Sándor Radnóti
Why One Should Imitate the Greeks: On Winckelmann
In his book on the French Revolution, Simon Schama recalls that „Mercier, who had
taught at college in his twenties, was another idolater of the ancients and after wallowing in
the majesty of the Republic found it »painful to leave Rome and find oneself still a commoner
of the rue Noyer.« .”1 Contemporary readers might find this sort of identification with
historical or imaginary figures mildly funny, but it was actually quite characteristic of the
second half of the eighteenth century. Thanks to Robert Darnton’s research, we know of a
merchant from La Rochelle whose entire life was based on a thoroughgoing identification
with Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse.2 „The revolution of 1789-1814 disguised itself in turn as
the Roman republic and as the Roman empire”—wrote Marx.3 I doubt that this disguise was a
matter of fashion, as Walter Benjamin supposed.4 In looking back, fashion cites, appropriates
or employs certain elements lifted out of the past; here, however, we are dealing with
something else, to wit, outright identification. In the period under discussion, identification is
not yet limited by the firm historicist conviction that every form of behavior, every gesture
and thought is inextricably bound up with a unique and unrepeatable historical situation;
already at this point, however, identification bears a heightened emotional charge owing to an
increasingly ominous awareness of the impossibility of recuperating a moment from the past.
Any given historical situation is merely an abstract framework whose content consists of
examples, and the very same examples might just as well be injected into the framework of
the present through imitation, emulation, analogy, competition, identity, identification—or
parallelism.
Parallel lives, written by Plutarch sometime around 105-115 AD, was at the peak of
its reception history at the time. Its success story lasted for three centuries, and it was only in
the nineteenth century, probably under the influence of historicism, that its popularity began
to wane. Plutarch’s work was staple reading for common people and for the outstanding

This essay is part of a longer study.
Simon Schama, Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 171.
2
Robert Darnton, „Readers Respond to Rousseau; The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity”, in: Darnton: The
Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. London and New York: Basic Books,
1984. 215kk.
3
Karl Marx, in the The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
1
2
minds of the time as well. Rousseau’s father was an avid reader of Plutarch, and so was
Rousseau himself, claiming that “ce fut la première lecture de mon enfance, ce sera la
dernière de ma vieillesse: c’est presque le seul Auteur que je n’ai jamais lu sans en tirer
quelque fruit.”5 Plutarch was an important source for Winckelmann as well as a permanent
point of reference—clearly understood by the audience—for the great public speakers of the
French Revolution. Before assassinating Marat, Charlotte Corday devoted the preceding day
to reading Plutarch, and when David painted Marat’s death, „what was he doing,” asks Mario
Praz in his book on Neoclassicism, „but translating the spirit of Plutarch into paint”.6 The
twenty-three parallel lives narrated by Plutarch followed a unified program, the portrayal and
comparison of a pair of historical (and mythical) figures from Greek and Roman antiquity
linked by an exemplary affinity of character and fate. The original function of these pairings
was to secure continuity between Greek and Roman culture. When translation into Latin and
various national languages made Parallel Lives one of the most widely-read books, it became
a literary model—for Giorgio Vasari among others—that epitomized the constructed unity of
an antiquity reborn.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, this unity began to disintegrate. The
traditions of Greece and Rome became individualized and opposed to one another. This meant
also that the terms „Roman” and „Greek” came to be interpreted as referring to the inheritance
of particular nations. In France, historical memory has long nourished and, beginning with the
seventeenth century, unfolded the analogy to Rome and the intellectual affinity with Latin
culture. Courts in Germany absorbed French culture and sought an antidote against this
influence through their turn to Greek antiquity.7 It was Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-
Walter Benjamin, „Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen XIV.”, in Benjamin Schriften I. (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,
1955), p. 503
5
„This was the first reading of my childhood and it will be the last reading of my old age; he is almost the only
author whom I never read without benefiting from the reading.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (Paris: nrf, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, 1957). p. 679. See also „Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality ,” The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
6
Mario Praz, On Neoclassicism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969 [1940]), p. 99. „The Plutarch of the
eighteenth century was not the historian of the triumphs of Caesar, of Alexander, of Aemilius Paulus, the author
whose works had suggested a triumphal procession to Lorenzo the Magnificent and to Mantegna the famous
cartoons; rather he was the portrait-painter who had immortalized the figures of Brutus, of Cato, of
Demosthenes, of Phocion; the portrait-painter of free and exemplary men, men who were nevertheless so close
to us that their virtues could be emulated.” P. 98.
7
Of course the cure involved other antidotes too. In his famous Seventeenth literary letter, Lessing proposed two
alternatives: 1. English models—especially Shakespeare—as opposed to the works of French Classicism, and the
aesthetics of genius based on the principle of nature as opposed to the rationalist aesthetics of regularity; 2.
Looking for theatre plays reflecting the „German way of thinking,” he called for the rediscovery of a national
tradition and insisted on the importance of medieval Germany, especially the story of Faust. Johann Gottfried
Herder became the great integrator of these alternative theories of culture (Greek antiquity, Shakespeare as
natural genius, Volk poetry, Oriental origin).
4
3
1768) who initiated this movement, exerting great influence even though only the following
generation would link Grecomania with Philhellenic national consciousness. Winckelmann
had incurred some grievances due to Gallomania,8 and he was quite given to Gallophobic
sentiments. Yet his work focused primarily on a historical question, that of the systematic
differentiation between Greek and Roman art, and on the attribution of absolute superiority to
Greek over Roman art.
However crucial for the humanities—especially for the hagiography of art history and
archaeology—in fact these inquiries only appeared to be historical in nature, since they
ultimately served the purpose of radically transforming aesthetic taste in the present and
presupposed a strong identification with the characters of the historical past. Against the
excesses and errors of the Baroque and the Rococo period, Winckelmann sought to reinstate
the universality of taste, the laws of beauty, which he reconstructed in reference to the
concrete historical moment of a particular historical people. He appreciated individuality and
sought universality at the same time: he was after the specific causes underlying the historical
moment while also adhering to a universal idea of beauty and good taste. Although nothing
could have been farther from his way of thinking than the historical relativization of beauty
and good taste, he diversified and historicized the previously unified conception of antiquity
as an „other” distinct from our time. Winckelmann highlighted the individuality of the
production history of art works but he did not individualize the resultant works themselves.
The only manner in which he could sustain these divergent tendencies within a coherent
conception was by positing a causal law explaining why it was in a particular period of Greek
antiquity that art attained to perfection in the normative sense. The law in question manifests
itself under certain necessary natural conditions, which first the abbé Dubos, later and most
famously Montesquieu, and finally—being heir to the popular ideas of the early
Enlightenment—Winckelmann himself derived from the radiance of the sky, in other words,
from the climate of Greece. This causal law is none other than the effect of political liberty
upon the development of art. It is the interplay between nature and society that constitutes the
precondition for the second-degree interplay of nature and society in the highest form of
human activity, that is, for art understood as the mimesis of beautiful bodies. Ideally shaped
bodies as well as the ideal capacity for their imitation are products of the natural and political
climate, the most important aspect of the latter being the form of education, and in particular
8
In 1765 it seemed that Winckelmann might obtain a position as museum supervisor and main librarian at the
Berlin court. The plan came to naught because Frederick the Great thought that a thousand crowns would suffice
4
physical education, rooted in the social system of a given state. Unlike other causal laws, with
which the Enlightenment abounds, this law promised no more than a dissemination of insight
and, at best, the approximation of the formerly attained norm of beauty through imitation.
Thus, in a few exceptional cases, the Greeks could be approximated—but approximated
only!—by the very greatest masters of the Renaissance—that is, strictly speaking only by
Raphael and, with some qualifications, by Michelangelo. In this manner, Anton Raphael
Mengs became the Raphael of his age in Winckelmann’s eyes. Although the anthropomorphic
conception of stylistic change patterned on the course of individual human life entailed a
theory of future development and decline, this conception nonetheless identified the absolute
goal of development in the distant past of the golden age—or ages—of Greek art. This
conception temporalized the norm of taste without dynamizing it. The actualization of the
norm was historicized, without, however, history offering any guarantee for its repeated
actualization, for „the attainment of antiquity”.9 The dynamis of history was not considered
robust enough to carry the burden of restoring what has already once been attained, and so it
could only mobilize three other potentialities: 1. the rejection of bad taste (in its Baroque and
Rococo variants), 2. the reception of good taste through the encouragement of a Neoclassical
art imitating antiquity, 3. the reception of good taste through the full reinstatement and
comprehensive introduction of the art of the past into the artistic culture of the present, so that
the antiquarian attitude toward the past gives way to a museological one. The immense
perspectives opened up by this entirely novel resolution of the debate between the old and the
new could not yet become apparent to Winckelmann, however; in the period under discussion,
after all, it was still possible in the context of a polemics against Neoclassicism and art
criticism to contradict Winckelmann (and Diderot) by asserting the absolute priority of an
artist’s effect on his contemporaries over the effect of works of the past during their
afterlife.10 Hence the elevation of a retrospective ideal to a historical telos inevitably gave rise
to tensions, which compelled Winckelmann, as a viewer and interpreter of Greek art, to
for a German– „1000 ecus étoient assez pour un Allemand”. See Weisse’s letter to Meinhard on 1 March, 1766,
in Winckelmann: Briefe IV. (Berlin W: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1957), p. 136.
9
See Winckelmann, “Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und BildhauerKunst”, H. Pfotenhauer et al. (ed.), Frühklassizismus. Position und Opposition: Winckelmann, Mengs, Heinse
(Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995), p. 26.
10
See Étienne Falconet’s attack on Marcus Aurelius’ Capitolium statue and other works from antiquity,
Observations sur la statue de Marc Aurèle, et sur d’autres objets relatifs aux Beaux-Arts ( Amsterdam, 1771). A
concise summary of Falconet’s views can be found in H. Dieckmann and J. Seznec, „The Horse of Marcus
Aurelius. A Controversy between Diderot and Falconet”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute,
XV. (1952) 198kk.
5
project himself into the distant past by way of a radical and intense identification—which
was, to be sure, not devoid of renunciatory moments.
This strong form of identification with Greek antiquity, ever so characteristic of
Winckelmann, did not stem from defects in his sense of reality. Nor did it have anything to do
with some sort of escapist Romantic longing. Winckelmann knew quite well how to adapt to
the exigencies of his age. Vanity and snobbery were not beneath him, as evidenced by the
pride he took in the friendship extended to him, a mere plebeian, by the purple-robed
dignitaries of the Roman clergy—whose respect for the erudite humanist, to be sure, did not
completely override mild condescension to the client. He could protect his interests as an
author, and he was adept at adjusting the language of his letters to the addressee’s social
status. He knew when and how to strike a deal based on compromise. He carefully weighed
the pros and contras of his conversion to Catholicism—his changement, as he called it—and
the reader may doubt his sincerity when, in several letters, he confides to members of his
earlier denomination that he occasionally still feels Lutheran.11 „Auch Winckelmann trug
Perücke und schnupfte: man muß auch über Rokoko umlernen,” wrote Gerhart Hauptmann in
his notes for an unfinished novel on Winckelmann.12 His desires were modest indeed, and he
could never quite get over the fulfillment of the foremost among them: to live among the
monuments of Rome. Otherwise, his desires only bear witness to his temperance: they
concern, above all, friendship, teaching young people, good health, the pleasures of the table,
good wine, every now and then a handsome castrated boy, prestige, and membership in the
Royal English Society of Antiquaries, and the like. Nor did his unfulfilled desires suggest
grandiose ambition: travel to Greece and Sicily—perhaps even to Egypt—, financial security,
a position in Germany (which his awed adherence to Rome would have presumably induced
him to decline in horror), serving as a guide to Emperor Joseph II. in Rome. Even by the
standards of his time, Winckelmann’s way of life could hardly be called modern; but then, of
course, the city that shaped his life was not exactly modern either. Walter Rehm, the leading
twentieth-century philologist of Winckelmann’s works (as Carl Justi was their leading
nineteenth-century biographer) characterized this way of life as a late humanistic and feudal
11
He repeatedly mentions to his old friends that he used a Lutheran songbook every morning. See his letter of 27
September, 1766 to Usteri in Winckelmann, Briefe III (Berlin W: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1956), p. 210. This
anecdotal detail, which even captured Goethe’s interest, later became significant in the context of the
problematic of „Winckelmann’s Germanness,” even though Winckelmann described himself a „Prussian become
Roman” in his letter of 14 November, 1761 to Gessner (Briefe II., p. 186)
12
„Winckelmann wore a wig and took snuff. We have some relearning to do about the Rococo age as well.”
Gerhart Hauptmann, „Winckelmann. Notizen und Quellenexzerpte”, Sämtliche Werke X. (Frankfurt/M.:
Propyläen, 1970), p. 652. This interesting fragment was written in 1939, and it exists in two versions, the second
of which is mentioned as a novella.
6
form which was still viable in the papal city in the eighteenth century: living in dependence
from feudal lords and yet as a member of a nobilitas litteraria that disregarded social rank, in
a kind of literary republic. At the same time, the moderation that constrained the horizon of
his life stood in notable contradiction to his intensely personal relationship to the art of
antiquity, an enthusiasm that was fervent and exclusive in the utmost. There was only one
form of life in which Winckelmann saw any merit, that of the antiquario, and every time he
met someone whose interests and pleasures concerned other things he found it hard to
suppress his astonishment, outrage or scorn. The term antiquario may be misleading, to be
sure, for even though from a sociological point of view the way of life of such a person
corresponds to that of the humanist antiquarian, he is primarily concerned with autopsia, the
experience of the eye: „Ich glaube ich bin nach Rom gekommen, denenjenigen die Rom nach
mir sehen werden die Augen ein wenig zu öffnen,” he wrote, adding, „ich rede nur von
Künstlern: denn alle Cavalier kommen als Narren hier und gehen als Esel wieder weg.”13 It is
the experience of the eye that has the power of making the viewer contemporaneous with the
ancient object. Already before having this experience (in Dresden), Winckelmann already had
some notion of such contemporaneity, as evidenced by his belief concerning the works of art
of ancient Greece that „Man muß mit ihnen, wie mit seinem Freund, bekannt geworden
sind”14 This sense of contemporaneity must have been enhanced by the fact that the totality of
the known relics of antiquity was open-ended, and incomparably more so than today. Every
day held the promise of another fascinating new finding brought to light in Rome—or in the
towns of Campania, where excavation had just begun—exposed to be seen for the first time,
as it were. This phenomenological contemporaneity of the object with its viewer can be
played out against its factual antiquity all the more strongly as the gaze beholding the object
had been preformed to operate mimetically, that is, trained in such a manner as to assimilate
the viewer’s impression of a statue to his ideal of the living body to a far greater degree than
would be sanctioned by the rules of reception prevailing in our time. „auch in unseren Tagen
sieht man lebendige Nioben und vatikanische Apollen,” as Winckelmann wrote.15 This kind
of gaze is intensely preoccupied with the action that the statue portrays, but not with its
„I believe I came to Rome to open the eyes of those who will see the city after me. I am only talking about
artists because every gentleman comes here as a fool and leaves as an ass.” Letter to Berendis, 7 July 1756,
Winckelmann, Briefe I, p. 235.
14
„we must be acquainted with them as with our friends…” “Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen
Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst”, 14.
15
„In our own time too, one sees living Niobes and Vatican Apollos.” Winckelmann, Trattato preliminare
(1767). Quoted in Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen. (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 19434 [18661873]), Vol. II. P. 410.
13
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former function. It is interested in mythic, not cultic significance; it strives to reconstruct a
timeless meaning rather than a historical context. The message that it seeks to reveal is not
historical or moral but rather one having to do with an ahistorical norm of beauty. The
privileging of the aesthetic dimension in this experience of contemporaneity is eminently
conducive to identification with the historical past and therefore contributes to the formation
of the „Greek” Winckelmann, the character of the Neo-Classicist aesthete. Yet this aesthetic
bent should not be taken to mean that historically real ideas of Greek antiquity were outside
the scope of identification. Winckelmann’s guiding idea was friendship in the classical Greek
sense of philia, which is supposed to involve every form of mutual attraction, as we know it
from Achilles and Patroclus, from the examples of ancient biographies, and from Books VIII.
and IX. of the Nicomachean Ethics—and it was quite clear to him that „heroic” friendship,
irreconcilable with Christian morality, is extremely rare in the modern world.16 He idealized
his loves and male friendships in accordance with this Greek model; inevitable
disappointments only made his cultural critique that much darker.
Quite a few contemporaries and immediate descendants thought that a parallel
biography of Winckelmann and Rousseau (1712-1787) would need little justification.
(Parallel Lives, the perennial bestseller for so many centuries, has always offered a
compelling scheme: already Montaigne, influenced by Plutarch, drew a parallel between
Plutarch and Seneca). Indeed, there is ample room for superficial analogies: their similarly
modest, small-town, artisan-like backgrounds; their insincere conversion to Catholicism,
leading both to espouse the lifestyle of the client (Cardinal Alessandro Albani—Madame
d’Epinay); their late but immediately and overwhelmingly successful start as writers
(Winckelmann is thirty-eight years old when he writes his treatise On the Imitation of the
Greeks, Rousseau is thirty-seven when he wins the essay prize of the Academy of Dijon),
soon to be followed by world-wide fame; the idiosyncrasies of their private lives.
Understandably enough, critics of culture--both of the pessimistic and the fanatic-enthusiastic
variety--tended to stress the affinity between the two: this is what Diderot discerned,17 and it
is also what Winckelmann’s adherents in Zurich discerned, who also cultivated close relations
with Rousseau. Leonhard Usteri, according to whom „Winckelmann was to the arts what
16
See the letters written to Bünau, 17 September 1754 and to Berendis, 19 December 1754 (Winckelmann, Briefe
I. 148, p. 151)
17
See Denis Diderot: „Salon de 1765”, Œuvres IV. ed. Laurent Versini, (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996), p. 439. See
Édouard Pommier, Winckelmann, inventeur de l’histoire de l’art. (Paris: nrf, Éditions Gallimard, 2003), p.
211ff..
8
Rousseau was to morals,”18 conducted a correspondence with Rousseau; and Hans Heinrich
Füssli, for whom „Winckelmann was to taste what Rousseau was to morality and politics”19
paid a visit to him. One assumes that they wisely refrained from sharing such views with
Winckelmann himself, who mentions Rousseau but once in his entire correspondence, and
even in that teasing context, his name carries negative connotations: the reference is to a
young traveller who reads Rousseau’s novel instead of an Italian pastoral poem.20
Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that Winckelmann could have conceived the plan, entertained
in 1764, to write a treatise on the corruption of taste in the arts and sciences without
familiarity with Rousseau’s negative answer, in the first Discourse (1750), to the essay prize
question of the Dijon academy („Whether the Restoration of the Sciences and the Arts
Contributed to the Purification of Mores”). Some see a close connection between the narrative
told in Rousseau’s second Discourse, based partly on historical, partly on philosophical
assumptions, and Winckelmann’s history of the art of antiquity.21 Yet this connection
becomes untenable, it seems to me, in light of Rousseau’s keen awareness of the contingency
of history, of „the chance coming together of several unconnected causes that might never
have come into being,”22 a view that is thoroughly opposed to Winckelmann’s conviction that
the development of the Greeks was driven by necessity. Rousseau was in a position to
recognize the importance of chance because he programmatically and provocatively broke
with traditional erudition and „set aside the facts.” This approach is diametrically opposed to
Winckelmann’s ambition to beat the antiquarian at their own game by surpassing them in
matters of erudition.
In any event Rousseau’s return to antiquity, and even further back into the past, is a
good deal more complicated than Winckelmann’s. Provided that Winckelmann’s relatively
modest oeuvre, mostly limited in range to sculpture, can be compared at all in terms of
independent intellectual achievement to Rousseau’s anthropology, philosophy of culture,
politics, and morals, it is still hard to avoid the conclusion that the two bodies of work are
opposed to one another. Rousseau unambiguously opts for the superiority of Rome to Greece,
whereas Winckelmann rates the Greeks higher. Moreover, Rousseau is also quite clear about
18
Letter to Füssli, 11 October 1763, Winckelmann: Briefe IV. p. 232. Available information concerning this
relationship has been compiled by W. Rehm in his astonishing annotations (see Winckelmann: Briefe III. p. 448)
19
Letter from Rome from 1764. Quoted by Rehm, Winckelmann: Briefe II. (Berlin W: Walter de Gruyter & Co.,
1954.) p. 512.
20
See the travel itinerary that Winckelmann sketches to Francke in 1762, Winckelmann, Briefe IV. p. 19.
21
See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994.) p. 43.kk.
22
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, „Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” The Basic
Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.) p. 59.
9
the superiority of Sparta to Athens; and, finally (at least in the period of the Discourses),
about the superiority of natural, „savage” man over historically determined man.
Setting aside the third opposition, which leads us to another kind of critique of
modernity in the name of „nature,” we can see that the first two oppositions between societies
underscore the primacy of virtue over taste, of war over peace, of closed society over a
society open to foreign influences. Each of these oppositions excludes one of the
diametrically opposed terms.
Art is excluded from the good society as a corrupting, enfeebling luxury. To be sure,
this Socratic decision is still based on the assumption that art has a kind of power over life
that none or only very few nowadays would be ready to acknowledge. “Platon banissait
Homère de sa république, et nous souffrirons Molière dans la nôtre!”23 Rousseau’s decision is
supposed to represent the sacrifice of taste for the sake of virtue, a sacrifice involving
considerable personal loss.24 If Classical tragedy does not fall prey to censorship, the reason
for its being spared is the very opposite of a universal criterion of taste, namely, the respect
that a closed society pays to its national tradition and to the history of its formation. The art of
Praxiteles and Phidias is presumably held in high esteem for the same reason. Here too we
find the explanation for the impossibility of transposing either art or science or philosophy
into another national culture. (Winckelmann considered the development of Greek culture
autochthonous—thus incurring Herder’s criticism—yet he also believed that the yardstick
resulting from this development was valid in every culture.) Cato’s campaign against the
Athenian philosopher ambassadors was one of the motivations, and not the least significant
one, for Rousseau’s intense reverence for Cato.25 Art and the other branches of culture must
heed the imperative of entrenchment behind national boundaries. Observance of the mores,
customs and holidays peculiar to a nation must be central to its culture, and where such
peculiarities are absent, they must be actively developed.
“Tout ce qui facilite la communication entre les diverses nations porte aux unes, non
les vertus des autres, mais leurs crimes, et altére chez toutes, les mœurs qui sont propres à
„Plato exiled Homer from his state and we should put up with a Molière in our own?” Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Lettre a d’Alembert sur les spectacles. Paris: Garnier Frères) p. 256.
24
„I am amused whenever I imagine how my taste is judged on the basis of my works. On the basis of the present
work they will say: ‘This man is mad for dance’—I am bored when I watch dancers; ‘He cannot suffer theatre’—
yet I passionately love it… The truth is that I am fascinated by Racine; and I never deliberately missed a
performance of Molière.” Ibid., p. 275.
25
In 155 B.C. the Athenians sent three philosophers as ambassadors to Rome. The extraordinary success of
Carneades and his companions disconcerted Cato, and he predicted that “the Romans would certainly be
destroyed when they began once to be infected with Greek literature.” Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecians
and Romans. Transl. by John Dryden and revised by Arhur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library), p. 428.
23
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leurs climat et à la constitution de leur gouvernement.”26 What Rousseau envisions is quite
unlike Herder’s notion of historical individuality, of the infinite variability and
incommensurability of national cultures—all the less so because Herder is interested in their
intermingling and a nation that closes in upon itself is a scandal in his eyes. Rather, Rousseau
is concerned with the guarantee of political security provided by the peculiarity of national
customs. This is why exemplary models of conduct can break through national boundaries;
this is why Cato can be the greatest of all human beings; this is why the Rousseauldian agents
of the Revolution can identify with the republican heroes of ancient Rome; and this is, finally,
why Rousseau himself calls for Geneva’s identification with Sparta.
It is hard to suppress the impression that the emotionally overcharged attitudes of
identification that we find in the second half of the 18th century are different from the earlier,
ornamental forms of identification, motivated by humanist ideas, which prevailed in the
Renaissance and the Baroque age. Indeed a further distinction must be drawn between the
latter two, for the Baroque age was specifically preoccupied with the problem of recasting
Christian contents in a mould derived from Classical antiquity.
One might with equal justification call the great period of French Classicism in the
17th century or the early 18th century in England, the age of Anne Stuart (1702-1714) an
Augustan age. Indeed Winckelmann himself resorts to phrases of courtly flattery in his
treatise on imitation: „Und man muß gestehen, daß die Regierung des grossen Augusts der
eigentliche glückliche Zeit-Punct ist, in welchem die Künste, als eine fremde Colonie, in
Sachsen eingeführet worden. Unter seinem Nachfolger, dem deutschen Titus, sind dieselben
diesem Lande eigen worden, und durch sie wird der gute Geschmack allgemein.”27 By
contrast, at the end of History of the Art of Antiquity he likens himself to an author who must,
in writing about the history of his homeland, also broach the topic of its destruction, which he
has experienced personally. Indeed he likens himself to one who sees ghosts where there is in
fact nothing.28 His homeland is the world of antiquity, and what perished is not just works of
„Everything that facilitates contact between different nations actually carries over the sins, not the virtues, from
the one to the other, altering everywhere the morals that accord with the climate and the form of government.”
Rousseau: “Narcisse. Preface”, in Oeuvres complètes II. Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard, 1964), p. 964.
27
„And one must confess that the reign of the great Augustus [August the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of
Poland] is the truly fortunate point in time at which the arts, like a foreign colony, are introduced into Saxony.
Under his successor, the German Titus [August III] these arts have become the country’s own, and through their
beneficial influence good taste came to be generally adopted.” Winckelmann, „Gedancken,” 13.
28
See Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1993), p. 393. There is no reliable modern edition of Winckelmann’s chef d’oeuvre, unlike of his
correspondence and several of his minor works. The edition cited here—the latest and most widely available
one—is the reprographic reprint of the 1934 Vienna edition (Phaidon Verlag). The rather questionable decision
to privilege the first, 1764 version of the text over its posthumously published second version—to a great extent
26
11
art but good taste. It is the destruction of the latter that renders everything ghostly in his eyes.
Deploring his age as coarse and uncivilized—lacking in culture, its taste corrupted, its
scholars ignorant and blinkered -Winckelmann the Greek appears in his own eyes as a ghost.
We find the reverse of this perspective in Rousseau’s critique of culture and his consequent
identification with antiquity: “…malgré la politesse de mon siécle, je suis grossier comme les
Macédoniens de Philippe.29 The opposition is always between civilized, effeminate Athens on
the one hand, and on the other, coarser, manlier, more virtuous Sparta, or the Roman republic
or Macedonia. Nor do the anti-Christian, pagan tendencies that characterize both forms of
identification have the same roots: Winckelmann’s proclivities are nourished by the universal
concepts of Classical friendship and autonomous beauty, by a universalistic taste that rejects
the Baroque, whereas in Rousseau’s case, the pagan bias is connected to his hostility to
universalism. In a letter to Usteri he writes: “L’esprit patriotique est un esprit exclusive qui
nous fait regarder comme étranger, et presque comme ennemi tout autre que nos concitoyens.
Tel étoit l’esprit de Sparte et de Rome. L’esprit du Christianisme au contraire nous fait
regarder tous les hommes indifféremment comme nos fréres comme les enfans de Dieu."30
These are the beginnings of „the populist critique of culture,” to quote Mária Ludassy. „In the
debate surrounding the first Discourse, contemporaries judged the turn marked by ’The last
answer’ as a case of frivolous exhibitionism: Jean-Jacques as the king of an African country,
at the gallows constructed on the border of the country, about to hang the first European who
might undertake to introduce the ’blessings’ of Western civilization to his little people … Yet
whichever of Rousseau’s works we choose to study, we can always find the symbolic gallows
meant to hinder the free flow of the ostensibly universal values of culture.”31 This view is
prepared, enriched, and in its historical section significantly expanded by Winckelmann himself—is only
exacerbated by the astonishing idea of adopting illustrations from the 1972 reprint (Cologne: Phaidon), which
includes works found in the nineteenth century that Winckelmann could not have known. Only samples are
known from the edition begun in the 1990’s, which takes the posthumous version into account: „…die Augen ein
wenig zu öffnen”: Eine Anthologie mit Bildern aus Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Geschichte der Kunst des
Altertums. Ed. Seminar für Klassische Archäologie der Freien Universität Berlin; Winckelmann-Gesellschaft
Stendal. Introduction by Max Kunze. Archäologische Kommentare: Mathias René Hofter. (Mainz am Rhein:
Philipp von Zabern, 1993). I also consulted the twelve-volume Donauöschingen edition of Winckelmann’s
collected works from 1825, whose volumes III. through VI. contain the second version of the Geschichte der
Kunst des Altertums.
29
“… the refinement of my age notwithstanding, I am rough as the Macedonians of Philip.” Rousseau:
“Narcisse. Preface”, 960.
30
„The patriotic spirit is exclusive since it treats everyone who is not a fellow citizen of ours as a foreigner,
indeed almost as an enemy. Such was the spirit of Sparta and Rome. The spirit of Christianity, however,
considers all men without any discrimination as brothers, children of God.” Letter to Usteri, 30 April, 1763.
Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau. Éd. critique par R. E. Leigh. Tome XVI. Banbury,
Oxfordshire : The Voltaire Foundation Thorpe Mandeville House, 1972. 127.f.
31
Mária Ludassy, „Népi tánc és harci ének: Rousseau és a populista kultúrkritika kezdetei” [Popular dance and
battle song: Rousseau and the beginnings of the populist critique of culture,” Téveszméink eredete [The Origins
of Our Misconceptions] (Budapest: Atlantisz, 1991), p. 41.
12
diametrically opposed to the importing to Saxony and elsewhere of the arts as a colony of
foreigners, whose assimilation holds the promise, to Winckelmann’s mind, of the
popularization of good taste. Once we see these oppositions in a clear light, we must also
recognize the common elements that separate both writers from earlier forms of indebtedness
to antiquity. Earlier writers liked to flatter themselves by drawing parallels between their age
and the golden age of Classical antiquity (as in the aforementioned example of Augustan
peace). Rousseau’s and Winckelmann’s views of antiquity agree insofar as they both see their
own time as the very opposite of antiquity. Among the variants of this basic polar opposition,
always charged with cultural criticism, we find Rousseau’s opposition between popular dance
and theatre and Winckelmann’s opposition between the nakedness of the Greek and the veiled
body of modernity. In the place of theatre, which D’Alembert (and Voltaire) prescribed for
the citizens of Geneva, Rousseau makes a plea for autochthonous forms of entertainment,
modest celebrations and simple games imagined after the model of Sparta. “J’entends déja les
plaisants me demander si, parmi tant de merveilleuses instructions, je ne veux point aussi dans
nos fêtes genevoises introduire les danses des jeunes Lacédémoniennes? Je réponds que je
voudrais bien nous croire les yeux et les cœurs assez chastes pour supporter un tel spectacle,
et que de jeunes personnes dans cet état fussent à Genève, comme à Sparte, couvertes de
l’honnêteté publique ; mais quelque estime que je fasse de mes compatriotes, je sais trop
combien il y a loin d’eux aux Lacédémoniens, et je ne leur propose des institutions de ceux-ci
que celles dont ils ne sont pas encore incapables."32 The naked dance of Spartan girls is
described by Plutarch in his biography of Lycurgos: „And to the end he might take away their
overgreat tenderness and fear of exposure to the air, and all acquired womanishness, he
ordered that the young women should go naked in the processions, as well as the young men,
and dance, too, in that condition, at certain solemn feasts, singing certain songs, whilst the
young men stood around, seeing and hearing them. On these occasions they now and then
made, by jests, a befitting reflection upon those who had misbehaved themselves in the wars;
and again sang encomiums upon those who had done any gallant action, and by these means
inspired the younger sort with an emulation of their glory… Nor was there anything shameful
in this nakedness of the young women; modesty attended them, and all wantonness was
„I can already hear the mockers inquire whether I propose to include, along with all those marvellous
educational institutions, the dance of the Lakedaimonian girls among our celebrations in Geneva? I reply: I
would gladly believe that our eyes and hearts have enough virginal chastity to endure such a sight, and that in
Geneva, similarly to Sparta, public virtue would shroud young creatures in such a condition; but much as I may
esteem my fellow townspeople, I know all too well how far they are removed from the Lakedaimonians, and I
only recommend to them those institutions of the latter people for which they have not yet become unfit.”
Rousseau: Lettre a d’Alembert, p. 278.
32
13
excluded. It taught them simplicity and a care for good health, and gave them some taste of
higher feelings, admitted as they thus were to the field of noble action and glory.”33
This passage in Plutarch was of pivotal importance for Winckelmann as well.
Reference is made to it already in Gedancken¸ when he surveys the diverse forms in which
nakedness appeared in public situations in Greece (gymnastics, drama, mystery play, ritual
dance), offering the arts the school of observing beautiful bodies; and it is also cited in his
History of the Art of Antiquity.34 His line of thought turns on the observation that, thanks to
nature, education, exercise, nourishment and even breeding—a kind of naive eugenics—the
bodies of Greek youth represented the most beautiful formations ever brought forth by nature,
and the ones closest to ideal beauty. Furthermore, in ancient Greece the public exhibition of
beauty was not hindered either by false chastity or by any misconception of well-being
associating nakedness with deprivation; nakedness was seen instead as a sign of free morality.
For Winckelmann, the highest object of art is the beauty of the naked human being with the
clearly defined contours of its body; indeed in Greek art even the folds of the clothing serve
the purpose of accentuating the shapes of the body.35 Natural beauty, noble contours, drapery
that clothes without concealing the naked human shape: on these same features Winckelmann
had founded the superiority of Greek art already in his treatise on the imitation of Greek art.
The artist is thus spurred on by continuous encounters with natural beauty. In one
passage, Winckelmann even links the beauty of nature to an Enlightenment motif that is
otherwise quite foreign to his way of thinking, namely, the valorization of the nature of the
savage. „Sehet der schneller Indianer an, der einem Hirsch zu Fusse nachsetzet: wie flüchtig
verden seine Säfte, wie biegsam und schnell werden seine Nerven und Muskeln, und wie
leicht wird der gantze Bau des Cörpers gemacht. So bildet uns Homer seine Helden, und
seinen Achilles bezeichnet er vorzüglich durch die Geschwindigkeit seiner Füsse. So bildet
uns Homer seine Helden…”36 True, this kind of eclecticism was hardly unique to
Winckelmann. It has been recorded, for instance, that in 1760 the young American painter
Benjamin West—who could have met an Indian and even more likely read Winckelmann’s
33
Plutarch: Lives, p. 60.
See „Gedancken…”, 19., „Geschichte…”, i.h. p. 151.
35
See „Geschichte…”, p. 82. Winckelmann also writes about the taboo on nakedness, related to well-being and
affluence (Wohlstand), among the Persians and the Etruscans (p. 112) and in contemporaneous bourgeois
society, in which affluence infringes on moral freedom. „Gedancken…”, p. 18.
36
„Behold the fast Indian in pursuit of a deer. How his vital fluids are animated, how nimble and fast his nerves
and muscles, how supple the entire build of his body. Thus Homer shapes his heroes for us and he marks his
Achilles above all with the swiftness of his legs …” „Gedancken…”, p. 16.
34
14
work, published five years earlier—saw a Mohican warrior in the Belvedere Apollo.37 Beside
the ancient classics, philosophy, medicine and „barbarous chronicles of monks” (which he
was obliged by duty to read at some point),38 Winckelmann’s furious reading and excerpting
activity may have extended to only a surprisingly small selection of art historical works, yet it
did lead him to devour a fair amount of travel writing, on the basis of which he concluded that
small and isolated peoples—Greek islanders, Georgians, Crimean Tartars—retained their
beauty to the day.39 Yet the question that particularly preoccupied him was whether the
physical beauty of the contemporaries he had met in Germany and Italy could be compared
with the beauty of the Greeks. The balance drawn in the treatise on imitation, written in
Dresden, is still negative: „Man nehme einen junger Spartaner, den ein Held mit einer Heldin
gezeuget, der in der Kindheit niemahls in Windeln eingeschrenkt gewesen, der von dem
siebenden Jahre an auf der Erde geschlafen, und im Ringen und Schwimmen von Kindesbeinen an war geübet worden. Man stellen ihn neben einen jungen Sybariten unserer Zeit, und
alsdenn urtheile man, welchen von beyden der Künstler zu einem Urbilde eines jungen
Theseus, eines Achilles, ja selbst einen Bacchus, nehmen würde.”40 The treatise on imitation
was, strangely enough, followed by an anonymous polemical tract expressing the contrary
position in the debate: the side of the new in the clash between old and new, the antiClassicism of the naturalists in the clash between idealists and classicists. That tract, which
would be answered in its turn by a confirmation of the original position, broached the issue of
nakedness from an angle opposed to Winckelmann’s original statement. “Ueberhaupt glaube
ich, unsere Künstler würden vielleicht eben so gute Gelegenheit haben können,. das schönste
Nackende zu studiren, wie in den Gymnasien der Alkten geschehen. Warum nutzen sie
diejenige nicht, die man den Künstlern in Paris vorschlägt, in heissen Sommertagen längst den
Ufern der Seine, um die Zeit, da man sich zu baden pfleget, zu gehen, wo man das Nackende
37
Francis Haskell & Nicholas Penny: Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900. (New
Haven & London: Yale University Press, 19944, [1981]), p. 150.
38
See Johann Gottfried Herder: „Winckelmann, Lessing, Sulzer” [1781] „Denkmal Johann Winkelmanns”
[1777], Werke II. Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767-1781. Ed. Gunter E. Grimm. (Frankfurt/M.:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), p. 679. Between 1748 and 1754 Winckelmann stood in the service of Count
Heinrich von Bünau as librarian of the Nöthnitz castle near Dresden. Von Bünau was a scholarly annalist who
wrote a history of the German emperors up to 918, and Winckelmann had to assist him in this project.
39
See „Gedancken…”, p. 17. and „Erläuterung der Gedanken von der Nachahmung in der Malerey und
Bildhauerkunst; und Beantwortung des Sendschreibens über diese Gedanken”, in H. Pfotenhauer & alii (ed.),
Frühklassizismus. p. 91
40
„Let us take a young Spartan begotten by a hero and a heroine, who was never constrained by swaddlingclothes as a newborn, who has slept on the ground since the age of seven and was trained in wrestling and
swimming since his childhood. Let him stand next to a young Sybarite of our time and let us judge then which of
the two an artist might choose as a model for his young Theseus, Achilles, or even Bacchus.”„Gedancken…”, p.
15.k.
15
von sechs bis zu funfzig Jahren wählen kann? Nach solche Betrachtungen hat Michael Angelo
in seinem berühmten Carton von dem Kriege von Pisa vermuthlich die Figuren der Soldaten
entworfen, die sich in einem Fluße baden, und über dem Schall einer Trompete aus dem
Wasser springen, zu ihren Kleidern eilen, und dieselben über sich werfen.”41
This opposition has considerable importance for the theory of art. For if nature itself
has become corrupted as a consequence of moral decline and less propitious climate, and if,
moreover, in ancient Greece the conjunction of natural and social forces has already brought
forth the highest degree of natural beauty as well as its most perfect mimesis, then it may be
possible to justify a peculiar detour, one through which nature is not so much copied in its
immediacy as imitated by way of ancient art. Whereas the path of copying leads to
individualizing portraits and depictions of scenes (the plurality of Parisians bathing in the
Seine or Florentine soldiers bathing in the Arno), the path of imitation leads to universal
beauty. Thus the opposition between naturalism and idealism arises. This opposition is,
however, a historical construct which was not characteristic of the Greeks—or at any rate not
of the hypothetical origin of Greek art—for in Greek art the observation of nature in its
immediacy led directly to universal beauty, allowing a straight transition from natura to idea.
To be sure, the agitative stance of Gedancken, motivated as it was by the wish to influence
contemporary taste and art, undergoes significant modification by the writing of Geschichte.
A more profound kind of historical insight gives rise to one of Winckelmann’s most brilliant
ideas, the supposition that art has an intrinsic nature of its own that has lost direct connection
with the imitation of nature as early as in the more advanced stages in the development of
ancient art.42 In the final analysis, however, even in Gedancken, the ultimate point of the
imitation of the ancients is to make the imitation of nature give way to fidelity to an older
tradition of specifically artistic truth. By opting for this strategy, Winckelmann takes side in
the old debate between the Aristotelian and Platonic discourses,43 a debate turning on the
„In general I think that our artists have equally good opportunities for studying the most beautiful nudes as the
ancients in the gymnasiums. Why don’t they use the opportunity suggested to artists in Paris, namely, walking
on hot summer days, at the time when people bathe, alongside the banks of the Seine, where one can choose
among nudes from six to fifty years? It was presumably after such observations that Michelangelo sketched his
famous cartoon of the battle of Pisa, with the figures of soldiers bathing in a river who, upon hearing the blare of
a trumpet, leap out of the water and hurry to fetch their clothes, which they throw over their bodies.”
„Sendschreiben über die Gedanken von der Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und
Bildhauerkunst”, Pfotenhauer et al.(ed.), Frühklassizismus. p. 63.
42
„The older style was constructed on a basis of a system consisting of rules that were taken from nature but
which subsequently detached themselves from the latter and became ideal. One proceeded more in accordance
with the prescriptions of these rules than after the nature that was supposed to be imitated: for art has formed a
nature of its own for itself.” Geschichte… p. 216.f.
43
An excellent summary of the antecedents can be found in the rich annotations of the new German edition of
Gedancken. See Pfotenhauer et al. (ed.),Frühklassizismus. p. 374ff.
41
16
choice between mimesis and idea, similitude and beauty, particularity and universality. Or, to
characterize the debate in terms of individual artists: Poussin or Rubens; Annibale Carracci or
Caravaggio.
And, although it is clear that Winckelmann takes side with the Platonists, the fact that
he couches his position in an Aristotelian idiom—deriving the ideal art, to be imitated by
modern artists, from the imitation of nature—suggests that such partisan commitment has
become problematic and that the „relation between the beauty of empirical reality and the
constitution of art” needs to be clarified anew. Not having such a clarification up his sleeve,
Winckelmann wavers between „the empirical view [Anschauung] and the original model
rising above nature.”44 His wavering is, in fact, even more general than that. For
Winckelmann’s efforts to grasp the autochthonous „nature of art” are so many steps taken
toward declaring the autonomy of the aesthetic domain. Yet such a declaration is precluded by
his basic philosophical tenets, the concepts of imitation and beauty.45 Art, understood as a
form of beauty, must be necessarily transcended, either towards the metaphysical beauty of
„the highest being”46 or towards the natural-sensuous beauty of man. The ultimate question
that preoccupies Winckelmann is whether it is visible or invisible beauty that plays the role of
the artist’s master.
The passage from which I am about to quote identifies degrees of proximity to nature
in the development of art: the observation of nature is followed by the amendment of nature
through a more nearly perfect arrangement of its elements, which in turn gives way to the
transcendence of nature towards an image that no longer has any natural correlate. This
account does not introduce any new elements with respect to Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s
synthesis, conceived ninety years earlier,47 and the Neo-Platonist Bellori’s compilation
remains beholden to Plato insofar as it posits a continuous ascent from natura to idea. „Diese
häufigen Gelegenheiten zur Beobachtung der Natur veranlasseten die Griechischen Künstler
noch weiter zu gehen: sie fiengen an, sich gewisse allgemeine Begriffe von Schönheiten so
wohl einzelner Theile als gantzer Verhältnisse der Cörper zu bilden, die sich über die Natur
44
Ibid., p. 376
This connection is illuminated in Georg Lukács’ Heidelberg aesthetics, in the part titled „The Transcendental
Dialectics of the Idea of Beauty.” Georg Lukács: Heidelberger Ästhetik (1916-1918). (Darmstadt & Neuwied:
Luchterhand, 1974.), p. 377. ff.
45
“The highest Beauty is in God”, in Geschichte…, 149.
Bellori: “L’idea del pittore, dello scultore e dell’ architetto, scelta delle bellezze naturali superiore alla natura”,
in Erwin Panofsky: Idea. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. (Berlin: Bruno Hessling,
1960.), p. 130.ff.
46
47
17
selbst erheben sollten; ihr Urbild war eine blos im Verstande entworfene geistige Natur.”48
The novelty stems from the question that explodes this synthesis: did the characteristic profile
of Greek culture emerge in the understanding of posterity or was it something one could have
encountered on the streets of Athens? Winckelmann does not resolve this question, which has,
seemingly at least, already found a solution. For Bellori, the idea guiding the artist derives
from intuition (in the sense of Anschauung) and from correction—by means of judgment and
selection—of the intuited material; on the one hand, this idea is based on the experience of
nature, on the other, it surpasses all experience by virtue of the artist’s creative activity. This
is why Bellori thinks that the Trojan war could not have been caused by the natural beauty of
an actual woman and that it must have been caused by the perfect beauty of a statue.49 We
must not forget that in Dresden the beauty of ancient works of art was still an invisible one for
Winckelmann, since he scarcely knew any works from immediate experience. Justi assumed
that the Roman period must have brought about a turn, lessening the emphasis on idealism
and increasing the relative weight of naturalism.50 What this means in terms of the great
debate between naturalism and idealism—between particularity, plurality, richness of
characters, similarity on the one hand and ideal beauty on the other—is that he took the side
of idealism. Yet the debate between naturalism and idealism reappeared on this side as well,
and it reappeared in the sense already discussed, namely in regard to the question whether the
source of the idea of beauty lies within or beyond the bounds of experience. In terms of the
classical dilemma resuscitated in the Renaissance—whose two horns the theory of the idea
unified but which nonetheless kept separating again and again—the discussion of the ideal of
Greek beauty in Winckelmann’s history of art was in fact closer to the practice of assembling
a beautiful body from individual parts observed in nature (belonging to the tradition of the
Classical theory of election51) than to the ambition to exhibit a non-corporeal kind of beauty
that would be incompatible with experience. Nevertheless the experience of beauty must be
occasioned by ancient works imitating nature in a more perfect form, “da aber einige
vollkommen gebildete Teile als ein sanftes Profil in den größten Städten kaum einigemal
gefunden werden, so müssen wir auch aus dieser Ursache (von dem Nackenden nicht zu
„Such frequent opportunities for the observation of nature induced the Greeks to go even further: they began to
form certain general concepts of the beauty pertaining to individual parts as well as to comprehensive
proportions of the body, which were supposed to rise above nature itself; their original model was a spiritual
nature delineated in the understanding alone.”„Gedancken”, 16
49
For a witty reinterpretation of Guido Reni’s The Rape of Helena see Panofsky: Idea. p. 133.
50
Justi: Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, II. p. 410.
51
This tradition goes back to the famous discussion between Socrates and Parrhasios, according to which painters
do not imitate a single model but combine the most beautiful details of the bodies of several models. See
Xenophon: Commentarii, III 10, 1. 20.
48
18
reden) einige Teile an den Bildnissen der Alten betrachten.“52 Winckelmann does not,
however, entirely give up on the idea of meeting flesh and blood Niobes and Apollos. On
October 4, 1760 he asks his friend Muzel-Stosch, who is staying in London, to observe in the
most precise manner the shapes and features as well as the natural grace of beautiful
Englishmen and Englishwomen, and to be on the lookout for Greek profiles in particular.53 It
is not the complexion of the skin or the color of the eyes that interests him but parameters like
built, height, large eyes and so on. The Classicist tradition inherited from Pliny,54 which still
to a great extent held sway over Winckelmann’s time (including Winckelmann himself),
retains its validity with respect to the living human body as well, insofar as its shape and its
artistic outline are accorded absolute primacy over the colors filling the outlines.
Contemporaries are assessed by the yardstick of the ancient ideal of beauty, indeed, in
reference to ancient manners of artistic form-giving. In his Geschichte, Winckelmann offers a
detailed discussion of bodily parts, including the profile, the eyelids, the eyes and so on, not
forgetting that „auch die Teile der Scham haben ihre besondere Schönheit; unter der Hoden ist
alle Zeit der linke größer, wie es sich in die Natur findet…”55
Since Winckelmann looks for a late reflection of Greek statues in the young men
coming to Rome from everywhere in Italy and the rest of Europe, and is smitten whenever he
finds such beauty accompanied by virtue and taste (most intensely perhaps by Reinhold von
Berg, a twenty-six years old Lithuanian baron to whom he dedicates one of his works in
memory of a friendship „without any intention one could imagine”56), the statues themselves
are objects not just of analysis but desire. Conspicuously, it is virtually always statues of male
bodies that Winckelmann singles out for description, a preference that he justifies in
theoretical terms. In the 1763 treatise dedicated to Berg he writes: „Ich habe bemerket, daß
diejenigen, welche nur allein auf Schönheiten des weiblichen Geschlechts aufmerksam sind
und durch Schönheiten in unserem Geschlecht wenig oder gar nicht gerühret werden, die
Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst nicht leicht eingeboren, allgemein und lebhaft haben.
Es wird dasselbe, bei diesen in der Kunst der Griechen mangelhaft bleiben, da die größten
„For even in the largest cities it is almost impossible to find perfectly shaped body parts, such as a mild profile;
therefore these parts (and we haven’t even discussed the naked human being) must be viewed in ancient
depictions of man.” „Geschichte…”, p. 174.
53
Briefe II., p. 102.
54
Pliny the Elder: Naturalis historia. XXXV. xxxvi. 67.
55
„the various parts of the genitals have a peculiar beauty of their own; of the two testicles the left one is always
larger, just like in nature…" „Geschichte…”, p. 179.
56
Winckelmann: „Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst und dem Unterrichte
in derselben”, Johann Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke. Von Joseph Eiselein, Vol. 1. (Donauöschingen: Verlag
deutscher Klassiker, 1825.), p. 238.
52
19
Schönheiten derselben mehr von unserm, als von dem anderen Geschlechte sind.”57 At first
glance this approach seems to betray a rather ascetic view of art, suggesting that the viewer is
always a male, for whom artistic depictions of the female body pose a danger insofar as they
tend to divert him from the tranquil appreciation of beauty and lure him toward sensuality.
But insofar as this danger of voyeurism arises, this alone already represents a certain
naturalization of the statue—indeed a certain Pygmalion-like element in Winckelmann’s
theory. A closer look at the matter thus shows that Winckelmann’s discussions are thoroughly
shaped by a „male gaze” which is erotically attracted to members of the same sex. Lest we
should think that his claim about the greater beauty of male statues is a merely historical one,
a more outspoken letter written a few years later sets the record straight. That males are more
beautiful than females is here asserted as a law of nature that obtains among animal species as
well.58 Having arrived in Rome, he began a description of the statues of the Belvedere, of
which three are completed, Apollo, the torso believed to represent Heracles and Laocoön.
These are naked, ideal figures of the god, the demi-god, the young, the mature, the old man
(and the children). In his art history he gives an entire typology of the male body, ranging
from the simple and innocent faun through boys, perfectly shaped youth and Apollo, to the
gradual transition into a more masculine age. Apollo stands in the center--„Ein ewiger
Frühling, wie in dem glücklichen Elysien, bekleidet die reizende Männlichkeit vollkommener
Jahre mit gefälliger Jugend, und spielet mit sanften Zärtlichkeiten auf dem stolzen Gebäude
seiner Glieder.”59 He also mentions the practice of castration, intended to prevent the youthful
beauty of the male body from perishing.60 In the statues of Bacchus, for instance, one finds a
mingling of masculinity with the ideal youth of the castrated.
“…I have noticed that those who are observant only of beauty in women, and are moved little or not at all by
the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for the beauty of art. To such a person the
beauty of Greek art will seem ever wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female.” (Transl. by
Walter Pater) Ibid., 244.
58
„I have never seen such superior beauties in the weaker sex as in our own. What kind of beauty do women
possess that we do not also have: for beautiful breasts are short-lived and formed by nature not for beauty’s sake
but for the sake of the child’s nourisment…” (Letter to P. Usteri, 27 June 1767, Briefe III., p. 277)
59
„An eternal spring, like the one blossoming on the happy fields of Elysium, invests the delightful manhood of
the mature years with the charms of youth, playing with soft tenderness around the proud edifice of his body.”
Winckelmann: „Apollo-Beschreibung”, in Pfotenhauer & alii: Frühklassizismus. This text is Winckelmann’s
separately published description of a work of art, which he also inserted into the Geschichte. See Geschichte ,p.
364. For a typology of ideal males see Geschichte…, p. 159kk.
60
Geschichte, p. 151. In the second edition of his history of art Winckelmann writes in great detail about this
ambivalent type of beauty and complements his account with a reference to depictions of hermaphrodites. See
„Geschichte…”, Johann Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke. Von Joseph Eiselein, Bd. IV. (Donauöschingen:
Verlag deutscher Klassiker, 1825.), p. 73kk. Winckelmann’s investigations here are aesthetic and historical in
nature (they mention, among other things, the sacred rites of the cult of Cybele, the orgiastic ceremonies of
which involved the self-castration of its priests); they are not affected by the typical Enlightenment rejection of
castration, as exemplified in Montesquieu’s condemnation of this practice in the fragment on taste included in
the Encylopedia „Essai sur le goût dans les choses de la nature & de l’art”, in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire
57
20
The erotic obsession permeating Winckelmann’s writings was not apparent in the eyes
of his contemporaries, nor to his immediate posterity—or at any rate, it was not discussed.61 It
was only the generations absorbing the influence of Nietzsche—who thoroughly transformed
the image of antiquity, opposing Dionysos to Winckelmann’s Apollo—that could discern the
Dionysian element in Winckelmann’s works. „The fixed, static character of Winckelmann’s
aesthetic ideal lies, essentially, in the transposition into terms of art of an erotic substratum
such as his, where an immense sum of energy was employed in a hallucinatory idolization of
the beloved object…” – writes Mario Praz.62 Alex Potts, one of his most recent
monographers, notes that in Winckelmann’s works, the connection between the nakedness of
the Greeks and the ideal of subjective and political freedom is stronger than in the works of
any of his contemporaries, even though he saw the dark, violent, conflicted and lethal—with
some exaggeration one might say Sadeian—aspect of absolute freedom.63 Yet such
knowledge had to be concealed, if for no other reason because of its homoerotic associations.
Thus the emphasis was placed not on the esoteric-erotic implications of his teachings but on
its exoteric-heroic content: on noble simplicity and tranquil greatness, on the harnessing of
passion and suffering, on dignity, discipline, sublimity, and immaterial beauty. A two-fold
ideal appears, the beautiful and the sublime, whose duality corresponds to Winckelmann’s
historical division between the epoch of the „high” (strong) style of Phidias, Polyclitus,
Scopas, Myron, and Alcamenes, and the epoch of the „beautiful” style of Praxiteles,
Lysippus, Apelles. Its theoretical framework can be found in the distinction between two sorts
of grace (high and beautiful), between the celestial and the earthly, whose alternation can take
place within the description of the same work.64
In its erotic and heroic65—beautiful and sublime—form, as well as in its mixed form,
Greek nakedness is the principal symbol of liberty for Winckelmann. Although the connection
raisonné des sciences, des arts et de métieres, 1757. VII. P. 765. (Reprint: New York, Paris: Pergamon Press,
1969.) See also Winckelmann’s letter to Riedesel 22 May, 1763, Briefe II., p. 320.
61
Even a century later Justi writes: „We shall not dig up these dark roots here, although the matter is not yet
explained through the cheerful and casual observation, made in the optimistic manner of Goethe, that at no time
is he ’more animated and obliging’ than in those ’fleeting moments when the needs of friendship as well as those
of beauty find nourishment in one and the same object’.” (Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, II. P. 261)
62
Mario Praz: On Neoclassicism, p. 49.
63
Alex Potts: Flesh and the Ideal, p. 5.
64
This is also observed by Potts apropos of Winckelmann’s most famous ekhphrasis on the Belvedere Apollo.
The alternation should be clear from our quotation from this description. The image of the omnipotent,
masculine god alternates gives way here to the ephebe of tender beauty, the hero to the sensuous youth, the lover
to the beloved, the erastes to the eromenos, greatness to grace, „the sublime self to the beautiful self.” (Ibid., p.
174.)
65
„…naked, and hence heroic, as the Greeks imagine their heros,” Winckelmann: „Geschichte…”, Sämtliche
Werke VI. 200. Winckelmann here quotes the passage from Pliny that distinguishes in this regard between Greek
and Roman taste: „It is a Greek custom to leave the body naked, while it is a Roman custom and one befitting a
21
between nakedness and liberty was not fixed in a system of allegorical or iconographic
symbols, nakedness, charged with ancient associations, had been linked to modern notions of
liberty since the Renaissance. For the contemporaries, Michelangelo’s David was a symbol
for liberty.
For Winckelmann, the meaning of liberty is two-fold: on the one hand, it refers to the
constitution and governance of a country, on the other, to our personal possibilities. As far as
the former is concerned, Winckelmann has precious little to say and so it is with some
justification that Herder criticized him for neglecting the external conditions of art, observing
that the forms of governance adopted by civilized peoples are just as dissimilar as their
climates.66 And yet Winckelmann’s remark that political freedom is beneficial to the arts is
significant, not so much because it contributed to the Enlightenment debates concerning
freedom as because it contributed to the emergence of art history (the very word
„Kunstgeschichte” being Winckelmann’s coinage). Art history could not have appeared as a
magnificent story in its own right if it had not integrated one of the two basic subjects of great
historiography whose status has been consolidated since the Peloponnesian war—political and
military history—and had not connected that subject with its own. The main source of the
history of ancient art is not so much historiographic art as literature, natural history and travel
writing. (Likewise, Winckelmann’s main source was Homer, Pliny the Elder and Pausanias.)
All stories excluded from the history of the state and its wars were customarily relegated to
the minor histories: biography, local history, travel writing, genealogy and so on—or else they
were cast not as narratives but as some sort of system: philology, collection, etc. Not everyone
interested in antiquities was a historian, and the antiquarian approach came in for harsh
criticism from Enlightenment historiography. While Enlightenment historians did integrate
the history of culture into greater history (as Bossuet integrated religious history), this was
accomplished partly through the debate with political history, „the history of kings,”67 and
soldier to put on a breast-plate.” Naturalis historia, XXXIV. x. 18.
66
Herder: „Denkmal Johann Winkelmanns” [1777], in Herder: Werke II., i.h. p. 659.k.
67
Voltaire, the founder of Enlightenment historiography (See Eduard Fueter: Geschichte der neueren
Historiographie. [München u. Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 19363.], p. 349), repeatedly contrasts the history of kings
(or heroes) with the history of a nation or people. His novel approach is summed up in the following passage
from the letter he wrote to Thieriot on July 19, 1735, while he was preparing for his work The Century of Louis
XIV: „ When I requested small stories from you from the century of Louis XIV., I did not so much have his
person in mind as the arts that blossomed during his time. I must confess that I am more interested in details
pertaining to the lives of Racine and Boileau-Despréaux, Quinault, Lully, Molière, Lebrun, Poussin, Descartes
and others than in the entire battle of Steenkerque. Of those who were in command of cavallery squadrons and
battalions only the names are now remembered; even a hundred battles did not benefit humankind; but those
great men of whom I just spoke bequeathed a pure and lasting joy to men still unborn. A new sluice built on a
canal linking two seas, a painting by Poussin, a beautiful tragedy, a recently discovered truth are a hundred times
more interesting than the history of any military campaign or court chronicle. You see, for me great men are
22
partly through the contestation of the claims of erudition itself. According to Momigliani „…
the Encyclopedists’ attack against erudition turned on the meaning of history. They fully
recognised the importance of the subjects studied by the antiquarians - law, political
institutions, religion, customs, inventions. They thought, however, that the antiquarians
studied them in the wrong way, by accumulating insignificant details and ignoring the
struggle between the forces of reason and those of superstition.”68 The evident interest in
cultural history that characterized Enlightenment historiography was the most important
reason for Winckelmann’s success in France. In the debate between political history and
cultural history, which lasted throughout the nineteenth century, his works played a crucial
role in legitimizing the younger discipline.69 Yet at the time of their writing, in the synthesis
between the antiquarian and the historiographic tradition, the political concept of liberty
served the purpose of improving the otherwise insufficient legitimization of ancient art as a
worthy subject of great historiography.
Political history, however, was never foremost among Winckelmann’s interests. He
had a much keener appreciation of the role of climate, a matter in which he did not tire of
reasoning, citing authoritative sources, and presenting various experiences and considerations
to his readers.70 Given its pervasive effects, references to political freedom are notably sparse
in History of the Art of Antiquity. Winckelmann mostly contents himself with a condemnation
of tyranny, and he seems to hold that in Greece political freedom could be realized in every
constitutional form, be it monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy—but of course, always
mindful of the Athenian polis governed by the collectivity of its citizens, especially in
democracy.71 To a certain extent this conviction defined his view of his own age, inasmuch as
he experienced his move to Rome from the world of despotic German princes as liberation; he
repeatedly writes about the lenient atmosphere, the freedom of expression and action that he
foremost and heroes come last. I call great those men who excelled in something useful or pleasant.” Instead of
encountering this new perspective on universal history, Winckelmann—two decades after Voltaire’s letter—
became immersed in dynastic, diplomatic, and military history in the library of Count Bünau.
68
Arnaldo Momigliani: „The Rise of Antiquarian Research”, in Momigliano: The Foundations of Modern
Historiography. Berkeley; Los Angeles; Oxford: University of California Press, 1990. 75.
69
Winckelmann „was the first to distinguish between the periods of ancient art and to link the history of style
with world history.” – wrote Jakob Burckhardt. Quoted by Potts, p. 70.
70
This conspicuously obsolete aspect of Winckelmann’s thinking has ellicited criticism from countless authors
from Herder to Peter Szondi. See Johann Gottfried Herder, „Die kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik. Älteres
kritisches Wäldchen”, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767-1781. See also Peter Szondi, Poetik und
Geschichsphilosophie I., (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974.), p. 24ff.
71
See Geschichte…, p. 130kk, p. 133.kk., p. 42.kk., p. 87., p. 295. “Geschichte…”, Sämtliche Werke, IV. P. 24.ff.
This list includes all the major passages in which Winckelmann discusses liberty in Geschichte.
23
found in the papal state.72 In the epoch allotted to him, however, only a private form of
freedom was possible in his view. Likewise the Greek idea of friendship had undergone a
process of modernization as a consequence of which it lost its political content and acquired
the sense of absolute but „private friendship.” As Winckelmann wrote in a letter, he studied
friendship „…je l’ai etudier, comme l’on doit etudier une science, et l’amitié me tient lieu de
l’amour, c’est-à-dire, elle devient passionné[e], delicate, et croît comme l’amour étant loin de
l’objet a qui je me suis dedié. Je me suis enhardi a Vous faire cette declaration, sachant que
souvent la liberté a été anciennement produite par l’amitié; temoin Aristogiton et son ami
chez les Atheniens et Menalippus et son ami chez les Syracusains.”73 This should be read
alongside Winckelmann’s effusive letter to Berg, according to which friendship without love
is mere acquaintance; by contrast, „eine solche Freundschaft, die bis in die äussersten Linien
der Menschlichkeit gehet, bricht mit Gewalt hervor, und ist die höchste Tugend, die itzo unter
den Menschenkindern unbekannt ist, und also auch das höchste Gut, welches in dem Besitze
derselben besteht. Die christliche Moral lehret dieselbe nicht; aber die Heiden beteten dieselbe
an, und die größte Thaten des Alterthums sind durch dieselbe vollbracht.”74
For Winckelmann, being free meant being Greek. In terms borrowed from Foucault, it
meant the freedom of desire from prohibitions and from the burden of sin. But is it possible to
be Greek in the Rome of the 1750s and 1760s? This question leads us back to the question of
radical identification with the past. The preceding two quotes speak volumes about the limits
and the nature of such identification. Winckelmann’s Greekness was confined to scholarship,
to his private life and the contemplation of ancient beauty. He knows full well that this is a
way of having only a small part in place of the whole and the melancholy of this knowledge is
acutely felt by him. At the same time, however, strong identification tends to blur the
boundaries between scholarship, life, and the adoration of beauty: if passionate friendship can
At the same time he is strongly upset by the following occurence: „This week,” he writes in February 1760,
„they hung tin plates over the pudenda of the Apollo, the Laocoon, and other statues of the Belvedere by means
of wires attached to their hips. Presumably the same fate befell the statues of the Campidoglio. I doubt that Rome
has ever had a more asinine government than the current one.” Letter to Muzel-Stosch, February 1760,
Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke. Von Joseph Eiselein, Bd. X. Freundschaftliche Briefe 1747-1768. p. 425. For
reasons unknown to me Rehm’s modern edition of the letters does not include this letter.
73
„as one must study a science, and friendship holds the place of love for me, that is to say, it becomes
passionate, delicate, and it grows as love does when far away from the object to which I have devoted myself. I
have the boldness to make this confession to you in the knowledge that often in ancient times liberty was the
product of friendship; witness Aristogiton and his friend among the Athenians and Menalippos and his friend
among the Syracusans.” Letter to Wilkes, 22 February 1765, in Briefe III. p. 82.
74
„…this sort of friendship, which touches the outermost boundaries of human existence, erupts violently; and
this is the greatest virtue, unknown among today’s people, and its possession the greatest good. It is not taught
by Christian morality, but the pagans regarded it with adoration, and it was this which brought forth the greatest
deeds of ancient times.” 9 June 1762, Briefe II., p. 233. He thinks the same way about Christian humility, also
72
24
transcend its object and thereby create the distance necessary for the interpretive reception of
works of art, conversely the enthusiastic appreciation of art may collapse such distance. The
pathos of friendship must be legitimized by scholarship, and scholarship in its turn stands in
the service of desire. Sensuality involves ascetic elements, but asceticism too involves
pleasure; and if the eroticist rejection of self-denial involves heroism, heroism involves
erotism. Historical knowledge can not only order information but also offer a model of life
„which is unknown among today’s people.” Obviously, one of the powerful motivations
driving identification stems from the backward glance to a culture in which homoerotic desire
was not yet constrained by the necessity of repression and the constant possibility of
punishment. Greek culture in this sense came to function for about two-hundred years after
Winckelmann as a code for a certain sexual preference. In order for this interpretation to
emerge in a full-blown form, however, the homosexual personality had to be constructed, and
Winckelmann himself was still far from this stage. While it is certainly true that his life and
his work exerted a powerful influence on the elaboration of this role in the nineteenth century,
one would be mistaken in projecting it back onto him. His homosexual inclination and
behavior did not amount to a homosexual identity. As a consequence, the key to
understanding him does not lie in the domain of sexual repression and demystification. His
efforts of identification were directed at the world of the Symposion and the Phaedrus. “Ich
hätte mehr sagen können,” he writes in the preface to his history of art, “wenn ich für
Griechen, und nicht in einer neuern Sprache geschrieben, welche mir gewisse Behutsamkeiten
aufgelegt; in dieser Absicht habe ich ein Gespräch über die Schönheit, nach Art des Phädrus
des Plato…, wiewohl ungern, weggelassen.”75 The violent eruption mentioned in the letter to
Berg is far too dangerous, and has too many implications, to be reduced to the violation of the
sexual norms of a particular period. (If such reduction were legitimate, all the problems
besetting poor Winckelmann would be solved if only he could be miraculously transported
back into ancient Greece or into the future, to some decade of the twenty-first century with a
more enlightened attitude toward the politics of sexual identity.) His image of Greece is still a
total one according to which Eros has as much to do with friendship, pedagogy, virtue, justice,
philosophy, public affairs, heroism and the contemplation of beauty as with love and
sexuality. Sexual liberty, which involves desire directed at members of the same sex as well
unknown in antiquity, because it is based on an idea of self-abnegation that is violently at odds with human
nature. See “Versuch einer Allegorie besonderst für die Kunst” [1766], Sämtliche Werke, IX. p. 38.
75
„I could have said more, if I had written for the Greeks and not in a modern language, which forced me to take
certain precautions; for this reason I decided, albeit with regret, to omit a conversation about beauty in the
manner of Plato’s Phaedrus.” Geschichte…, p. 18.
25
as diverse forms of the regulation of pleasure, not exluding self-restraint, constitutes just one
element of freedom. The imitation of the Greeks, always clearly distinguished from copying,
is a program whose scope extends beyond the theory of art. Here we may recall
Winckelmann’s famous—early—paradox, “Die einzige Weg für uns, groß, ja, wenn es
möglich ist, unnachahmlich zu werden, ist die Nachahmung der Alten…”76 which was simply
a self-conscious avowal of the ambition of identifying with the ancients, a program that later
came to be tinged with an admixture of resignation.
The following generation set out to extend this heritage to public life. When the French
revolution brought about various attempts to recreate life in ancient Rome, a new, reliable
translation of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art arrived in 1790 just in time to serve as the
most topical guide to art around. If politicians imagined Paris to be the new, republican Rome,
artists and politicians of art—influenced by Winckelmann among others—saw a new Athens
in it; he was the main influence behind their predilection for comparing the great art to be
inaugurated by revolutionary freedom to the golden age of art ushered in by the political
freedom of the ancient Greeks.77 In Germany the relation was reversed: instead of political
freedom giving rise to great art, a revival of Greek life was expected from the new „Greek”
art. This was what Herder dreamt about.78 To what degree Winckelmann’s and the following
generations’ identifications with the Greeks managed to capture—whatever that might
mean—the life-world of the Greeks as later historians would come to know it is a question
that cannot be addressed here. Suffice to recall a remark by the next radical reformer of the
modern view of Greek antiquity, the great anti-modern modern Nietzsche: oldal: 25
„Winckelmanns und Goethes Griechen, V. Hugo‘s Orientalen, Wagners Edda-Personnagen,
W. Scotts Engländer des 13. Jahrhunderts – irgend wann wird man die ganze Komödie
entdecken: es war Alles über alle Maaßen historisch falsch, aber – modern, wahr!”79
„the only way for us to become great, indeed, if possible inimitable: the imitation of the ancients,”
Winckelmann: „Gedancken…”, 14.
77
See chapter VII. of Pommier’s book on Winckelmann: „Dialogue avec la France des Lumière et la Revolution”,
199ff. One example is a speech held in 1794 at the Société republicaine des arts by Jean Baptiste Wicar, a
painter who had just returned from Rome. The speech was published in a periodical bearing the eloquent title
Aux armes et aux arts! „Wicar’s procedure is entirely clear: he absolutizes ’freedom,’ which is a constitutive
element of ’Greek nature’ for Winckelmann, and thereby unites the Greek century with the century of the
Revolution.” (Ibid., p. 222)
78
„The theory of beauty most strongly infused with feeling, with the simplicity, dignity, and force of the ancients,
as expounded by Winckelmann, can only indicate what must come, namely, a new Raphael or Angelo of the
Germans, who shall create Greek people and Greek art for us.” Herder: „Denkmal Johann Winkelmanns”, Werke
II. Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767-1781. Ed. Gunter E. Grimm. (Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1993.), p. 673.
79
„The Greeks of Winckelmann and Goethe, the Orientals of V. Hugo, Wagner’s Edda-figures, W. Scott’s
thirteenth-century Englishmen—one day the entire comedy shall be unmasked: in a historical sense, all this was
false beyond every measure and yet—in a modern sense, true!” Friedrich Nietzsche, „Nachgelassene Fragmente
November 1887 - März 1888 11[312]”, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 13. Ed. Giorgio Colli
& Mazzino Montanari. (*?dtv, de Gruyter, 1980.), p. 130.
76