities or
measurable aspects Gesetzlichkeiten which the instructor could point out
to the student in the form of rules that he should observe and accept as a
basis for his own creation of beautiful objects. Would these experiences
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 161

then have reproduced the Urbild of classical artists in the mind of the
student? Would he not have needed his own Urbild, or was it perhaps
replaced by the proportions of classical beauty?

Winckelmann’s theory of the educational process was basred on his wish

to act as a guide to help the student to experience the beauty of Hellenistic
art rather than in nature. By pointing out the aesthetic laws that governed
art-critical knowledge, the student artist would learn the laws that govern
aesthetic experience. These laws were: proportion, colouring, light and
shade, design and composition. By observing these ill-defined aspects on
objects of classical art, the student would, so Winckelmann thought,
become conscious of the ‘correct’ path to artistic excellence. There is an
illusion here of the static nature of beauty. This is surprising, because
Winckelmann claimed to have great sensitivity to the changing historical
aspects of art. The idea of inimitable art unnachahmbare Kunst is
contradicted by the assumption that imitation Nachahmung was the key to
the achievement of ideal art. And this ideal art was to be not a copy nor an
imitation, but an inspired re-creation of ancient art – of sculptures of
human forms that are by definition imitations in stone, clay or bronze of
soft tissues and limbs.

Winckelmann’s educational programme may be related to his urge to

instruct, to his desire to express in ecstatic words his own experience of
beauty - and what better target for his enthusiasm than German trainee
sculptors or painters who would, he thought, respond to his guidance.

The traditional path of artistic training in Germany, in Holland and in

Italy led from a long apprenticeship in an older artist’s studio to the
copying of other artist’s work. Then, once an artist had become proficient
as a copyist or engraver he might gain access to commissions and a
precarious livelihood as court painter or as an employee of an ecclesiastic
institution. It was the imitation of other artists’ work that was the
traditional path of artistic education and Winckelmann’s scheme was well
within the existing notions of training. 6

The idea of communicability Mitteilbarkeit, was at the root of Winckelmann’s

educational theories. He assumed, without ever developing the theory that
the impression of one person’s visual experience can be passed on to

6
Gottfried Keller describes such apprenticeship of a young painter in the 19th
century in his novel: ‘Der Grüne Heinrich’.(Ed. Walter Morgenthaler in Historisch
kritische Gottfried Keller-Ausgabe, Munich: Carl Hauser Verlag 2005)
162 Chapter Four

others by verbal exposition. Not only from one observer to another, but his
own experience of classical sculpture was to be the guiding principle of
the teaching of art and of art history to the German artists of his
generation. The practicality of this proposition was never established –
perhaps it was never meant to be realised – it may have been, like much of
Winckelmann’s texts, a purely rhetorical proposition.

The lasting approval of his Geschichte by his successors did not, as he had
wished, amount to a return to the classical ideal by the imitation of Greco-
Roman art by German artists. But instead it was his style and his language
that received acclaim. His rose-coloured view of classical antiquity was
accepted and further developed by some of his successors. It was not the
artistic community of the later century that shared his unstinting
admiration of late Hellenistic sculpture, but the travellers, the German
visitors to Italy who became his admirers and who echoed his enthusiasm.
However, these followers of fashionable German neoclassicism indulged
in the dream of a magic return to a simpler life, closer to nature and
perhaps to the freedom that they imagined to have been enjoyed by the
population of classical Greece. The transmission of aesthetic experience
through descriptive text was praised by his followers but it was never
imitated.

Immanuel Kant wrote in 1790 a clear and concise refutation of the idea of
the transmittability of aesthetic experience. Under the heading Von der
Mitteilbarkeit einer Empfindung’ he wrote:

The enjoyment of beauty is neither an enjoyment of a sensory experience

nor a matter of judgement nor is it the intellectualising contemplation of
ideas but it is purely speculation without purpose or principle as guideline.
The pleasure of beauty accompanies the common appreciation of an object
through imagination.

This categoric statement contradicts Winckelmann’s proposition that his

own experience of beauty could be passed on to others by his literary gift,
by his ability to put his emotional state into words. Winckelmann seems to
have regarded this process as a vehicle to give expression to his own urge
to instruct, his emotional need to use his didactic talent. Perhaps he had a
great longing to find a sympathetic audience, a great urge to be
understood, and perhaps to be loved. His urge to instruct can be seen as
Winckelmann’s Lust des Genusses (the joy of pleasure?), a way of
creating effectively, an ideology of art.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 163

Kant continues to refute the connection of artistic beauty with goodness or

with justice. He describes how the beauty of natural forms is more
dependable than the artificial products of art since the artist is able to
select, imitate, exaggerate or falsify natural objects. The most obvious
difficulty in Kant’s approach was also clearly seen by Kant himself: how
do we explain the way in which we are both subject to the norms of reason
and yet also the agents who institute those norms? How, after all, can we
be bound by the laws that we ourselves have made? Kant’s conception
required some account of how we institute norms and whether the norms
making up what we call ‘reason’ are not instituted by reason at all but
simply are what they are.

Immanuel Kant came face-to-face with this problem in his characteristically

radical way in the Critique of Judgement Kritik der Urteilskraft. The title
of the work as translated into English is misleading. Kant meant by Kritik
an analysis that did not have the negative or even pejorative connotation of
Critique (as in ‘criticize’ or ‘being critical’). He means something between
an assessment, or analysis, an appreciation rather than a detraction. And
the term Urteilskraft’is not well translated by ‘Judgement’ since Urteilskraft
includes the idea of the authority or the justification, the ideas behind the
making of value judgements. Urteilskraft also includes the institution of
norms and by these norms we can focus on the problem of how we go
about orienting ourselves in the moral and empirical order.

Judgements about the beautiful are reflective in Kant’s sense, but

classifying them as reflective only puts off answering the question about
why or whether such reflection is necessary for the apprehension of the
beautiful. These problems were already faced by Socrates in the fifth
century BC and remain unresolved to this day. The key to answering the
question has to do with the fact that judgements both about the beautiful
and the agreeable involve taste Geschmack and are thus subjective.

A more modern view is expressed by Marcus Käfer (1986) who takes a

view that is somewhat parallel to Kant on the subjectivity of sensory
perception. But he believes that sensory experience is governed by rules
that are logical. When he speaks of becoming conscious of beauty
Bewusstwerdung des Schönen he probably means something like Immanuel
Kant’s sensibility Empfindung. 7

7
Markus Käfer. 1986. Winckelmanns hermeneutische Prinzipien (Heidelberg:Karl
Winter Universitätsverlag)
164 Chapter Four

Since the experience of beauty, according to Käfer is an intellectual one it

is to be based on the observation of regularities or of rules. This brings us
back to Winckelmann who argued that Empfindung can be taught by
experts (such as himself) who were able to point out the beauty of classical
sculpture to the receptive student. Herder, by contrast was aware of the
multiplicity of beauty, of its subjectivity and the shortlived fashions of
aesthetic judgements when he wrote:
And when your head is full of a group you have fallen in love with, can
your field of view include the entirety of periodic changes of taste? To
organise them? To gently follow them? Separate out in every scene what is
of importance? Read first and learn to see! Moreover I know like you that
every generalised view, every general concept is but an abstraction.

In his analysis of the role of allegory in the German dramatic tragedies

Walter Benjamin writes scathingly of ideas of absolute judgements in art.
He might have had Winckelmann in mind when he wrote:8
For more than 100 years the dominance of an usurper rests upon the
philosophy of art; a usurper who came to power in the disturbances of the
Romanitic period. The courting of the romantic aestheticists over brilliant
and truly irresponsible realisation of absolute values has created in the
simplest historical debates meanings that have nothing in common with
the true matter than the name.

It was probably Winckelmann who introduced the irresponsible realisation

of an absolute value in his rather excessive and dogmatic praise of the art
of Hellenistic Rome which he considered to be classical Greek. Why did
the environment and the conditions of the Greek artists not continue to
have such a beneficent effect? It was not until more recent times that
Greece was governed from Istanbul by the Ottoman Turks who would
have regarded representational art as offensive and impious. Moreover,
other parts of southern Europe that had similar climatic conditions to
classical Greece e.g. Sicily or Andalusia did not develop significant large
stone sculpture.
Finally as the period of total enlighenment and freeedom arose in Greece,
art too became freer and nobler. The older style was based on the
application of rules that were based on nature but later they moved away
from nature and became idealistic. They worked more according to the

8
Walter Beenjamin.1978. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Suhrkamp
Taschenbuch Nr.225)
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 165

prescriptions of rules than about nature, because art had created its own
natural forms.

Winckelmann believed in the educational power of art and wrote: All arts
have a double purpose, they mean to entertain and to instruct. This was
written by a man who had been a schoolmaster for many hard years and
who regretted in later life that he had been unable to continue teaching
young men. He had many reasons for liking young men, but among them
was a passion to instruct. This was perhaps one of his truly Hellenic traits.
He had the gift of a true educator of putting his own enchantment into
ecstatic words; he had the ability to communicate his enthusiasm to his
hearers and readers. This was undoubtedly his major achievement and his
greatest success. Winckelmann’s determination to be an educator is
reflected in everything he wrote and it may have been the source of his
major impact on his contemporaries.

As an historian he had a great longing to be understood by his readers, a

drive that may have been influenced by the frustrations he experienced
during his years of labour as librarian and schoolmaster. His descriptions
of sculpture were reflections of his need to communicate his feelings, the
need to explain himself. It is perhaps the single most important aspect of
his work and might well be an expression of his sexual frustrations, of his
innermost urge to be understood and loved. And this need caused him to
return repeatedly to his texts and make minor improvements. This seems
to indicate that the process of description was somehow a pleasurable one
(perhaps a cathartic one?). The quality of Winckelmann’s experience of
late classical sculpture is, however, of major importance. By ‘quality’ I
mean the enthusiasm with which he responded to large Hellenistic
sculpture; an enthusiasm which inspired many of his friends and
contemporaries, as well as succeeding generations of German literati.

Winckelmann’s planned aesthetic education was not implemented in his

life time, but his educational program was generally accepted when
romantic classicism became popular in the subsequent generations. His
clients were, according to his sarcastic and derogatory remarks,
exclusively recruited from the minor nobility of the German states.
Winckelmann thought of aesthetic education rather than artistic education
since he never seriously engaged with the technical problems of the
sculptors whose works he criticised. As to the techniques and the
preparation of the materials needed to create marble sculptures he
remained ignorant.
166 Chapter Four

Art, in his mind, was a spiritual and aesthetic matter and not a matter of
craft and techniques. The modern sculptor should learn his craft by
observing the ancient models guided by Winckelmann and not by wielding
the mallet and chisel. It may have been his success as a guide and the
praise he received from his clients that gave him the illusion that he could
teach artists how to return to an ideal of gracefulness and beauty. It was
his misfortune that he was unable to attract artists to his lectures – his
friend Mengs was the only artist with whom he maintained an intensive
correspondence The educational plans of Winckelmann were unrealistic
and his emotional response to ancient sculpture was communicable
(mitteilbar) only to persons who were already sensitive to art and who
accepted the aesthetic theories that he presented as definite and absolute
judgements. The next section will explore the wider implications of the
problems and fissures in his reasoning.

4.3 Enigmas and Textual Contradictions

From the eighteenth century to the recent past Winckelmann has been
highly regarded by the German cognoscenti as the founder of art criticism
and art philosophy. The Winkelmannn Society at Stendal has encouraged
much valuable and positive critical work. However, the shortcomings and
failures of his interpretations have often been disregarded and it may be
timely to redress the balance and to consider in what way Winckelmann’s
aesthetic theories and judgements showed weakness or inadequacy. It is,
of course, easy to make critical judgements with hindsight and
Winckelmann was without doubt the forerunner and fashionable exponent
of Neo-classicism. He can be seen as a catalyst of the formation of a
German national culture and its nationalistic aberrations. He was
celebrated as a German as well as a connoisseur of antiquity and his
enthusiasm for large sculpture was further developed by succeeding
generations of German archaeologists. The most important ones were
Schliemann at Mycenae and Tyrins, Dörpfeld and Karo at Troy, and Carl
Humann who excavated Pergamum and Ephesus in 1879. The material
remains that were uncovered by these German archaeological teams were
confirming rather than contradicting Winckelmann’s impassionate view of
antique art. The reason why they discovered so many beautiful things was
because that was what they were searching for and material that they
thought did not fit Winckelmann’s theories (such as ceramics, mosaics or
fragments of reliefs) was often discarded or ignored.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 167

Winckelmann’s method of stylistic analysis as a basis for the dating of

classical sculpture is suspect since without archaeological or even literary
support his arguments for the historical sequence of styles can not be
accepted as valid. And where inscriptions are found that give names of
artists we can not be sure that they are true, nor that they were
contemporaneous. Booty and homology may present additional problems:
a series of statue bases has been found in Pergamon that carry the
inscribed names of famous sculptors – Myron, Praxiteles and others. They
may have supported sculptures that had been collected by the kings of
Pergamon. But Greek names are often repeated in later generations as an
act of piety or commemoration. There existed a sculptor called Myron in
the fourth century BC (attested by an inscriptionn at Olympia) and there
was another Myron in the later second century at Pergamon. Names such
as Polykles and Timarchides alternated for several generations and the
Greek tradition of naming a son after his father or grandfather ensures that
such sequences were common. On the basis of our scant evidence it is
often impossible to tell which master is involved.

The Belvedere Apollo retained its powerful magic for Winckelmann as the
highest ideal of art and so did the Laocoön. But these two sculptures are
unlike in appearance, ethos and expression. How could Winckelmann
place them on the same aesthetic plane? The same style? Winckelmann
declared that the Apollo Belvedere was an example of Greek art among
the Romans of the Empire (Geschichte 12.3.11) and the Laocoön was to be
dated as a work of the time of Alexander, four hundred years earlier
(Geschichte 10.1.11-17).Yet he tells us that they are still in the same
period of style. Perhaps the stylistic criteria that Winckelmann had
introduced as critical markers were so imprecise as to be useless. 9

Distrust of literary and stylistic evidence is often voiced and the

minimalist position may lead to excessive scepticism but this may be
preferable to perpetuating phantoms of a Greek past without reliable
substance. Some scepticism is advisable when examining classical
sculpture. Repair and re-working of sculptures took place already in
antiquity so that monuments, although untouched by Renaissance or
modern restorers may no longer preserve their original appearance even as
they come out of the ground. The Attalids, the rulers of Anatolia, for
instance, sent master masons to Olympia to copy and improve sculptural
masterpieces so that we can not be sure, in stylistic terms, whether we are

9
e..g.the shape of the eyebrow ridges.
168 Chapter Four

looking at an original or at an ancient copy of a classical work or perhaps

at a late Hellenistic restoration. Some classical works may betray their
Hellenistic date by the style of carving, particularly the drapery. In
addition, we are familiar with the Greek practice of refurbishing earlier
monuments to rededicate them when the occasion demanded – as
epitomised by the so-called Monument of Agrippa at Athens which was
previously part of a Pergamene chariot group.

Where literary references exist (e.g. mention by Pliny or Strabo) there is

no reference to the size of the objects they mention and we can not be sure
whether they were describing terracottas, small bronzes, or over life-size
marbles. Where similar scenes to the Belvedere marbles occur on coins, on
engraved stones or terracottas we cannot be sure whether they were earlier
or later than the related marbles. They might have been models or copies
or independent works of art.

Winckelmann’s historicising of antique sculpture had one other important

dimension. His Geschichte represented ideal sculpture as an integral part
of the fabric of Hellenistic culture. His success in giving so-called Greek
sculpture this added resonance, paradoxically depended on his analysis not
being consistently or truly historical in the modern sense. He represented
the Greek ideal as simultaneously the product of a long-lost moment in the
early development of human culture and as a supreme fiction that stood
above human history. It could only be imagined within the context of a
past that was in some sense also ideal or allegorical. He seems to have
been unaware of the tension between ancient art as an ideal and at the
same time as a historical feature that stood above history. Perhaps Greek
art was part of an idealised past that was itself an art form. If classical
Greece had been a uniquely privileged moment in human history then
Greek art, as a complete expression of what was possible would have been
truly inimitable and thus no longer relevant as an example to the modern
artist.

Winckelmann’s belief in the superiority of Greek culture was the

foundation of his theories.. His famous characterization of Greek art as
noble simplicity and silent grandure edle Einfalt und stille Grösse was a
manifestation of his belief that classical art expresses not only the physical
beauty of the Greeks themselves but also their personal moral and civic
nobility. By portraying the noble character of its citizens, Greek artists
revealed to Winckelmann an ethical ideal of humanity: the beautiful man,
free and purposeful, able to develop all his faculties and interests without
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 169

hindrance in harmonious balance with the natural world and with the
divine. For Winckelmann the greatness of the Greek character can be seen
in the Laocoön whose stoic calm dynamically reflects his control over
inner turmoil, restraint over pain and passion.

Winckelmann’s aesthetic theory demanded that the objects of his praise

were Greek and not Roman or Etruscan. The achievements of earlier
Greek sculptors of the fifth and fourth centuries BC are regarded today by
many scholars with increasing respect and admiration. These works were
created many centuries before the sculptures that Winckelmann regarded
as the pinnacle of plastic art.

Classical sculptures, which today stand in their creamy monochrome, are

thought to have been painted in strong mineral colours in antiquity and the
creamy elegance (Grazie) that Winckelmann found in them was the result
of erosion during thousands of years of exposure to the elements rather
than the intention of the sculptors. Winckelmann chose as his examples
sculptures that depict humanity in moments of extreme suffering but there
is a lack of empathy in his text with the victims of the wrath of the Gods.

Winckelmann did not claim to be a philosopher and there are few ideas in
his writings on art, apart from his style, that can be called original. He was
seeking to rediscover the classical ideal of beauty by claiming an
unprecedented history-based connoisseurship. There is a fundamental
dichotomy between his seemingly logical, even technical approach to the
art of antiquity and his descriptive texts, where he used phrases that are
more like impassioned acclamations of the enthusiasm he felt for these
large sculptures. From his first publication, the Gedanken to the last, he
can be seen to have a commitment to the concept of an Hellenic ideal, of
an enduring value of ancient art which he formulated in the form of an
aesthetic of the beautiful masculine body. Writing about the Greek
sculptor Winckelmann said: He created [objects of] sensual beauty with
sublime aspects. From the first he took the humanism, from the latter the
divine. Die sinnliche Schönheit, die erhabenen Züge, von jener nahm er
das Menschliche, von dieser das Göttliche. He argued that the works he so
fervently admired were both naturalistic and at the same time idealistic. He
believed that beauty Schönheit is at the centre of all art, but this centre is
elusive and Raimund Fridrich describes how the fundamental figure of
Winckelmann’s aesthetic is not the circle but the ellipse. He comments on
Winckelmann’s statement:
170 Chapter Four

The forms of the beautiful human body are defined by lines that constantly
change their centre and in extension never form a circle; they are simpler
but also more varied than a circle, which, how ever great or small it may
be has but one centre and can include circles or be included in others.

The human figure is neither circular nor elliptical and it is not helpful to
seek to describe the complex shapes of human bodies in geometric terms.
However, it is undeniably Winckelmann’s most important contribution to
historical writing that he liberated the history of art from the biographical
approach of his predecessors, principally the Italian art-critics Vasari and
Bellori. It is perhaps Winckelmann’s greatest achievement that his
definition of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur was only truly appropriate
to earlier classical Greek works that he had never seen. However, it could
not be applied seriously to his examples of late Hellenistic or Roman
sculpture. Perhaps we could echo Goethe’s idea when he described
Winckelmann as the new Columbus, foreseeing the New World before he
had discovered it.

The descriptive texts created by Winckelmann form a secondary

hermeneutic phase. He reinterpreted the visual image in poetic terms, in a
fervent language much admired in his day. Our own interpretation of his
text in its historical environment adds a further stage to the sequence of
interpretations. This hermeneutic chain obscures the original intent of the
sculptors. Perhaps the impetus was an instruction from the patron or the
town council or the ruler with the intention to beautify the agora or a
temple platform of their city. The preservation of Hellenistic art was due
to Roman leaders who were eager to display captured or copied sculptures
that looked Greek. The display of these works in the gardens and estates of
the nobility was thought to enhance their status.

The system of cultural determinism that underlies Winckelmann’s theories

seems today artificial and personal. He selected examples of sculpture that
he declares to be archaic because of their rigid and stylised design. Then
he asserts that the next stage in the evolution of styles is one of ‘heroic
grandure’ and again he selects sculptures that he calls the high or the
sublime style. And this group evolves into the graceful beautiful style.
Again he selects examples by no other criteria than the ones he has
decided to be significant. There is no literary or historical evidence to
support his theories, nor does he succeed in his profound scanning of
Greek literature to find a source that would support or match his
assumption that classical art evolved in these discreet styles.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 171

The history of art has developed greatly in the centuries that separate
Winckelmann’s work from modern art criticism and the accusation of
‘hindsight’ can be levelled at any attempt to denigrate or disparage his
achievements. But all historical writing, by definition is created with
hindsight and any evaluation of past writing has to take account of modern
taste and current understanding of the difficult and ill-defined terminology
that is at the root of art criticism.

Winckelmann’s achievements have been criticised even during his

lifetime, for instance by Christian Gottlieb Heyne who regarded the
historical part of the Geschichte as useless so gut als unbrauchbar.
Ludwig Curtius (1874-1954) wrote: ‘Science, our science of this century is
far distant from Winckelmann and hardly any of his statements can be
accepted today‘. And further:‘ He is half sober-erudite, and half a religious
writer of hymns. Even his faithful biographer and editor Joseph Eiselein
thought that his contribution to literature was the only aspect that can be
regarded as an achievement. Max Kunze wrote more recently: ‘It is, of
course, easy to regard Winckelmann’s work as inadequate in the light of
modern research, however, the fact remains that his influence on the
cognoscenti of his day was fundamental - an undeniable achievement.’

The general approbation and acceptance of his theories can be explained

as being embedded in the political and economic situation of the German-
speaking world at that time. The churches and the traditional nobilities had
lost much of their land, their power and influence, and a new group of
educated citizens were searching for models of ‘Good Taste’ and standards
of aesthetics that were not connected to the religious or the political
authorities. Winckelmann’s influence can be seen in the attitude of some
modern art historians, for instance Peter Kranz (1975) who gave a
presentation to his university audience about human representations in
antique art. His method is directly based on Winckelmann. He selects only
stone sculptures of males and then he develops theories of aesthetic
evolution. Moreover, Kranz believes in the existence of Greek originals of
Roman sculpture and he dates the statue of the so-called Kasseler Apollo
to the time of 450 BC, but then he adds in a footnote, that it is really a
marble copy of the second century AD.

In an age when the barriers of language, of cost and of the vagaries of the
book-trade frequently impeded the circulation of controversial material, it
was the journals that spread new discoveries, ideas and controversies
around Europe. A second aspect of the journals’ cultural impact was their
172 Chapter Four

unceasing advocacy of the new, ‘enlightened’ ideals of tolerance and

intellectual objectivity. Wieland and Bayle, Heinse and Le Clerk, Basnage
de Beauval, Barnard and numerous lesser figures, were all tireless
champions of religious and intellectual freedom – albeit usually within
definite limits of what was acceptable in religious and political matters. So
powerful was their drive towards impartial judgements and presentation
that it led at times to excessive proneness to detachment, almost a fear of
taking sides or taking a clear position. In this environment of open debate
and controversy, Winckelmann’s certainties and convictions are surprising
and this was perhaps the reason why his writings were never published in
periodicals or journals. His emotional need and search for certainties in art
as in life may have influenced him to decide to convert from the
uncertainties of Protestantism to the more clearly defined Roman Catholic
doctrines.

Winckelmann’s principal assumption was that the Greek sculptor had an

Urbild in mind which he skilfully transferred to the stone. Michelangelo
(1475 – 1564) described in a number of sonnets the way he saw in the
rough stone, the image he was to create by liberating it from the
surrounding material. This was, perhaps the source, the Urbild that
Winckelmann had in mind. It is not known whether Winckelmann had
access to the sonnets but his command of Italian would have been more
than adequate to interpret the poem of Michelangelo:

Just as by taking away, Lady, one places in hard, alpine stone

A living figure, that grows the more, the more the stone
diminishes: so some good works are hidden
for the soul, that still trembles,by the excess of its own flesh
with its rude, hard and tough skin.You alone can take away
from my outermost parts for in me there is no will nor strength of myself.)
(my approximate translation)10

Winckelmann suggested that it was not only the natural beauty of the
Greeks that informed the ancient sculptor but he argued that the Greek
artist also superimposed an imaginary ideal, a spiritual image, the Urbild.

10
Si come per levar, Donna, si pone
In pietra alpestra e dura
Una viva figura,
Che là piú cresce, u’piú la pietra scema
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 173

A number of problems arise from Winckelmann’s terminology: first, it is

not clear what he understood by a spiritual image. In what way did he
think of the human form or its image as spiritual? And if the form was
‘purely designed in the intellect’ how did the artist make this intellectual
image compatible with the limitations imposed by the material, the tools
and the instruction of his sponsors? There is another difficulty here of
understanding what Winckelmann meant by Urbild. Was it an image or
the imagined mental model, perhaps the archetype? Michelangelo’s model
hidden in the stone? Perhaps he meant that the sculptor, like many artists,
should have a clear image in mind, a vision of beauty which he then
attempts to translate into the object or artefact that we can admire. The
images that Winckelmann himself admired so greatly were late classical
allegories of nature. Similarly he could have interpreted the marble
creations of Michelangelo in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence [the
Medici Tombs of 1460] as worthy successors of classical art. In Rome he
could have seen Michelangelo’s Moses, and in Florence the Pietá and the
enormous sculpture of David. But he did not make the connection from
classical models to Renaissance art. As far as his conception of art history
was concerned, after Greco-Roman classical sculpture there was only
decline.

There is little evidence, in fact, that Winckelmann thought of art as a

profound interpretation of nature. It was not nature itself that was to be
represented but an alegory of nature. Already in his first publication of
1745, he praised Allegory as the true path whereby art in his day could
recover its truth and integrity. Yet allegory was for Winckelmann affected
by images drawn from nature and his last work, the Attempt at an Allegory
pursued the same idea. In this curious theory nature was to be poetically
heightened, given nobler stature by the artist; a notion that became popular
among painters of the Romantic style.

Perhaps here lies the almost prophetic quality of Winckelmann. He

probably felt that his own vision of the allegorical aspects of art were
universally valid. One can argue that all art is allegorical since it expresses
the vision of the artist even where it is representational. However, the
subjectivity of allegorical interpretations was ignored by Winckelmann.
The mythology of the sculptures, the legends they are meant to represent,
whether the Apollo, or Laokoön, or the Niobe, were not investigated by
Winckelmann who thought of allegorical expression only in terms of its
transformation of natural forms into beautiful art with possible moral or
ethical implications. The mythology of Heracles was the only instance
174 Chapter Four

among the images he admired where he recounted the mythological

background.

Identification of gods and heroes was important to Winckelmann and he

lists attributes that were used to explain their identity to the cognoscenti.
For him it was like a game, a process of decoding the symbols so as to
arrive at the name of the personage. He published an attempt at a general
Allegory in 1766 where he lists Greek gods and heroes, their attributes,
characteristic postures and representations on antique coins, intaglios and
vases. A compendium of allegorical imagery, however without reference
to the meaning these attributes might have had in antiquity.

In the second, extended edition of the Geschichte of 1776 he writes (p.

303- 4):
The calm and quiet [of sculptures] can be seen as an expression of virtue,
which the Greeks sought to observe in their gestures and actions in asmuch
as even a fast walk to some extent was seen as offending against concepts
of propriety, one saw in it a form of cheekyness.

The calm that he found in the marble sculptures is, however, contradicted
by his descriptive text which emphasises the art of the Greek sculptor to
express strong emotions. He writes about the Apollo:
The wise artist who intended to create an image of the most beautiful of
the gods placed anger in the nose of the Apollo where, according to the old
poets is the seat of anger. The Vatican Apollo was to show the God in
anger about such a minor victory and contempt. He has expressed it in the
lower lip which is pulled upward which causes the chhin to be raised and
the nostrils to swell.

What Winckelmann saw in the sculpture of the Apollo was a highly

personal and emotional vision of the deity. He also regarded the Laocoön
group as being calm and free of emotion since he managed to ignore the
anguish expressed in every inch of the Laocoön figure. Similarly he
considered the suffering Niobe’s anxiety and her desire to protect her
daughter as being ‘unspecific.’ He admires the absence of emotion in the
sculptures, but his descriptive text shows that emotion plays an important
part in his experience and assessment of art.

His detailed description of five large sculptures seems somewhat

inadequate since in Rome, Naples and Florence there were literally
hundreds of marble sculptures available in private and public collections
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 175

that could have broadened the base of his argument. The question remains
whether Winckelmann’s substantive cognitive and ethical insights were
really generated through his intensive engagement with the observation of
ancient Greek sculpture. Was he not perhaps looking for proof of his pre-
formed theories by examining only those aspects of his carefully selected
objects that would support his ideas? Might not an intuitive, aesthetic
response always contain an element of enthralment to the pleasurable or
exciting or even disconcerting sensations felt in the presence of a work of
art? Or does the pleasure derived from its observation testify to something
lodged in the object of art itself and in the culture that produced it?
Winckelmann’s project is based on the belief that the intensity and depth
of his response to ancient sculpture was more than a mere enchantment
and he believed that such a response was central to our understanding of
Greek art and of the aesthetic values embodied in this art. These points,
however, are not argued but they are rather made strongly implicit in his
presentation leaving the reader to spell out for him or herself what the
relation might be between the personal, the aesthetic and the historical
insights being offered.

There is a further problematic aspect of the Geschichte. It is the inability

of Winckelmann to provide a continuous narrative – he is not a story-
teller, nor a historian but more an observer of what he assumes to have
been an artistic environment that changed in discreet steps from
immaturity to perfection and decline. He does not link the objects that he
admired to their socio-political environment, nor to their precursors. Nor
does he tell us of the great evolutionary processes that have, in his view,
ended in the large sculptures he adamired. German literature in
Winckelmann’s time contains many examples of the epistemological
importance of the story-telling tradition. Lessing’s Nathan, for instance,
can envelop his enlightened philosophy in a story and the young Werther
tells us of his problems in an impellingly argued narrative. Winckelmann,
however, does not find a way to express the continuing evolution of taste
and art in history; he is not concerned with the links between the periods
that he tries to identify and to separate. He does so by finding small
differences in style such as the curve and shape of eyebrows which he
observes carefully. Winckelmann does not distinguish between knowledge
based on his experience and knowledge based on intuition – he treats
observation and emotion with the same verbal intensity, never
distinguishing between certitude and opinion. The history of art, in the
modern sense, is not primarily concerned with the division of art into
periods and fashions with fixed boundaries but is today seen as a
176 Chapter Four

continuing process that joins rather than separates periodic changes in

style.

In the fourth chapter of the Geschichte Winckelmann lists the antique

copper and bronze cast sculptures that he knows had existed in Rome,
Florence and Venice. He gives a detailed account of the process of casting
but he omits to tell us of the way the clay model (or core) was covered and
sculpted in wax in order to obtain hollow cast sculptures when the molten
metal displaced the thin layer of wax. There are few large metal sculptures
preserved that are older than Roman times, because bronze and copper
were important military materials and bronze sculptures were readily re-
cast into daggers, spear –points and arrowheads, breast plates and helmets.
But Winckelmann does not tell us about the re-use of metal, he believes
that the extant bronze sculptures were cast from the ores of copper and tin.

The Geschichte then gives details of the late classical wall paintings that
had recently been excavated at Pompeii and at Herculaneum; he describes
four small paintings and he discusses whether the painters were Greeks or
Romans. He quotes Pliny who tells of two Greek painters who were
decorating the interior of the temple of Ceres in Rome. Pliny believed that
the painters were freed slaves. This notion supported the theory that the
freedom of the artist is an essential basis for the creation of great art
(Geschichte 4.35). Winckelmann complained that the decline of art in the
period of the Roman Republic was due to the fact that the artrists were
regarded as inferior artisans. This view is also reflected in his lack of
regard for the creators of the Greco-Roman mosaic floors. He quotes Plato
to show that the Greek sculptures were in fact painted but he did not
develop the idea. Perhaps his notion of silent grandeur would have seemed
inappropriate to gaily painted works of sculpture.

In classical Rome, the preservation of ancient artefacts, ranging from

everyday goods to classical sculpture, corresponds with an interest in
antiquities in our own time. Nietzsche diagnosed that his age was ‘infected
with a consuming historical fever’ and since his days the efforts to
preserve the past have steadily increased. The preservation and concern
with objects of the past has roots in the Homeric tales.11 Homer shows his
concern for objects of the mythological past and the preservation of
objects of ‘heroic antiquity’. It is important to note that the grip of the past

11
Jonas Gethlein ’ Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and Odyssey’, Article
in the Journal of Hellenic Studies vol.128 of 2008.
 Winckelmann’s Profound Limitation 177

in Greece and in ancient Rome was not significantly different from

modern ‘historical fever’. In our age, material remains are valued as
testimonies of the past and are often seen as evidence of an idealised and
distorted past. The current heritage crusade leads to ‘musealisation’.
Objects are taken out of their original context, they are collected and
assembled in groups. The boom in museums and in restoration
programmes is grounded in the notion that the past was significantly
different from and superior to the present. In Germany, it is in the axial
age, say from 1750 to 1800, that the heightened awareness of the ‘Golden
Age’ of a foreign country became relevant. It was then that antiquarianism
became respectable and dominant, and made Nietzsche grumble: ‘There is
a degree of sleeplessness, of ruminating, of historical awareness by which
the living is harmed and perishes, be it a man, a people or a culture’.

There is an additional epistemological problem that pervades the

historiography of Winckelmann. He is unaware of the limitations inherent
in his view of antiquity, unaware of the general diachronic uncertainties of
language and meanings that are inherent in the use of historical sources.
He quotes Greek literary texts without realising that the written records are
fallible, that they express the view of the author at that time in an ancient
language, and that the texts were written for purposes that we can only
guess at. These linguistic uncertainties are additional to the problems
involved in the translation of classical Greek into the terminology of the
erudite German language of his century. Winckelmann accepts the views
expressed by ancient authors (particularly Plato and Cicero) although their
views cannot be regarded as ‘true’ and their writings should not be used to
support art-historical theories.

It was customary, Décultot tells us, to ascribe two innovations to

Winckelmann: first, the systematic historicising of ancient art, and
secondly, the investigation of the origin of the represented themes of
Greek mythology, a preliminary stage of modern iconography. Neither of
these two aspects of Winckelmnann’s métier can be accepted today since
his historicizing consisted of selecting objects of Hellenistic art to support
his pre-defined theories when there are truly hundreds of other sculptures
that do not fit his scheme. And the second claim, the interpretation of the
iconography cannot be attributed to Winckelmann since he copies from
classical sources (e.g. Hesiod, Homer, Apollodorus, Apollonius, Plutarch
and Ovid).
178 Chapter Four

Winckelmann’s Geschichte is fascinating now because of its appropriation

by later art theory and art history. It clearly functioned as the origin and
foundation of a new kind of history of art based on the theory of
systematic historical development of styles. It seems to usher in a new
historicising outlook that took over the understanding of the visual arts in
the early nineteenth century. At the same time it resolutely defies being
assimilated within this tradition. Winckelmann loved the classical past for
its own sake as he loved sculpture and beautiful men for their own sake.
He definitely invented a highly influential paradigm but the larger logic
became something quite different when, forty or fifty years later, it was
conceived as initiating a break with previous understandings of the
position of art in history. His inheritors saw him as a transitional figure
whose conception of art was as yet ‘incompletely historical’.
Winckelmann’s writing laid the foundation for later art history and the
historicising of the visual arts that went with it. But at the same time it
throws into question the monuments erected on these foundations.
 CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

The importance of Winckelmann’s work to the development of a philosophy

and history of art Kunstgeschichte is not in doubt. He created a believable
framework by successfully merging historical sources with the aesthetic
experiences of the sensitive observer of classical art. Winckelmann
himself wrote in his Remarks about the imitation of design and
architecture of antiquity: ‘My greatest pleasure in the explanation of
ancient art were the instances where I could improve on or clarify the
ancient texts.‘

His descriptive prose introduced a poetic, even lyrical tone, reflecting his
emotional response to the sight and the examination of classical models.
He saw himself as intermediary, as an educator pointing to the beauty of
classical art. At the same time he aimed to make his literary readers aware
of the development of styles in classical sculpture. His critical attitude to
other pre-Christian art from Egypt or the Near East was imperfect since he
was unable to see many examples of their art. He was unable to travel to
regions beyond Italy; his precarious financial situation ruled out such
expeditions.

Two factors dominate Winckelmann’s contribution to German literature:

the first lies in his ability to describe his emotional response to the visual
arts. He was the first and probably the most important German writer who
explained in glowing prose the feeling of exultation that he experienced
when confronting examples of classical sculpture. His second and no less
important contribution was his ability to redefine and organise the views
of his predecessors (principally Junius, Caylus, Vasari and Bellori) to form
a coherent vision of the development of styles in Greco-Roman marble
sculpture.

His methods, however, and therefore his conclusions cannot be accepted in

the light of modern classicism and modern philosophy of art. Three
problems lie at the root of the doubts raised by his critics. The principal
180 Chapter Five

criticism that affected all aspects of his work lies in his uncritical
acceptance of classical sources, sources that he selected to support his
aesthetic theories. Winckelmann’s attitude to classical history was part of
the diachronic Hellenistic utopia that he shared with a number of German
writers of the time. Aebli, writing in 2007 about Winckelmann’s historicity
writes:
The historicity of Winckelmann consists in the fact that he ascribes to the
Greeks a constitution and the creation of a social utopia. He denies other
historical periods and regions their ability to accomplish what had
characterised the classiccal Greek achievement before other people and
periods.1

It is true that Winckelmann did not value the great achievements of earlier
cultures, particularly those that were based on irrigation and cereal
farming. In the Nile Valley and in Mesoppotamia the state organized the
labour-force and developed technologies that created great monuments of
religious art. These works of colossal art were disregarded by
Winckelmann as he failed to recognize their influence on Greek art and
architecture. The second criticism, perhaps related to the first, is the
personal nature of his aesthetic judgements which make his work
propagandist rather than analytical. The third difficulty, perhaps of lesser
importance, arises from the nature of his ambitious title Die Geschichte
der Kunst im Altertum; a title that implies the existence, in classical times
of a process of aesthetic evolution in clearly definable stages of growth
and decline. He declared that some small changes in the way the eyebrow
region of sculptured heads were prepared were indicators of this evolution.

There is a fundamental dichotomy between the absolute aesthetic value

that he declared to be at the core of all art and the idea of progress, of
advancement through stages that he thought culminated in ideal beauty.
This progression, he declared, had come to an end with the absorption of
Greek culture and art in the early years of the Roman Empire (He is
unaware of Byzantine art). He voices no doubts about the validity of his
judgements and there are no shades of confidence in his interpretation of
ancient society. His scathing criticism of his opponents as scribblers
Scribenten reinforces the objection to his method and to his judgments.

1
Daniel Aebli. Winckelmanns Entwicklungslogik der Kunst. (Frankfurt a. M:
2007), p. 260.
 Conclusion 181

In her article Élizabeth Décultot describes his forceful condemnation of

all connoisseurs of classical art who had not been to Rome: e.g. Caylus,
von Hagedorn, and his friend Öser, art critics who could only have seen
what Winckelmann thought were minor objects of classical art that were
on display in Germany. Winckelmann thought that only in Rome could
one see the true greatness of Greek art. 2

Winckelmann, notwithstanding the shortcomings of his approach as

discussed in this study, had responded to Voltaire’s turn towards a
philosophy of history by developing a history of art. In his first publication
Gedanken (1754) he suggested that it was important to distinguish between
what was useful nützlich in history and what was pretty and beautiful artig
und schön. Winckelmann’s major work the History of Art in Antiquity
Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums of 1764 achieved the following:

- moving away from the biographical approach, from the history of

artists towards explainig the essence of art as changing aspects of
beauty.
- abandoning chronology for the sake of exploring the essence of form
and appearance.
-Expressing in the German language some elements of Latin rhetoric,
especially in the description of emotions.

After his untimely death two literary figures were prominent in the
preservation and the furtherance of his work. Foremost among his
followers was Johann Hermann von Riedesel, Freiherr zu Eisenbach
(1740-1785) whose friendship with Winckelmann was the prelude to the
publication by the next generation of literary critics of the collected works
of Winckelmann. 3 Riedesel was an author of travel literature; he wrote a
Companion to Sicily and a guide to travel in Greece. His art-critical views
were less emphatic than those of his mentor but he followed in the same
general attitude of praise for Hellenistic sculptures.

The second important pupil and successor of Winckelmann’s work was

Johann Jacob Volkmann (1732-1803) whose travel guide was taken by
Goethe in his luggage when he travelled to Italy. Like Riedesel, Volkmann
kept his focus on the visual arts, perhaps in the process of passing on to the

2
Elizabeth Décultot, article in Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte, ed. by Ulrich
Pfüsterer (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2007), p.12.
3
Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke,12 vols. ed. by Joseph Eiselein (Donaueschingen:
1825-9; repr. Osnabrück 1925).
182 Chapter Five

next generation some of Winckelmann’s literary heritage sein Gedankengut.

In 1805 Goethe published 27 letters that Winckelmann had addressed to
Berendis, under the title Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert: in Briefen
und Aufsätzen. 4 Winckelmann’s heritage was thus assured; however, his
art historical and critical views and his aim to become guide and mentor of
the sculptors of the German and Italian schools remained unfulfilled.

Admiration of classical models, however, was adopted by successive

generations of sculptors, painters and architects in the development of the
Neo-classical style that endured throughout the next century. In
architecture, classical motifs were dominating the façades of the grand
new museums (e.g. the British Museum) and pillared façades and porticos
even became a feature of churches. (e.g. La Madeleine in Paris, modelled
after the Roman ‘Maison Carrée’ at Nîmes, with its Corinthian pillars.)
Rome remained the centre of marble sculpture, and Bertel Thorvaldsen
(1770-1844) employed 40 assistant sculptors in his studio there. The
Venetian Antonio Canova (1757-1822) established his workshops in
Rome and he also worked in Paris where he was charged with preparing a
bust of Napoleon in the best neo-classical style. His famous sculpture
‘Three Graces’ stands in the National Galleries of Scotland and many
more of his sculptures can be found at the Canova Museum at Possagno
(Veneto) in Italy. The Danish sculptor Johannes Wiedewelt (1731-1802)
travelled to Rome in 1754 where he shared a studio with Piranesi. These
neo-classical artists added a sentimental and often ‘honeyed’ aspect to
classicism that was not present in Hellenistic works, nor can we find
sentimentality in Winckelmann’s descriptive text. Thus the core of
Winckelmann’s experience was somewhat broadened, popularised and at
times exploited by the next two generations of sculptors. Finally, it should
be noted that Neo-classicism coexisted throughout much of its later
development with the seemingly opposite tendency of Romanticism. But
far from being distinct and separate, these two styles intermingled in
complex ways. What Winckelmann had begun as a profound personal
vision of excellence evolved during much of the following century and the
‘inimitable Beauty’ that he had discovered in classical proportions of the
human form became an aspect of ‘Good Taste’ north and south of the
Alps.

4
First edition in Tübingen: by Cotta,1805.
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