THE HISTORY OF ART HISTORY: WINCKELMANN

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1719-1768) was a German scholar who spent his most productive years in Italy. It is difficult to characterize his accomplishment without risking hyperbole; Winckelmann was "the inventor of scientific archaeology; author of the first modern history of art; initiator and model of two centuries of unexcelled German humanistic scholarship; virtual founder and arch-practitioner of Romantic aestheticism; and a radical proto-republican and self-made man in the very citadels of aristocratic absolutism. He was a great force in the history of ideas and sentiments, and his private life fulfilled an extravagant and once revolutionary dream of ascendance shared by a new aristocracy of talent, beauty, and virtue on both sides of the Atlantic."ⁱ

In crucial ways an innovator, Winckelmann also had his traditionalist side. He reenergized and redirected the venerable European conviction that classical civilization was the norm, creating space for the the concept to develop further and, surprisingly, to do service in the larger cause of promoting social change.

Following an assessment of Winckelmann's predecessors and his accomplishment, the latter part of this chapter traces some of the permutations of the classical ideal through the nineteenth century.

Prologue: Winckelmann's Predecessors.

Winckelmann was not oblivious to earlier efforts to gather and publish information about the artistic achievements of antiquity. Continuously available since they were first written, but for long neglected, the relevant chapters in Pliny the Elder's Natural History served as the basis for the account of Greek and Roman art incorporated into Lorenzo Ghiberti's Commentarii. Other evidence had survived, of course, in writings from antiquity. Although the De Sculptura (Florence, 1504) of the Neapolitan humanist Pomponius Gauricus is largely theoretical, the writer did supply data extracted from Pausanias and Philostratus the Elder, not to mention rhetorical themes derived from Quintilian and Cicero.

Giorgio Vasari excluded biographies of ancient artists from his Lives. Yet after the appearance of the first edition in 1550 he evidently felt that something was needed. In the enlarged 1568 version he included a long prefatory letter by Giovanni Battista Adriani on ancient painters and sculptors, which is, however, largely a précis of Pliny, with some supplementary gleanings.ⁱⁱ This ploy of first summarizing Pliny, and then "folding in" some material gathered unsystematically from other authors, continued through the sixteenth century and beyond.

A major step forward was taken by the erudite Franciscus Junius the Younger (1591-1677), the author of De pictura veterum.ⁱⁱⁱ Of Huguenot origin, he received an excellent classical education from his father, Franciscus Junius the Elder who was active both as a Calvinist minister and professor. Franciscus the Younger spent his formative years at Leiden in Holland. In 1621 he joined the household of Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, one of the most cultivated men in Europe.^iv The earl's library was the ideal setting for Junius' scholarly endeavors, which addressed Germanic and Anglo-Saxon philology as well as ancient art sources. By 1628 he was at work on his Catalogus, a lexicon of ancient and medieval artists and their works not published until after his death. The material assembled for this lexicon also contributed to his more systematic work De pictura veterum (1637), dedicated to Charles I. In the following year Junius published a revised translation, The Painting of the Ancients, with the aim of making the appreciation of the fine arts more general in England.

Copiously endowed with quotations from a vast range of ancient authorities, The Painting of the Ancients has sometimes been mistakenly classed as a mere anthology. In fact the quotations are marshaled to form an argument intended not only to illuminate ancient art but to influence contemporary theory and practice (which it did, though primarily in France). The first of the three books treats the origins of art and the nature of painting and sculpture. The inclusion of sculpture may seem surprising, but Junius understands the category pictura (painting) to comprise representational art whatever the medium. Placing the principle of the unity of the verbal and visual arts under the umbrella of the concept of imitation, Junius justifies his frequent resort to ancient rhetorical (i.e. literary) sources.

The second book presents a teleological theory of the progress of the arts to their perfection, a progress that is advanced or retarded by an array of forces, including the moral resolve of the artist. While this presentation includes historical elements, it does not produce a history of ancient art as we would understand the term.

The third book defines and celebrates perfection, as manifested under the following headings: invention, design, color, motion (including character and action), and disposition. It was Junius' exposition of these precepts that was to have the greatest effect on contemporary art theory.

Although the Earl of Arundel possessed a collection of ancient marbles, the account that Junius gives is austerely innocent of contact with original works. He never went to Italy or Greece, so that his treatment of ancient art recalls the contemporary discipline of "musical humanism" whereby the scholar could discourse learnedly about Greek musical theory without ever having heard a piece of ancient Greek music.^v In this extraordinary but one-sided account Junius implicitly bequeathed to a successor the task of starting over with the visual evidence as the primary object of attention, and then integrating the texts so as to produce a real history of art. In the middle of the following century this daunting task was finally undertaken by Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Winckelmann's Rise to Fame.

Winckelmann came into the world on December 9, 1717, in Stendal, a picturesque but impoverished town about seventy miles west of Berlin.^vi His father was a shoemaker, but as the boy showed intellectual promise he was sent to grammar school, which offered instruction in Latin and Greek. Winckelmann's parents were Protestants of strict observance, and it was expected that he would become a theologian. At the University of Halle, however, he encountered a more enlightened interpretation of religion, which he came to understand as a personal commitment not determined by outer form.^vii Moreover, his passionate pursuit of the classics had sunk deep roots.

Having completed his education, Winckelmann found employment as a schoolteacher. After some modest success at this profession, he accepted an appointment as librarian to Count Heinrich von Bünau, a distinguished member of the circle of the Saxon Royal Court at Dresden.  Styling itself "Florence on the Elbe," Dresden had acquired imposing collections of art, though the classic works that interested Winckelmann were mainly accessible in the plaster casts then common in art academies.  He longed to view the origin­als.  His acquaintance with Cardinal Alberigo Archinto, the papal nuncio at the Saxon court, opened the way to an appointment in Rome. It was made clear to him, however, that only by conversion to Catholicism could the transfer be effected. In 1753, after considerable hesitation, Winckelmann took the plunge.

His conversion has sometimes been interpreted as a cynical maneuver, a mere means to an end. However, Winckelmann had been impressed by the easy coexistence of the two religions in Dresden, where the elector was Catholic and most of his subjects Protestant. Also, it seems that he drew upon his earlier experience of distinguishing the outer husk of religious observance from its inner substance. Since all religions possessed a core of truth in common, one could change one's confessional dress without changing one's inner convictions. 
Outwardly, the Rome that Winckelmann first saw was little more than a provincial market town, yet it was animated by a constantly changing stream of visitors from all the nations of Europe.^viii In his new home he first lived on a pension sent from Dresden. As these funds began to dry up, he assumed the post of librarian to the powerful Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1799), nephew of Pope Clement XI. After an earlier career as a soldier and diplomat, Albani had settled into a comfortable life as a wealthy collector and connoisseur.  On the outskirts of Rome the cardinal created a villa that was a museum and shrine to the emerging new sensibility.  This sensibility embodied a doctrine of regenerative classicism that was to have implications extending far beyond art and antiquarianism, to affect literature and music, politics and ethical theory--reaching even farther to propose a new norm of the heightened conduct of life. In their endeavors Albani and Winckelmann found support in the activity of the restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (ca. 1716-1799), who sought to treat ancient works with a new respect, free of the extravagances that anachronistically transformed ancient fragments into baroque display pieces. In fact, Albani, Winckelmann, and Cavaceppi formed a triumvirate, "leaders in the lively eighteenth-century Roman society enflamed by Antique art, politics, power, wealth, taste, and history."^ix

Once his powerful sponsors and intrinsic merit had erased the stigma of  his humble origins, Winckelmann found easy entry into aristocratic Roman circles. The easy-going Romans of the day did not care to inquire too deeply into the sincerity of his profession of Catholicism. Nor did his homosexuality, practiced discreetly, attract attention in the Eternal City. Winckelmann's growing fame drew a stream of foreign visitors, German, Swiss, English, and French, eager to solicit his guidance in their study of antiquities. The Abbé Winckelmann (as he was known thanks to his pro-forma espousal of the elementary grade of holy orders) had "made it." He retained this status until his death in Trieste in 1768. While his removal from earthly existence cut short his day-to-day influence in the Eternal City, his writings carried his fame throughout Europe.  It was a fame that achieved heights never before scaled by a writer on art.

Winckelmann's Writings.

His earliest publications addressed classical literary themes. But gradually antiquities assumed first place in his consciousness. In 1764 he published a book that captured the attention of the learned world, Die Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of the Art of Antiquity).^x This sonorous title seems to be the first occasion in which the expression "the history of art" was prominently displayed.  Of course, as has been noted in previous chapters of this book, from the early Renaissance onwards thoughtful observers (resuming the Plinian tradition) had set forth ideas about the history and course of art, but with Winckelmann the concept became overt.  It was no longer latent but blatant.^xi

Significantly, Winckelmann spurned a publisher's request that he supply artists' biographies, maintaining that the day of feeding the public such morsels was past. He preferred to deal with art as art, a suprapersonal activity. To be sure, he did not presume to write about the whole course of the history of art, but only about the monuments of his beloved classical antiquity. He endowed Greek art with a transcendent, canonical status, so that it went without saying that a determination of its nature and phases was of supreme importance. Whatever features may have been reached Greek soil from Egyptian and Near Eastern sources, the Greeks transformed them utterly. Greek art was therefore, transcendently and unequivocally, a "first" in cultural history. This primordial status made it the model for all subsequent artistic activity.

In Winckelmann's view, the development of Greek art underwent four major stages. 1) The Older Style ("Der ältere Stil"), corresponding to what we would nowadays call the Archaic, has survived in so few statues and reliefs that we have to infer its character mainly from coins and engraved gems. It is generally characterized by stiffness and massiveness, relieved only by the violent subject matter that the artists were often required to address. Towards the end of the stage, however a softening is noticeable. 2) The Elevated Style ("Der hohe Stil") is one in which jagged outlines became smoother, movements more flowing, and violent expressiveness muted. This style, found in the monumental works of Phidias and Polyclitus, lasted until the age of Pericles. 3) The Beautiful Style ("Der schöne Stil"), flourishing just before the time of Alexander the Great, excelled in grace and wavelike line. The skillful works of the sculptor Lysippus and the painter Apelles best exemplify the Beautiful Style. 4) The Imitative Style ("Der Stil der Nachahmer") follows with the inevitability of an organic process. "Since the proportions and forms of beauty had been exhaustively studied by the artists of antiquity, and the shapes and contours of figures so finely determined that they could be changed only to their detriment, the concept of beauty could be raised no higher." Not being able to advance any further, art must needs decline. The artists, cocooned in their belief that they were faithfully imitating the old masters, in fact neglected both monumentality and grace. They tended instead to lavish attention on such secondary features as drapery folds, locks of hair, jewelry, and similar adornments. Such work recalls (he averred) the theatrical excesses of Gianlorenzo Bernini. Other artists essayed a frisson by dabbling in the outdated fashions of Egypt and Etruria, giving rise to what some modern scholars have dubbed archaistic art.

Winckelmann's theory is one of rise and fall, positing the ascent, apogee, and decay of a great art tradition.  Graphic­ally one might represent such schemes as a bell curve:  Ω or  . - . .  But this representation would be suitable only for three phases, while Winckelmann stipulates four: . - - . . Why did he adopt this more complex configuration? Conscious as he was of differences in climate, he may have been influenced by the metaphor of the four seasons; there is the springtime of art when it first emerges from winter's deadness, then the maturity of summer, followed by autumn, still glorious, but yielding to a new period of deadness. But perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on the deductive, schematic character of Winckelmann's writings. He liked systems, to be sure; yet he was also a careful observer. Significantly, modern archaeologists have tended to agree with him, acknowledging that classic Greek art did indeed have two distinct phases, for the more formal art of the fifth century yielded in the fourth to a more graceful phase. For those who read Winckelmann to guide their own taste, the four-stage scheme introduced a welcome note of flexibility. The first and last stages were, of course, to be avoided. However, approved art was not tied dogmatically to a single set of precepts as in the Renaissance tradition, but could find its place somewhere in the scale between the two poles of Elevation and Beauty. 

At first, this measured dualism would seem to be highly advantageous. Trading in the old constricted idea of a single approved style, we now have two. By positing a choice of acceptable styles of art, Winckelmann anticipated nineteenth-century comparative theories of stylistic pluralism. Viewed in its own terms, however, his "twin-peaks" theory has disturbing consequences. It undermines the traditional concept of the absolute unity of classical Greek art. As the British art historian Alex Potts remarks, "the ideal symbol is split apart." In consequence the Greek ideal withdraws into an ambivalent realm in which it is never fully present, for it is always partially absent. "The fullest physical beauty of the signifying figures and the most immediate evocation of the signified idea no longer coincide, and the presence of the one entails the absence of the other. In the high mode, the immediacy of the signified idea is suggested by an austerity and hardness of form, by a lack in the material presence of the figure supposedly embodying it." Matters are quite different with the beautiful mode, for "the physical refinement and beauty of the figure is a substantial presence, but as a result the idea being represented necessarily exists at one remove."^xii As the object of beholding, the beautiful figure is more accessible and alluring, but the idea that sustains our appreciation of it has retreated. As a result of this dualistic system Winckelmann unwittingly introduced a kind of alienation principle into Greek art. It is a little like an individual who divides his life between two countries: while living in the one he always yearns for the advantages of the other. Winckelmann's adoption of this dualism may reflect his own life, for he lived both in Germany and Italy. Up to this time Greek art and culture had generally been approached through the filter of ancient Rome.  Not surprisingly, Italian scholars and artists had extolled the achievements of their distant ancestors. Winckelmann broke fresh ground in his insistence on an absolute separation between Greece and Rome. His study of Greek literature had convinced him of the special character and authority of the civilization from which it had sprung.  Yet in discussing Greek art, he was forced to work with the Roman copies which abounded in the collections available to him. Political conditions in his time, when the capricious Ottomans ruled the East, prevented him from traveling to Greece, where he could have examined the originals in their own settings.  Although it is hard to specify exactly how the process worked, his immersion in ancient Greek literature does seem to have guided his taste. Intuitively, he was able to penetrate the Roman veil that had shrouded direct access to these works.

Wherein lies the distinctive contribution of Winckelmann's chronology of Greek art? After all, the concept of rise and decline had been utilized by a host of ancient and modern writers who had compared the organic development of an art tradition to a human life, with its infancy, maturity, and old age. Moreover, the preoccupation with decline, emphasized in Winckelmann's fourth, or Imitative period, was hardly unique to him, witness Edward Gibbon's great work. To have any impact at all, of course, Winckelmann would have had to strike some notes that were the common property of his age. But he went beyond these conventions. Winckelmann brought order into a mass of works, especially statues, which in his day had been admired, almost indiscriminately, as witnesses to the splendor of a remote period that was regarded as beyond compare and therefore undifferentiated. To accomplish this task, however, it would probably have been sufficient to issue an annotated version of Pliny's chapters, coordinating his remarks with the sculptures that one could actually see in modern collections. However, Pliny's theory of artistic development is essentially a "baton theory," explaining advances in art by the passing on of talent from one great master to another. Winckelmann saw art as much more than a collaborative effort of individual geniuses over time. Without formulating the idea in so many words, he saw art as a supraorganic entity, almost an impersonal force, which progressed on its own power. Here he anticipated Hegel's idea of Geist, or Spirit, as a force guiding all human cultural activities.

The works achieved their effect through a fusion of inner strength and outward grace. Yet Winckelmann was not a formalist; he did not believe in "art for art's sake." Greek art commands our attention, he held, because its qualities are firmly grounded in external circumstances. Here he was influenced by a kind of geographical and political determinism that he had learned from the French theorist Montesquieu. The Hellenic climate was uniquely favorable, neither too cold or too warm. In addition to climate, politics played a part, for the best art arose with the assertion of liberty and languished as it failed. Possibly as a result of the joining of these influences, the Greeks were people of superior physical condition. Care of mind and body went together.  One of the distinctive features of the Greeks was their custom of exercise in the nude in gymnasia, so that statues of naked people were perfectly natural to them. Although his Greek chauvinism is no longer in vogue, fairness requires that we recognize that his geographical-political theme anticipated the late-twentieth-century concern with "context."

Apart from the effectiveness of his overall schema, Winckelmann introduced a new way of looking at works of art and describing them. He represents not so much the point of view of the artist, but what can be broadly described as that of the consumer. Unlike many earlier commentators on art, Winckelmann was not an artist.  Nor did he seek to put himself in the place of the artist, as an ambassador to the world.  He was primarily a writer who loved words as his métier.  His books addressed the point of view of the ideal reader, the dedicated amateur of art. Of course, in earlier times patrons had stated their preferences and artists had striven to satisfy them. Winckelmann envisaged something broader: a community of art lovers. Most of them lacked the means to acquire important works, but they can still appreciate the subtle values of the fine arts. Winckelmann acts, so to speak, as the honest broker of the world of lovers of art. By creating works of art of his own, though in another medium--in his prose writings--Winckelmann foreshadowed the modern idea, maintained by Roland Barthes and others, that the critic is a creator, standing on an equal plane with the works he or she examines.

Winckelmann's account of his favorite sculpture, the Apollo Belvedere, is famous.^xiii He extolled this idealized figure through a striking metaphor--that of the ocean which, placid on the surface, has still powerful currents underneath. Winckelmann's description emphasized the subtle elements in the sculpture that lie almost below the level of consciousness, in keeping with what Barbara Stafford has called his "aesthetics of imperceptibility."^xiv This tribute to the Apollo, one of the great set pieces of the 1764 book, was written with superb literary flair.  This fluency helps to accout for the fact that the History enjoyed many publications and translat­ions.

Winckelmann had other devices for reaching his public.  In his most lapidary statements he might almost have been said to anticipate today's sound bite or bumper sticker.  One formulation stands out as having stood the test of time. In his credo known as Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), Winckelmann asserts: "The general and most distinctive characteristics of the Greek masterpieces are, finally, a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur (eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Grösse), both in posture and expression."^xv In this way he pinpointed four key themes: nobility, simplicity, tranquility, and grandeur. Grammatically, simplicity and grandeur are preeminent, appearing in the form of nouns, but the other two qualities remain indispensable. The content of the precept becomes clearer when we consider its possible negations. Noble sim­plicity, to begin with the first pair, is clearly preferable to the ignoble simplicity of commercial or folk art.^xvi Noble complexity would not be productive and ignoble complexity, negating both terms, would be truly abhorrent.  Predictably, Winckelmann disliked Caravaggio and the Dutch realist painters of everyday life. Turbulent grandeur, as found in the baroque style still rife in some parts of Europe was not right. It was overemotional and formally untidy. The sculptures of that archpriest of the baroque, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), evident in many prominent sites in Rome, particularly attracted Winckelmann's scorn. Tranquil littleness would be unworthy of our attention, and turbulent littleness, if that is possible, would be the product of the worst sort of bungler. Thus the four words set forth an ideal, which can also be defined by the approaches that it counsels against.  The implicit negations are not set forth by Winckelmann in any one place, but we can be confident that he would have endorsed them.

Winckelmann's teachings not only helped to reorient taste towards ancient art, but they had an effect on contemporary production.  They fostered disparagement of baroque art, an aversion that persisted until recently in many quarters.  But Winckelmann's precepts also encouraged the positive development of Neo-classicism.  This art style did not come into its own, however, until after his death in 1768.

Winckelmann's Sexual Orientation.

There was a subtext to Winckelmann's investigations. His sexual orientation was homosexual.^xvii His awareness of the tolerance of ancient Greece in this regard could only serve to enhance his devotion to that civilization. Moreover, a major aspect of Greek art was the heroic male nude.  These affinities helped him to find the way to his great themes, but they did not influence him so much as to cause notable bias. Because of the objectivity he attained Winckelmann attracted, and has continued to attract readers of all persuasions.

His preference for male beauty is clear. "As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female."^xviii  The remarks were originally dedicated to Friedrich von Berg, a handsome Baltic nobleman whom Winckelmann had met while the former was cultivating his taste on the grand tour. Earlier in the essay he remarked to Berg: "Our intercourse has been short, too short for both you and me; but the first time I saw you, the affinity of our spirits was revealed to me: your culture proved that my hope was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense of beauty. My parting from you was therefore one of the most painful in my life." It was goodlooking men of noble birth, his emotions persuaded him, who were best fitted to comprehend the fullness of his message.

In everyday life, however, he had involvements with Italian page boys of lesser social status.^xix Perhaps in response to this set of experiences, Gert Schiff has argued that Winckelmann favored an androgynous type, almost a kind of gender intermediate.^xx  It is true that the form of same-sex love honored among the Greeks was pederasty, the love of the adolescent youth whose full masculinity has not yet become apparent.  However Winckelmann's own tastes in art seem to have lain between the pederastic and androphile (adult) male ideal; in sculpture he favored depictions of men in their young adulthood, as seen in the Apollo Belvedere, for example.

In his published writings Winckelmann carefully skirted disclosure of his homosexual nature.^xxi  This caution--remaining in the closet, as it were--reflected the social situation at the time.  Prior to the Counter-Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century, homosexual conduct had enjoyed a considerable measure of tolerance in artistic circles in Italy.  Many artists were gay, and patrons and critics were indulgent, if they did not share the orienta­tion.^xxii  By Winckelmann's time open avowal of such feelings had become dangerous, though study of classical culture, which was virtually permeated with the orientation, served as a refuge for learned modern homosexuals. That the atmosphere remained relatively tolerant in Rome, at least in cultivated circles, is shown by an amusing hoax whereby some artist friends of Winckelmann's deceived him into believing that a modern pastiche of a pederastic painting was an ancient original.^xxiii

Winckelmann's death occurred during an excursion into the sexual underworld of his time.  He died on the return trip from a triumphal visit to Vienna. While waiting for a ship to take him across the Adriatic, he was murdered on June 8, 1768, in Trieste. In his inn he had met and swiftly became fast friends with one Francesco Arcangeli, an unattractive 37 year-old drifter--a most unlikely acquaintance for a distinguished gentle­man.  Although a police report has survived, it is difficult to reconstruct the motivation for Arcangeli's.  The two men took their meals together in the Italian's room and spent much time prowling around Trieste's port.  In all likelihood, Arcangeli, who understood the local dialect, helped in Winckelmann's search for sexual partners, what we would nowadays term cruising.  Although he gave his profession as cook, he may well have been a part-time pimp. Arcangeli certainly had a previous criminal record. Abandoning his customary caution, Winckelmann inadvertently stim­ulated the cupidity of his acquaintance by showing him the collection of medals that had recently been bestowed on him in Vienna.  Arcangeli first attempted to strangle, then stabbed him, but the victim resisted, crying out, and Arcangeli was immediately caught with the incriminating evidence.^xxiv

News of Winckelmann's death caused shock waves in Germany, where he was revered not just in art circles but by the founders of German classical literature, notably Goethe and Schiller.  The murder has continued as a theme in German literature that has continued down to the present day.^xxv

The enthusiasm for classical antiquity that Henry Hatfield has called "aesthetic paganism" reflects Winckelmann's continuing influence.^xxvi  Although his sexual interests were downplayed, a series of learned studies of Greek pederasty appeared in Germany during the period 1775-1840 that probably would not be possible without the implicit authorization his renown permitted (at least they do not occur in other countries). 

Recent research has shown that homosexual feelings differ considerably from one period to another, so that there is no one personality type.^xxvii  However, it is possible to hazard some guesses as the possible relation between his orientation and his scholarly work.  His enthusiasm for the idealized male nude is of course the most obvious link.  Some less evident qualities may stem from Winckelmann's need to veil his sexual nature.  He tended to translate his enthusiasm for Greek art into a generic key; often avoiding specificity he produced at times an almost musical evocation of the works.  This procedure implies a form of sublimation.  Similarly his sense of art as detached from personality suggests a cautious conviction that there are certain personal matters that are best kept private.  Necessarily adept at disguise and concealment as he was, Winckelmann became sensitive to this quality in other realms.  To be sure, it may not be appropriate to honor concealment. An important part of his History deals with the detection of fakes of ancient art, works that are not what they seem. This branch of study became an important part of connoisseurship, because in order to understand the character of an artist or a period one must first weed out the imposters among the works.  But it is a curious irony that Winckelmann's sensitivity to artistic imposters may have been heightened by the imposter status that had been forced upon him.

The Heritage of Winckelmann.

The immense value of Winckelmann's contribution lay not simply in his intense concentration on aspects of ancient art, but in his reorganization of the underlying regulatory concept. For the first time, it was felt, he placed the history of a single, exemplary period--the art of ancient Greece--on an objective footing. He showed, more clearly than anyone had before, that the development of Greek art was not the story of one great master succeeding another, but a meaningful sequence in its own right, governed by such encompassing factors as climate and politics. Apart from the light cast on an art epoch that held particular fascination and authority for the eighteenth century, his scholarly achievement created a model or paradigm that could be adapted to explain other eras of art as well. In fact, it could be argued that the later schemes of such major art historians as Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl, while owing much to Winckelmann's example, also disclose a narrowing of perspectives. For the art history that emerged as dominant towards the end of the nineteenth century concentrated on form, downplaying other elements, while for Winckelmann larger social issues remained paramount. Precisely because he linked art with social well-being, Winckelmann stimulated the art that rose to prominence immediately after him: Neo-classicism. 
Since his primary interest lay in the field of ancient art, Winckelmann stands at the confluence of both art history and archaeology. The latter discipline, as it expanded from its Mediterranean focus, tended more and more to shift its shape to become a very different field from that of art history. Thus the marriage between the two became a divorce.

It is perhaps ironic that Winckelmann's accomplishment should give such impetus to Mediterranean studies in that he was, by birth and training, a man of the north. In fact, he was the first major German-speaking historian of art, for Joachim von Sandrart's work had been largely imitative. After his death German, Austrian, and German-speaking Swiss writers assumed a dominant position in art historical studies, a preeminence that later chapters will seek to account for. Of course, Winckelmann's life has its own fascination, posing the question of the relationship between scholarship and personality.

With respect to art history, he anticipated an ideal formulated in the succeeding century by the Swiss Heinrich Wölfflin in his austere program of a history of art without names.  In this concept what appears to be a handicap imposed by the limitations of our knowledge of prehistoric or poorly documented art becomes an advantage which we can extend to more "civilized" eras, for by ignoring the adventitious facts of personality we are free to concentrate on the grand sweep of art itself.  Although there is something metaphysical about this grand-sweep concept, it incorporates an important truth, namely that individu­al artists are not simply striving to "do their best" but to participate in a group endeavor, one which includes the dead as well as the living.  Moreover the progress of art tends to show a distinctive profile: rise, culmination, decline. In Winckelmann's modifed version, this bell curve is well illustrated in ancient Greek art.  As has been noted, Vasari posited something similar in Italian art from ca. 1250 to 1550 CE.  The discernment of such patterns has encouraged the comparative study of art traditions--though some would say that the model proffered is overdeterministic and that few civilizations show such a clear trajectory.  This problem appears in a more general form in the metahistorians Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee--though the well-merited criticisms their work has attracted have not succeeded in resolving the question which does not disappear when one has demolished premature solutions of it.  The problem of meaning in history is an abiding one.

The new orientation in taste--Neo-classicism--was immensely assisted by its alliance with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.^xxviii The new style, though it did not become permanently dominant, yielded a number of masterpieces by such artists as Jacques-Louis David, Antonio Canova, and Bertell Thorwaldsen.^xxix  In the past most arts had first flowered, "on their own" so to speak, and then were explained.  However, Winckelmann reversed the order, offering the explanation first.  Implicit in his writings is a "recipe" for contemporary art, and it was a recipe that worked.  Neo-classic­ism extended throughout the arts.  In the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck music also became Neo-classical--or simply "classical" as music historians term it, for no specimens of ancient music were known and the new style had to be created by analogiz­ing from the spirit of ancient art.  A paradoxical effect of this application of the principles of ancient art to the present was the necessary awareness that ancient really was ancient.  This sense of the pastness of the past, and its inherent grandeur, may have fueled a widespread sense of unease that has prompted the rapid changes of art in succeeding generations. 

Finally, there were political implications.  The French and American models of the ideal society were initially more attentive to Roman prototypes than to Greek ones.  Eventually, however, as the founding of such towns as Athens and Sparta in many American states shows, the Greek theme came to the fore.  The Greek revival style prevailed in US architecture during the early decades of the nineteenth century.  Stimulated in part by the contemporary independence movement in Greece itself, America came to view itself not only as a republic but (potentially at least) as a democracy. 

The Art Historical Aftermath.

Winckelmann's tragic death in 1768 spared him the task of coping with the effects of the American and French Revolutions. What he would have thought of these events we cannot know. A self-made man, he revered "nobility." Still, his acerbic comments about the decayed state of art in his own day struck a sympathetic chord with those who inveighed against the corruption and tyranny of the Old Regime. One of his followers, the painter Jacques-Louis David, became an ardent revolutionary, voting for the death of Louis XVI in 1793. Others, though, drew more conservative conclusions from Winckelmann's premises.

Efforts to understand the course of art, and to present it to a larger public, continued in the new era. Two writers, Lanzi and Quatremère de Quincy, demonstrate contrasting responses to the challenge of the French Revolution.

Luigi Lanzi (1732-1809) was born to a middle-class family in Fermo in Central Italy.^xxx Trained by the Jesuits, he early exhibited aptitude for both literary and scientific pursuits. After the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, he accepted a position with grand duke Leopold of Florence as curator of the Medici cabinet of coins and medals. Tremendously learned, he published a series of antiquarian essays under the auspices of the Tuscan court. Few were prepared, however, when in 1789 he issued the first volume of his Storia pittorica dell'Italia, which treated the schools of Florence, Siena, Rome, and Naples. The enlarged and revised editions, which he continued to prepare until his death, added the schools of Venice, Lombardy, Modena, Parma, Cremona, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, and Piedmont. By offering relatively even-handed treatment of these regional developments, he consolidated the school system which had gradually developed to displace Vasari's chauvinistic emphasis on Tuscany. In the individual chapters he sought to balance the account of the overall course of the school with the role of the leading painters, thus combining the Pliny-Vasari emphasis on great masters with Winckelmann's stress on process.

Lanzi adopts Vasari's three-stage system, adding to it a fourth, personified by the Carracci family at the start of the seventeenth century. These four phases together constitute the Golden Age of Italian art. Then there occurred one final phase, stretching from the time of Guido Reni (1575-1642) to that of Luca Giordano (1632-1705). After this Silver Age came the decadence of art.

Lanzi's position recalls Pliny's. He chronicles glories of art which happened in past time--in illo tempore--but that time is definitely over. He cautiously avers that because of the discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the beneficial influence of Winckelmann and his associate the painter Anton Raffael Mengs, a revival may be possible, but he is unwilling to commit himself. Lanzi's conclusions were pessimistic, and lent encouragement to those in ensuing generations who believed that art was dead.

In a sense Lanzi responded to the French Revolution by not responding to it. On the other hand, by writing the history of art in his own country as something over with (and he sees no hope elsewhere), he establishes a divide between the culture of the Old Regime as a unit and whatever might come after. The development he traces is the era B.R.--Before the Revolution. Despite, or perhaps because of, its inherent tendency essentially to consolidate earlier findings, Lanzi's history of Italian art gained acceptance as standard. An English-language version by Thomas Roscoe appeared in 1828 and 1847, entering the popular Bohn's Library series in 1852-54. French and German editions were also successful.

Lanzi's great history held the field until the work of Crowe and Cavalcaselle began to appear in 1864.^xxxi Combining careful study of the documents with minute scrutiny of the works, Crowe and Cavalcaselle used photographs to communicate with a larger public. Their work, however, depends on the romantic transformation of historiography.

The figure of Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) contrasts with Lanzi in as much as he did not register the upheaval that began in 1789 from afar but witnessed it first-hand in Paris.^xxxii Initially a supporter of the Revolution, Quatremère favored rational reform rather than outright destruction of existing institutions. In particular, he opposed the abolition of the Academy, holding that the revolutionary changes had not in themselves sufficed to promote good art. In his Considérations sur les arts du dessin (1791) Quatremère opined that art had reached its peak in the Renaissance. Already by the time of the Carracci it had begun to sink into the twin abysses of realism and mechanical obedience to the "rules." Even the time of Louis XIV had not been, as was generally believed, a time of great artistic accomplishment, for the French had adopted from the Italians an art that had entered on the downward path. Unlike some of Winckelmann's followers, Quatremère held that liberty alone would not foster the creation of high art as it had in the Greek city states. Ancient Greece benefited from a climate, religion, and customs uniquely favorable to the arts; such an array of conditions did not exist in modern France. No, the arts in France were "fruits foreign to its soil… which one nonetheless should not despair of cultivating by artificial means." Still, with a careful and rational organization of institutions one could attempt to resuscitate as much as possible of the incomparable glories of the Greek achievement.

A constitutional monarchist, Quatremère found himself increasingly at odds with the radical direction taken by the Revolution. Under a warrant signed by his former friend, Jacques-Louis David, he was arrested and imprisoned in 1794. After his release he became increasingly conservative, advocating the restoration of monarchy.

Following the return of the Bourbons in 1815 he rose to a number of offices so that he became almost an artistic dictator. Hardening his stand, he now proclaimed that modern art was inescapably inferior to its ancient predecessors. Few shared Quatremère de Quincy's obdurate cultural pessimism that held that even an attentive study of the ancients could not yield truly great art. But his doctrinaire conservatism opened the way for the jeremiads of nineteenth-century criticism that treated any departure from classic prototypes as a heinous form of indulgence, an indulgence that instead of resisting the prevailing climate of decline insouciantly yielded to it.

New Paths in Architecture.

Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand (1760-1834), a pupil of Etienne-Louis Boullé with his grandiose, abstract interpretations of classical architecture, left his stamp on generations of French architecture through his teaching and his book Précis de leçons d'architecture données à l'Ecole Polytechnique. This book first appeared in two volumes in 1802-05 and was reissued repeatedly down to 1840. Although Durand drew inspiration from several sources, his approach was dominated by the idea of achieving rationality through uniformity and repetition. He also stressed mastery of constructional principles and technology. On the one hand, Durand leads to the monumental classicism of the Beaux-Arts and City Beautiful trends, on the other hand to the functionalist modernism of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, which despite its rejection of classical ornament may be regarded as a continuation of the classical concerns for simplicity and clarity.

The remedy for the classical whiteness of Greek revival buildings came from the discovery that the Greeks did, after all, use color in the their buildings and sculptures. Hence the "Néo-Grec" movement in contemporary architecture, which used color in sometimes startling ways. In general, however, this model was not followed and "Grecian" buildings in Europe remained uncolored. In Scotland Edinburgh possesses a particularly handsome group of them. In many instances, of course, there was mingling with Renaissance modes. Gothic revival was a major competitor, causing some defensive retreats and adaptations among the classicists.

Germany, feeling itself particularly akin to ancient Greece, has produced some remarkable specimens. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel (1781-1841), one of the greatest of all European architects, devoted himself to embellishing Berlin in an original version of Neo-classicism.^xxxiii His Altes Museum of 1824-28 in particular was designed to reconcile exemplary classicism (the building), with educational historicity (the objects shown inside.^xxxiv Schinkel also drew up plans for the reconstruction of the Athenian Acropolis as a royal palace for the newly installed German royal house. Fortunately this scheme was not executed, for it would have obliterated some of the major classical buildings.

A curious and revealing episode is the Walhalla erected by Leo von Klenze near Regensburg under the patronage of the Bavarian king Ludwig I (1786-1868). This monument to German national sentiment, the very name of which refers to the northern world commemorated in the Niebelungenlied, was nonetheless built as a classical temple in the purest Greek Doric style. An earlier scheme by Daniel Joseph Ohlmüller (1814-16) in the Gothic revival mode was rejected.^xxxv

Classical Archaeology Emerges.

Another major channel of the influence of Winckelmann nourished the great enterprises of classical archaeology which, as political conditions improved, increasingly focused on the Greek world in its largest sense--including western Asia (even as far as Afghanistan).

Winckelmann's career coincided with the start of the excavations of the Campanian cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which had been buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.^xxxvi In 1711 investigators found their way into a portion of Herculaneum by means of a cistern. In 1738, however, interest shifted to Pompeii where the remains, lying closer to the surface, were easier to uncover. Winckelmann traveled to the region to see the finds in 1758, 1762, 1764, and 1767. Preferring to examine the results of the excavations rather than to supervise the labor deployed to extract them, Winckelmann felt no calling to become what is nowadays termed a "dirt archaeologist." Although the methods used fell short of those employed in later discoveries, the excavators did keep a careful journal of their work. Enthusiastically supported by the Bourbon king of Naples, Charles III, the Herculaneum finds were published in folio volumes entitled Antichità di Ercolano, beginning in 1757.

After Winckelmann's death the focus shifted for a time to the "base camp," the city of Rome. Napoleonic domination spurred a new effort to expose and glorify the ancient monuments.^xxxvii

Archaeology in Rome was conducted in large measure by Italians, including Carlo Fea, Enea Quinto Visconti, and Antonio Nibby. Fea produced an annotated edition of Winckelmann's great history, citing new discoveries and interpretations. In his monumental Catalogo of the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican (1782-1802), Visconti was able to detect copies of famous works by Praxiteles, Laochares, and Eutychides, laying the foundation for further critical work on the great Greek masters. He also made significant iconographical discoveries. Nibby compared the so-called Gladiators in several Roman collections, relating them to prototypes made in Pergamon to commemorate the victory over the Gauls.^xxxviii

The learned German Georg Zoëga resided for a time in Rome. He differed from Winckelmann in his positive evaluation of Egyptian art. In 1802 Zoëga assumed the post of the first chair specifically reserved for classical archaeology, at the University of Kiel. He thus constituted a living link between the archaeologists residing in Rome and the increasingly vigorous northern contingent. These German scholars generally came to archaeology through a careful philological formation in the study of original Greek and Latin texts. A leading figure in the northern pole was Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812) who put classical studies on a new footing in Germany. A friend of Winckelmann since his Dresden days, Heyne taught at the progressive new university of Göttingen. There he lectured not only on philological subjects, where his methodology was universally respected, but on archaeology. In the latter field he focused not simply on facts but sought to foster the formation of taste and "the perception of the beautiful." While Heyne had an animating influence in the north, he was never able to travel to the Mediterranean.

The rise of a new generation of German scholars signaled the autonomy of classical archaeology. This maturation is seen especially in the work of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Karl Otfried Müller. The first, a disciple of Heyne and Zoëga, assumed a close link between poetry, mythology, and art, beginning a specific hermeneutic tradition.^xxxix Müller, more closely focused on history and the history of art, studied the paintings on Greek vases, which were becoming increasingly numerous through excavations, and the Parthenon marbles (recently moved to London) and the Aegina sculptures (likewise moved to Munich), which he contrasted as originals to the copies on which scholars had previously been largely dependent. His Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (1830) is the first systematic synthesis of its subject.^xl In 1839 Karl Otfried Müller was able for the first time to travel to Greece; however, he died almost immediately of heat exhaustion brought on by copying an inscription at Delphi.

The new interest in originals reflects the effects of an increasing tempo of investigations and excavations in the eastern Mediterranean, especially in Greece.^xli This had already started with the Englishmen James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who visited Ottoman-controlled Greece in 1751-54 measuring and drawing ancient monuments. The result was their influential Antiquities of Athens published in five folio volumes from 1762-1832. This work was raided for inspiration by countless neoclassic designers. Other books resulted from the voyages of James Dawkins and Robert Wood (Palmyra, 1753, and Baalbek, 1757) and Richard Chandler and William Pars (1769-97).

These illustrated volumes excited the interest of the powerful to remove Greek works and not simply contemplate artistic renderings of them. The most celebrated of these removals was Lord Elgin's still-controversial abduction of the Parthenon marbles (1803-12), which found a home in the British Museum in 1816. In 1812 the Aegina sculptures were acquired for crown prince Ludwig of Bavaria, and two years later the Bassae frieze went to the British Museum.

A more disinterested accomplishment was carried through with the support of the great scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador to the Holy See in Rome. There northerners created a Società Iperborea-Romana in 1823, and this shortly formed the nucleus of the more international Istituto di Correspondenza Archeologica, which issued various categories of publications to monitor the increasing volume of discoveries. Eventually, this became the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, which with branches in a number of countries is still today the leading organization of its kind.

The Greek War of Independence (1821-32) both hindered and helped the cause of archaeology. Politically disturbed conditions made serious study difficult, but at the same time enthusiasm for the Greeks in western Europe built up a fund of support and interest for the great enterprises soon to take place. Ludwig Ross (1806-1859), a citizen of Kiel, is credited with introducing strict archaeological methods into excavations in Greece, where King Otto named him chief conservator of antiquities in 1834. He did much to free the ancient monuments of the Acropolis from later encrustations, and traveled widely in Greece and Anatolia. Other Germans notably active in excavation and research in the middle years of the nineteenth century were Friedrich Thiersch, Alexander Conze, Adolf Michaelis, and Ernst Curtius.^xlii

A Greek Archaeological Society was founded in 1837. Under license from the Greeks other excavations were undertaken by the French, Americans, English, Austrians, Italians, Danes, and Swedes.

In Germany itself the centennial of Winckelmann's death was marked by a remarkable compilation of original sources, Johannes Overbeck's Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Griechen (Leipzig, 1868). A remarkable instance of scholarly longevity, this book remains a standard reference work to this day.

The "archaeological century" of Winckelmann culminated in the brilliant career of Adolf Furtwängler (1853-1907), who crammed a wealth of scholarship into his relatively short life.^xliii Tactless and unsparing in his criticism of others, Furtwängler never achieved the honors that were due him, but worked with methodical zeal cataloguing a number of private and public collections of antiquities in Germany. These labors prepared him for his Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik (1893), which sought to set forth, for the general reader as well as for the scholar, solid conclusions to the problem that had abided since Winckelmann's time: How could one use the multitude of Roman copies to best advantage to reconstruct the appearance of the lost originals of the great masters of classical Greece?^xliv Not all Furtwängler's solutions have been accepted, but his monograph marked a turning point.

Furtwängler's day marked the last point at which the classical art of the Greek fifth and fourth centuries would be ranked, almost automatically, as the quintessence, without peer or rival, of Greek art as a whole. Two developments challenged this supremacy. The excavations of the debris left on the Acropolis after the Persian occupation, which reached a decisive conclusion in 1885-91, revealed masses of excellent sculptures carved prior to the classic period. These and other finds, before and after, forced a reevaluation of the archaic style as a worthy category of art in itself and not a fumbling preparation for the classic. Then, in the 1890s Viennese art historians began the rehabilitation of Roman (including late Roman) art. This meant that the classic style was met by a kind of pincers movement on either side. When the inherent dignity of Hellenistic art was also restored it was no longer possible to ignore the true sequence of Greek and Roman art. In this way Winckelmann's historicization of Greek art was completed, but in a completely reconstructed and nonjudgmental way so that one period followed another without risking being labeled as either primitive or decadent.

Winckelmann Victorianus.

The developments just discussed pertain mainly to the realm of archaeology, which was becoming more and more specialized. Gradually the message of Winckelmann for the general public and "persons of taste" shifted. This process did not so much contradict the German savant as silently modify his doctrine, replacing it with something else.

The Elgin marbles from the Parthenon came to the British Museum in 1816. At first viewers were disturbed by the fact that they seemed more realistic than Winckelmann's precepts would have lead them to expect. The sculpture galleries of the British Museum remained a leading site of classical concern throughout the nineteenth century. Changing conventions of display reflected the modulations of understanding of classical art.^xlv In addition, the great country houses of Britain were adorned with famous antiques or reputable copies of them, usually imported from Italy. Revered as talismans of good taste, these sculptures were supplemented for the general public by copies in public galleries.^xlvi

Alongside this august population there developed in the nineteenth century a new cohort of contemporary sculptures in a manner that was accepted as Grecian: the "white marble flock." Typically, the theme and presentation of such works was adjusted to suit contemporary sensibilities. A sensation at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 was Hiram Powers' Greek Slave, a naked chained women in immaculate white marble. This work elicited the sympathy of observers as the woman was evidently intended for the harem.

The presentation of such figures, white, chiseled and mute, was, one level at least, a symbol of Art. To admire them showed that even in the presence of nudity one could respond in a purely dispassionate and aesthetic manner. Respectable society welcomed such works into the drawing room and the exhibition hall; the proper response to them symbolized uplift and renunciation. Careful reading of Victorian criticism and novels shows, however that not everyone responded in this fashion. As the century wore on it became necessary to recognize that the erotic element had not been banished from such works as clearly as had been thought. Regrettably, no absolute wall of separation stood to mark off the difference between the nude and the naked. There was thus a paradox: the unclothed whiteness stood for purity and obliteration of sexuality--while simultaneously alluding to it. In psychoanalytic terms, the mechanism of repression creates desire even as it seeks to banish it.^xlvii

The English aesthete Walter Pater (1839-1894) was one of the most admired and influential of Victorian writers. Significantly, the concluding essay in his most famous book, The Renaissance (1873), depicts Winckelmann's life and thought.^xlviii Evidently the lonely Oxford don, homoerotic in sentiment if not in action, identified closely with the German savant and aesthete. Pater's essay discloses several levels of understanding. First, he gives a good summary of Winckelmann's normative ascription of the source of all value in classical Greece: "The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflection of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them,but in a stage of society remote from ours. The standard of taste, then, was fixed in Greece, at a definite historical period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of the influences of Greek society." At the same time, Pater allows, somewhat cautiously, that Winckelmann's appreciation of beauty in art was linked to his admiration of male beauty in his aristocratic associates.^xlix Today the observation may seem banal, but in the climate of late-Victorian prudery it was daring.

Pater perceived that the interpretation of Neo-classic ideals by Goethe and Hegel in Germany formed the basis for much of their later transmission. Goethe took Winckelmann as his guide in exploring classical art in Italy, while Hegel incorporated his ideas in his progressive notion of history as advance of the human spirit, the glory of Greece lying in its overcoming of the limitations of Egyptian "symbolic" art.

Finally, there is Pater's own view. On the one hand, he repeatedly evokes Greek art and culture in general terms as light, even "pure and colorless light." On the other hand, he saturates his text with such words as "attraction," "excitement," "generation," "sensuous," "penetrated," and "pregnant." At one point he even describes the German scholar caressing classical statues--but such was Winckelmann's purity of motive that his hands were unsullied.

Neglect and Subsequent Rehabilitation of Roman Art.

Even today we speak of Greco-Roman civilization, as if the whole were a unit with the Roman contribution forming an honorable part, if not perhaps quite equal to that of the Greeks. One of the most controversial aspects of Winckelmann's message--at least in Italy--was his downgrading of Roman art in favor of the glories of Greece. The putdown of Rome was opposed, notably by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), but the enthusiasm for Greece in Germany, the nation that became the dominant power in archaeology, swept all before it. To be sure, Germans continued to study and excavate in Italy, but this activity was justified in part because actual Greek objects, such as the vases found in tombs, could be recovered there. Other works, produced by the Romans but bearing the stamp of Greece, could be studied for their residual Hellenic value. Even today, a prejudice against the Romans as an exploitive and unoriginal people lingers in many quarters.

An improvement in the fortunes of Roman culture ultimately came from Austria. The Viennese school of art history, which rose to world prominence in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, was truly cosmopolitan in its interests, ranging from Islamic carpets to the paintings of El Greco. One reason for this breadth was the multiethnic character of the Habsburg empire. The mosaic of peoples, all of them represented to some degree in Vienna itself, created a sense of affinity with the Roman empire, which was also multiethnic, but ruled from a single center. Moreover, important Roman remains were found on the soil of the Habsburg empire, having been laid down when Vienna was Vindobona.

Franz Wickhoff (1853-1909) deserves credit as the original rehabilitator of Roman art. He began with a late production, the Genesis manuscript in the National Library, and worked backwards, discovering in the illusionism of high imperial Roman art an affinity with progressive trends in nineteenth century art.^l Viewers could now "access" the distinctive aesthetic qualities of Roman art by examining it through the perspective of modern art.

There remained the problem of the heterogeneity of Roman art, which could not be readily accommodated to a sequence like the one that led, so cogently it seemed, from the Greek archaic to the Hellenistic stage. In part this heterogeneity could be attributed to by the complexity of sources. In its beginnings Roman art was indebted not only to the Greeks living in southern Italy, but to indigenous peoples, above all the Etruscans. During the 1920s, as the travel writings of D.H. Lawrence attest, this people attained a vogue status as "mysterious" and preoccupied with sex and death. Unlike the classical Greeks the Etruscans had created monumental tombs adorned with frescoes. Some highly stylized sculptures elicited admiration for their abstract qualities.^li

Another element making for complexity was the piecemeal pattern whereby Romans acquired their dominions. These conquests entailed various compromises with existing cultures, especially in the Greek East where Hellenistic motifs tended to linger in art. In Egypt and Syria, however, indigenous motifs came to the fore, producing an increasing emphasis on nonclassical, anti-Greek elements. This growing resistance to Hellenic classicism was tirelessly emphasized by another Viennese art historian, Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941).

Other elements of variety were explained by the genre-dependence of Roman art, which meant that one stylistic tended to prevail in portraiture, another in official monuments, and yet another in funerary art.

Finally, there is the element of patronage. Some emperors, such as Augustus and Hadrian, had a strong personal taste, which gave the art they sponsored an particular stamp. Much Roman art was concerned with conveying messages that served the purposes of the state, and this tended to make such work distinctive, so that it might differ from private works. Recently, efforts have been made to study private patronage, which differed from the imperial sort.^lii

All this means that Roman art has emerged with an almost kaleidoscopic richness, comparable in many ways to the art of the twentieth century. At the same time the complexity has made it hard to settle on any simple formula to encompass it so that even today the appreciation of Roman art lags among the general public, while some specialists in Greek art do not conceal their dislike of it.

Conclusion.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), another German who enjoyed Italy in person and Greece through its literature and art, finally transformed our picture of ancient Greece, so much so that today Winckelmann's idealization no longer fits.^liii In an early work, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), the German philosopher held that Greek culture oscillated between two major poles: a rational and cerebral side, which he termed Apollonian, and a passionate and extravagant side, which he termed Dionysian.^liv Winckelmann had dwelt only on one pole.

Through its own dynamic, modern civilization has traveled far from Winckelmann's idealism, with its exaltation of ancient Greece based on the philological study of literary classics. Today the discipline of archaeology finds itself allied more closely with anthropology and the natural sciences than with the venerable disciplines of the humanities. In fact a certain tension has grown up between archaeologists and art historians. Archaeologists tend to regard art historians as elitist traditionalists. Art history could learn (and in fact is learning) from archaeology's concern with "minor" objects as well as with masterpieces. Above all, today's archaeology has provided the model of a truly multicultural discipline, leaving no corner of the world in which human beings have lived untouched.

The sins of art history in the last two hundred years are no doubt many. Yet today's archaeologists should perhaps recall that the two professions were once united in the person of a quirky Prussian expatriate, the son of a shoemaker. Abandoning the comforts of his native land, he pursued his own quest unerringly. For a time his interests happily accorded with the aspirations of Europe's intelligentsia, increasing his influence beyond anything he could have imagined. At its core, Winckelmann's contribution to art history lay in his isolation of a sense of a meaningful succession of forms of art, dwelling for a season in individual artists but independent of any particular exponent. He demonstrated this process in classical art alone. Yet much, perhaps most art is not classical. For the many voices of the world's art to be heard, the romantic movement was necessary.

i Seymour Howard, "Winckelmann's Daemon: The Scholar as Critic, Chronicler, and Historian," Antiquity Restored: Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique, Vienna: IRSA, 1990, pp. 162-74, 278-83 (cited: p. 162).

ii Giorgio Vasari, Opere, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence: Sansoni, 1973 (reprint of 1906 ed.), vol. 1, pp. 15-90.

iii Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients: De Pictura Veterum According to the English Translation (1638) (The Literature of Classical Art, 1), Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; the second volume of this set, A Lexicon of Artists & Their Works: Catalogus Architectorium . . ., contains a translation by the same editors of the 1694 Latin edition of the companion volume. The introduction to the first volume (pp. xxi-lxxxiii) provides an excellent conspectus of the significance of Junius' work. See also Colette Nativel, "La comparaison entre la peinture et la poésie dans le De pictura veterum (I,4) de Franciscus Junius," Word and Image, 4:1 (1988), 323-30; as well as her "Franciscus Junius et le 'De Pictura

Veterum,'" XVIIe Siècle, 35:1 (1983), 7-30, and subsequent articles in this periodical related to the preparation of a French translation of De pictura veterum. Finally, see Elizabeth Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Düsseldorf Notebook, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 161-84.

iv David Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

v Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

vi A serviceable account of the life is Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann, New York: Knopf, 1970. Still worthy of attention is the account of the archaeologist's life and times by Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 3 vols., Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1898. Among recent contributions, note Thomas W. Gaethgens, ed., Joachim Joachim Winckelmann 1717-1764, Hamburg, 1986 (Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert, 7); Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Neue Forschungen, Stendal, 1990 (Studien der Winckelmann-Gesellschaft, 11); Edouard Pommier, ed., Winckelmann: la naissance de l'histoire de l'art à l'époque des Lumières, Paris: La Documentation Française, 1991; and Élisabeth Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: enquête sur la genèse de l’histoire de l’art, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000  The most penetrating assessment of Winckelmann's achievement is Alex Potts, Flesh and the Idea: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

vii Werner Schultze, "Winckelmann und die Religion," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 34 (1952), 247-60.

viii Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

ix Seymour Howard, "Albani, Winckelmann, and Cavaceppi: The Transition from Amateur to Professional Antiquarianism," Journal of the History of Collections, 4 (1992), 227-38 (cited: p. 27).

x The standard modern edition, with full commentary, is that produced under the auspices of the Mainz Akademie: Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 4 vols., Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1996-99.  There is also an English translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave, [Winckelmann], History of the Art of Antiquity, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006.

xi For the permutations of the word history, see Paul E. Geiger, Das Wort "Geschichte" und seine Zusammensetzungen, Freiburg im Breisgau: Wagner, 1908; Karl Keuck, Historia: Geschichte des

Wortes und seiner Bedeutungen in der Antike und in den romanischen Sprachen, Emsdetten: Lechte, 1934; and Johannes Hennig, "Die Geschichte des Wortes 'Geschichte,'" Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 16 (1938), 511ff.

xii For these remarks, see Alex Potts, "Winckelmann's Construction of History," Art History, 5 (1982), 377-497.

xiii Hans Zeller, Winckelmann's Beschreibung des Apollo im Belvedere, Zurich: Atlantis-Verlag, 1955.

xiv Barbara Maria Stafford, "Beauty of the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 43 (1980), 65-78.

xv Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, translated by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C, Norton, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987, pp. 32-33. The original title of the work is Gedancken ueber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-kunst.

xvi For the roots of the expression "noble simplicity," see Wolfgang Stammler, "'Edle einfalt': Zur Geschichte eines Kunsttheoretischen Topos," in Gustav Erdmann and Alfons Eichstaedt, eds., Worte und Werte: Bruno Markwardt zum 60. Geburtstag, Berlin, 1961, pp. 359-82.

xvii Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, is the first full-length study of his scholarly achievement to integrate it with his homoeroticism.

xviii This avowal appears in paragraph nine of the 1763 essay "Abhandlungen von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben."

xix See the excerpts from the letters collected by Paul Derks, Die Schande der heiligen Päderastie: Homosexualität und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur, 1750-1850, Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1990, pp. 174-231.

xx Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on Art History, New York: Continuum, 1988, p. xvi.

xxiThat there was more disclosure than is usually assumed is argued by Paul Derks, Die Schande der heiligen Päderastie.

xxii The gradual erosion of tolerance is shown by James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

xxiii Thomas Pelzel, "Winckelmann, Mengs and Casanova: A Reappraisal of a Famous Eighteenth-Century Forgery," Art Bulletin, 54 (1972), 301-15.

xxiv The court records appear in Elio Bartolini and Cesare Pagnini, L'assassinio di Winckelmann: gli atti del processo criminale, Milan: Longanesi, 1971.

xxvLionel Gossman, "Death in Trieste," Journal of European Studies, 22 (1992), 207-40.

xxvi Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature from Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.

xxvii Stephen Donaldson and Wayne R. Dynes, "Typology," Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, New York: Garland, 1991, vol. 2, pp. 1332-37.

xxviii Edouard Pommier, "Winckelmann et la vision de l'Antiquité classique dans la France des Lumières et de la Révolution," Revue de l'Art, 83 (1989), 9-20.

xxix Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism, New York: Penguin, 1968. See also Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Eighteenth-Century Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

xxx Gabriele Bickendorf, "Luigi Lanzi's 'Storia pittorica dell'Italia' und das Entstehen der historisch-kritischen Kunstgeschichtsschreibung," Jahrbuch des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte [Munich], 2 (1986), 231-72.

xxxi Donata Levi, Cavalcaselle: Il pioniere della conservazione dell'arte italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1988.

xxxii This discussion of Quatremère profits from the incisive observations of Alex D. Potts, "Political Attitudes and the Rise of Historicism in Art Theory," Art History, 1 (1978), 191-213. On a broader scale, see now Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

xxxiii Karl Friedrich Schinkel (exhibition catalogue, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

xxxiv Steven Moyano, "Order vs. History: Schinkel's Altes Museum and Prussian Arts Policy," Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), 585-608.

xxxv For this category of monument see the broad survey of Jörg Traeger, Der Weg nach Walhalla: Denkmallandschaft und Bildungsreise im 19. Jahrhundert, 2d ed., Regensburg: Bernhard Bosse Verlag, 1991.

xxxvi For what follows, see Ulrich Hausmann, ed., Allgemeine Grundlagen der Archäologie (Handbuch der Archäologie), Munich: Beck, 1969, p. 49ff.

xxxvii Robert T. Ridley, The Eagle and the Spade: The Archaeology of Rome During the Napoleonic Era, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

xxxviii For Italian involvement with ancient art, see Salvatore Settis, ed., Memoria dell'antico nell'arte Italiana. III. Dalla tradizione all'archeologia, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1986.

xxxix William M. Calder et al, eds., Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker: Werk und Wirkung (Hermes Einzelschriften, 49), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986.

xl Wolfhart Unte, "Karl Otfried Müller," in Ward W. Briggs and Willam M. Calder III, eds., Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia, New York: Garland, 1990, pp. 310-20.

xli For a popular account, see Richard Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods: The Search for Classical Greece, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

xlii Ulrich Haussmann, ed., Allgemeine Grundlagen der Archäologie, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1969, pp. 33-107 (by Wolfgang Schiering).

xliii Andreas E. Furtwängler, "Adolf Furtwängler," in Briggs and Calder, op. cit., pp. 84-92.

xliv Furtwängler's magnum opus was translated and edited for English readers by Eugenie Strong in 1895. It may be read in the revised edition: Masterworks of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Art, Chicago: Argonaut, 1964.

xlv Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800-1939, London: British Museum, 1993.

xlvi Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

xlvii See the brilliant observations of Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 133-54; and his Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

xlviii See the critical edition of Donald L. Hill: Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, Berkeley: University of California, 1980, pp. 141-85, 410-441. A general study is Paul Barolsky, Walter Pater's Renaissance, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987. For the link between Pater and Winckelmann, see Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 238-53. More generally, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994; and Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

xlix For the context of the admiration of Winckelmann by Pater (and by John Addington Symonds), see Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Asceticism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, esp. pp. 112-15.

l Franz Wickhoff, Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early Christian Painting, trans. and ed. by S. A. Strong, New York: Macmillan, 1900. For the context of Wickhoff's discovery, and some ensuing stages in the scholarship of Roman art, see Otto Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

li For a reliable survey, see Otto Brendel, Etruscan Art, New York: Penguin Books, 1978 (Pelican History of Art). See also David Ridgway and Francesca Ridgway, eds., Italy Before the Romans: The Iron Age, Orientalizing, and Etruscan Periods, New York: Academic Press, 1979; Larissa Bonfante, "Recent Books from Italy on the Etruscans," American Journal of Archaeology, 95 (1991), 157-64; and Ellen Macnamara, The Etruscans, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

lii Elaine K. Gazda, ed., Roman Art in the Private Sphere: New Perspectives on the Architecture and Decor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. This, and some of the other trends noted in the text above, figure in the casebook edited by Eve D'Ambra, Roman Art in Context: An Anthology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993.

liii James C. O'Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert M. Helm, eds., Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. 

liv See Michael Stephen Silk and Joseph Peter Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. This monograph shows that Nietzsche's ideas were more complex than their received form suggests. A different view, deemphasizing Nietzsche's role, appears in the influential work of E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irational, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.