Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: Aesthetics and History in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780199695843, 0199695849

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Note on Translations and Citations
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
Preface
1. Introduction: Winckelmann and the imagined community of classical scholarship, 1790–1930
Part I. Winckelmann in Context
2. ‘Placez moi dans un coin de Votre Bibliotheque’: Winckelmann’s career in Germany and his self-positioning within the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters
3. ‘Kennzeichen der griechischen Meisterstücke’: Winckelmann’s early Roman writings and the discourse of connoisseurship
4. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums and its earliest critical reception
Part II. On the Contours of Das Altertum and the Possibility of its Recovery: Heyne versus Wolf
Introduction to Part II
5. Homeric questions: a late eighteenth-century priority dispute
6. Heyne, Winckelmann, and Altertumswissenschaft
Conclusion: the problem of Wolf ’s Hellenism
Part III. Altertumswissenschaft and the Amateur: Johann Gottfried Herder
7. Herder, Winckelmann, and Wissenschaft
References
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W

Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK JAMES I. PORTER

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft

KATHERINE HARLOE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University press in the UK and in certain other countries # Katherine Harloe 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937619 ISBN 978–0–19–969584–3 As printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Acknowledgements This book has been some six years in the research and writing; it is also a first book, and the list of those who have supported it is long. First thanks must go to the institutions whose support enabled me first to discover the topic and then to work on it. I was first able to turn my attention back to classics, and to the history of scholarship, because of the generosity of the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol: a research centre which has done a great deal over the past decade to support junior scholars in both classical reception studies and more traditional areas of classics. I owe particular thanks to Robert Fowler, Miriam Leonard (now at University College, London), Charles Martindale, Nicoletta Momigliano, Neville Morley, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (now at York) for welcoming me to Bristol, for affording me many intellectual opportunities both then and since, and for believing in the importance and interest of Winckelmann. Work on the project began in earnest during two years spent as a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. I count myself extremely lucky to have had Chris Pelling as my official research mentor during those years: a role he has continued to play unofficially since with just as much of his characteristic generosity and patience. I was also fortunate in being elected to a fellowship at St Anne’s College, where Matthew Leigh, Roger Crisp, and Ed Bispham immediately made me feel an integral part of the Classics School. Oxford also funded two research trips, to Germany and to Paris, without which the archival basis for this book would have been utterly inadequate. Earlier still, it was within the sheltering walls of Magdalen College and through the inspiring tutoring of Oliver Taplin and Ralph Walker that I was first able to pursue my fascination with the ancient world. During most of the book’s composition period my institutional home has, however, been the Department of Classics at the University of Reading. I thank all my departmental colleagues and students for the hard work, collegiality, intellectual interest, and enthusiasm which has helped me through the past few years. Reading has also been generous in allowing me those periods of relief from teaching and

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administrative duties that are necessary in order for a project such as this one to make progress. Its completion was enabled by the generous award of a research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Both within and beyond the institutions mentioned above, many other individuals have also helped and supported me along the way. I owe particular thanks to Jaś Elsner and to Ian Jenkins for their support and encouragement at crucial points; and to Constanze Güthenke, who read my proposal for Oxford University Press and has been a wonderful and constructive interlocutor ever since. It was her idea to try out some of my chapter drafts in a graduate seminar on the history of classical scholarship that she was co-convening with Antony Grafton: a prospect and a process that I found at first petrifying and then reassuring. I am also grateful to OUP’s other, anonymous reader for many careful and judicious criticisms; to the series editors, Lorna Hardwick and Jim Porter; and to Hilary O’Shea and Taryn Das Neves at the Press for their promptness and competence in our dealings, as well as for their patience while waiting for the final version. Particular thanks must also go to those who take care of the wonderful library collections I have been able to use for this research: to the staff of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, the British Library and Warburg Institute in London, the Bodleian and Sackler in Oxford, and especially to Jill Hughes, Helen Buchanan, and their colleagues in the Taylor Institution. In the Preface I mention the particular role that Quentin Skinner played, albeit unawares, in the genesis of this book. I hope that two other Cambridge professors will not be too dismayed to detect traces of their influence in it: Raymond Geuss, who listened and responded patiently to my earliest attempts to get to grips with German philosophy and historicism; and Nick Jardine, who dared to suggest that I return to classics after my doctorate and introduced me to the intellectual value of studying priority disputes. I would be nowhere at all, however, were it not for the support of my friends and family. A particular delight to me in recent years has been the steadily increasing tally of small nieces and nephews who have reminded me that life is not all about work: Reuben, Macy, Connall, Teon, Rachel, Lucas, and your parents Ruth, Titus, Wendy, Yasmin, and Aaron: thanks! But I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my parents, Judy and Michael, and my partner Tom, who have lived alongside me through the highs and lows of this book’s genesis (sometimes, indeed,

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in closer quarters than they might have wished) and have been constant in their confidence and unstinting in their love. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, May Cecilia Spooner and Pearl Cynthia White. Neither lived to see its appearance, but I hope and believe that both would have been proud.

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Contents Note on Translations and Citations List of Abbreviations List of Figures Preface 1. Introduction: Winckelmann and the imagined community of classical scholarship, 1790–1930

xi xiii xiv xv

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Part I. Winckelmann in Context 2. ‘Placez moi dans un coin de Votre Bibliotheque’: Winckelmann’s career in Germany and his selfpositioning within the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters

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3. ‘Kennzeichen der griechischen Meisterstücke’: Winckelmann’s early Roman writings and the discourse of connoisseurship

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4. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums and its earliest critical reception

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Part II. On the Contours of Das Altertum and the Possibility of its Recovery: Heyne versus Wolf Introduction to Part II

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5. Homeric questions: a late eighteenth-century priority dispute

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6. Heyne, Winckelmann, and Altertumswissenschaft

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Conclusion: the problem of Wolf ’s Hellenism

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Part III. Altertumswissenschaft and the Amateur: Johann Gottfried Herder 7. Herder, Winckelmann, and Wissenschaft

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References Index

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Note on Translations and Citations In conformity with the policy of Classical Presences I have presented all significant passages of quotation in the main text in English translation. Where such translations already exist I have gratefully made use of them. Where footnotes do not refer to existing English versions translations are my own. I have been nowhere more conscious of the challenges of the translator’s task than when dealing with idiosyncrasies of Winckelmann’s French and the irregularities of Herder’s German. I owe particular thanks to Jake Wadham, Kathryn Murphy, and Christine Eckhard-Black for their advice on some of the more difficult passages. I bear sole responsibility for any remaining infelicities. The following works by Winckelmann, some of which are cited several times throughout my discussion, are referred to by their German titles: Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 1st edn. 1755; 2nd edn. 1756). Sendschreiben über die Gedanken von der Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst (Open Letter Concerning the ‘Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks’, 1756). Erläuterung der Gedanken von der Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst; und Beantwortung des Sendschreibens über diese Gedanken (Commentary on the ‘Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks’ and Answer to an Open Letter Concerning the ‘Thoughts’, 1756). ‘Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst’ (‘Memo on the Contemplation of Works of Art’, 1759). ‘Von der Grazie in Werken der Kunst’ (‘On Grace in Works of Art’, 1759). ‘Nachrichten von dem berühmten Stoßischen Museo in Florenz . . . ’ (‘Report from the Famous Cabinet of Stosch in Florence . . . ’, 1759).

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‘Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom’ (‘Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome’, 1759). Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch (Description of the Engraved Gems of the Late Baron Stosch, 1760). Anmerkungen über die Baukunst (Remarks on Architecture, 1762). Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen . . . (Open Letter on the Discoveries at Herculaneum . . . , 1762). Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben (Treatise on the Capacity for the Sentiment of the Beautiful in Art, and on Instruction in it, 1763). Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764). Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen . . . (Report on the Latest Discoveries at Herculaneum . . . , 1764). Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (Essay on Allegory as Applied to Art, 1766). Monumenti antichi inediti spiegati ed illustrati (Unpublished Ancient Monuments Engraved and Elucidated, 1767).

List of Abbreviations ADB AGD II

Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. Antike Gemmen in deutschen Sammlungen II: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz Antikenabteilung Berlin, ed. Erika Zweirlein-Diehl (Munich: Prestel, 1969). ALZ Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. BnF ALL Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds allemand (collection of German manuscripts). BSW Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste. DKV Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Günther Arnold et al., 10 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000. GGA Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen. HPW Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. IfAK Institut für archäologische Korrespondenz (Institute for Archaeological Correspondence). Justi I, II Carl Justi, 1866. Winckelmann. Sein Leben, seine Werke und seine Zeitgenossen, 2 vols. Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel. KGW Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–. KS Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, 2nd edn., ed. Walther Rehm, with a foreword by Max Kunze and an introduction by Helmut Sichtermann. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002. Otto 1, Johann Gottfried Herder, Schriften zur Literatur, ed. Regine 2/1, 2/2 Otto, 3 vols. (Series: Herder: Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Heinz Stolpe and others), 3 vols. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1990. Rehm I–IV Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Briefe, ed. Walther Rehm, with Hans Diepolder. 4 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1952–57. Where two Arabic numerals are given after the volume number and separated by a colon, the first refers to the number assigned to the letter by Rehm and the second to the page number in the indicated volume. SWS Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, Carl Redlich, and Reinhold Steig. Berlin: Weidmann, 1887–1913.

List of Figures Figure 1. Title page of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. Heidelberg University Library, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, III.

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Figure 2. The Stosch gem, or the ‘Five heroes before Thebes’. Heidelberg University Library, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, III.

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Figure 3. The ‘Tydeus’ gem. Heidelberg University Library, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 114.

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Preface Intellectual historians have long identified the decades between the 1760s and 1820s as a time of significant transition in German scholarship, particularly in those disciplines aimed at the study and reconstruction of the past. Since Meinecke’s classic Historismus, and the equally influential frameworks set out by Foucault and Koselleck, numerous accounts have been given of the emergence of historicist modes of interpretation across the disciplines, of the emancipation of the arts faculties of universities from their traditional subordination to the ‘professional’ faculties of medicine, law, and theology, and the development of an academic culture that valued the augmentation of knowledge through original research above its mere preservation and transmission.1 Scholars have, however, differed in their views of the precise character and timing of this ‘great transition’ (Turner 1987). Some have followed social and political historians in locating a sharp caesura around 1800, arguing that the political, social, and cultural ferment that attended the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of Idealism and Romanticism also generated a sharp rupture in the ideals and outlook of scholarship.2 This view was questioned four decades ago by Gay 1967–70, Reill 1975, and Lepenies 1986, 1984, among others. Since then, numerous edited collections (Vierhaus 1985, Bödeker 1986, Most 2002, Rosenberger 2008), as well as synoptic studies (Muhlack 1991, Leventhal 1994, Clark 2006), bear witness to a renewed awareness of the eighteenth century as a time of significant developments in the institutions and methodology of scholarship, and the production and organization of knowledge. This turn to the eighteenth century has yet to be replicated fully within the historiography of classical scholarship. Although the importance of certain individual scholars has been recognized, much research has continued to focus upon the ideal of Altertumswissenschaft formulated by Friedrich August Wolf and Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 1790s and institutionalized in the 1800s with the foundation of the University of Berlin and the reform of the Prussian 1 2

Meinecke 1972 [1936]; Foucault 1966; Koselleck 1972, 2004. Nipperdey 1996; Ziolkowski 2004.

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Gymnasien. Thus Marchand (1996), the most thorough and insightful account of the institutionalization of classical scholarship in modern Germany, devotes only one chapter to developments before the 1820s; a recent and extensive study of the impact of Winckelmann’s ideas (Sünderhauf 2004) begins its narrative in the 1840s; Most’s 2002 collection on ‘Disciplining Classics’ contains only two essays that deal with the pre-nineteenth-century period (and only one of these treats the German context). This result is sometimes an overly schematic or unitary picture of German classical scholarship in the eighteenth century, or one that privileges those elements that most clearly prefigure its canonical, nineteenth-century formation. This book aims to deepen understanding of the history of classical scholarship in eighteenth-century Germany by exploring certain debates that arose in consequence of the work of the classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, between the publication of his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums in 1764 and the end of the century. Winckelmann’s eloquent articulation of the cultural and aesthetic value of studying the ancient Greeks, his adumbration of a new method (style analysis) for studying ancient artworks, and his provision of a model of cultural-historical development in terms of a succession of period styles influenced both the public and intradisciplinary self-image of German classical studies long into the twentieth century. Yet this area of Winckelmann’s Nachleben has received relatively little attention, especially when compared with the proliferation of studies in recent decades concerning his importance for late eighteenth-century German art and literature (Weimar classicism and Romanticism), for historians of sexuality, and his traditional status as a ‘founder figure’ within the academic disciplines of classical archaeology and the history of art. One of the arguments of this book is that the reasons for this are partly internal to the manner in which classics has developed as a discipline. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as is well known, classical scholars formed a conception of Altertumswissenschaft as a new and ‘modern’ pursuit, applying rigorous techniques and approaches to the study of ancient evidence in order to produce progressively superior ‘scientific’ knowledge of the ancient world. While Winckelmann was often acknowledged as a forebear within the public discourse of German classics, he was celebrated increasingly as an untimely and romantic genius: a perspective which enabled classicists to avoid too close a critical engagement with his

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ideas and arguments. Winckelmann’s position as a man of letters, outside of the institutional structures of academia and at times scornful of them, also contributed to the growing incomprehensibility of his traditional status as classical scholarship’s founding hero. All these factors contributed to his eventual displacement in the disciplinary self-understanding of classics by a figure with more recognizable academic credentials, whose life story and writings project a stronger sense of the professionalism of Altertumswissenschaft and the modernity of its methods: the Halle philologist Friedrich August Wolf. Consequently, Winckelmann occupies but a minor position within many contemporary classicists’ understanding of the history of their discipline. My aim in this book is not to reverse this process, to re-enshrine Winckelmann as the founder or ‘inventor’ of Altertumswissenschaft where the standard histories have placed the author of the Prolegomena. Rather, I seek to use both Winckelmann’s work itself and selected episodes in its early reception as a lens through which to examine aspects of the late eighteenth-century ‘disciplinization’ of the study of antiquity in the sense defined by Most: ‘the establishment of a defined field of objects of knowledge and a set of methods designed to study it in a regulated and intersubjectively verifiable manner’.3 I make my main case for the interest of this subject in Chapter 1 below. My remaining prefatory comments constitute a brief attempt to set my project within the context of contemporary classical reception studies, and to differentiate the kind of disciplinary history I am attempting from other forms with which classicists (and students of classical reception) may be more familiar. I consider myself fortunate to be bringing this book to completion at a time when students of classical receptions have begun to pay increased attention to the history of classics itself.4 There are good reasons for them to do so, for—whether because of their possession of abstruse forms of specialist knowledge, their participation in the kinds of activities now often grouped under the category of ‘engagement’ or ‘outreach’, or the authority which continues to be accorded them as rigorously trained ‘experts’—it is clear that classical scholars, their institutions and practices, both have played and continue to play an important role in the ever-continuing processes of antiquity’s adaptation, recirculation, and reuse. 3 4

Most 2002; for further discussion see Chapter 1 below. See e.g. Porter 2008; Güthenke 2009.

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Scholarship is thus itself an influential form of reception, and there is no reason why classicists should exempt themselves from reception studies’ reflexive gaze. But disciplinary histories can come in different shades, and can be employed to different goals and purposes. And here I make reference to a discussion which—although it pursues a set of questions and a methodology ultimately rather different from my own—has been a particular stimulus to the conception of this book: the chapter on ‘Archaeologies of Greece’ with which Ian Morris introduced his 1994 edited collection Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies. In that essay, Morris called for classical archaeologists to pay closer attention to the intellectual history of their own practices with the aim of acquiring what, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu, he termed ‘reflexive knowledge of the conditions and the social limits of their discipline’.5 Morris’s key thesis in that paper was that what he called ‘the structures of [present-day] academic archaeology’ cannot be understood ‘without putting them in the context of Hellenist thought’. For Morris, this meant uncovering their implication in the construction of a notion of ‘Europeanness’ which centred around ‘the idealisation of ancient Greece as the birthplace of the European spirit’ and functioned to bolster imperialist ambitions by its insinuation of the cultural, intellectual, and, in some cases, the racial superiority of Europeans over other peoples. It was under this political and ideological constellation, Morris argued, that the set of academic conventions and practices that became individuated as classical archaeology developed and took shape; moreover, he suggested that ‘since the 1950s, with the gradual disappearance of the social arrangements which had made Hellenism an important academic discourse, the classical disciplines as a whole and Greek archaeology in particular have been left without adequate intellectual justification’. His foray into intellectual history was therefore presented as a necessary propaedeutic to the urgent task of ‘refiguring’ Greek archaeology: of finding a ‘new relevance’ and a new conception of ‘what is a worthwhile object of study’ in the face of the demise of those assumptions that made the value and form of studying the Greek and Roman past appear self-evident.6 I read Suzanne Marchand as arguing towards broadly similar conclusions in her justly celebrated 1996 monograph Down from 5 6

Morris 1994: 9, drawing on Bourdieu 1988. Morris 1994: 8–11.

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Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970: an important work with which I engage further in Chapter 1 below. Marchand’s decision to focus in detail upon one particular (albeit also particularly influential) national context for classical archaeology allows her to incorporate an important dimension which Morris’s more summary account cannot hope to encompass: the gradual displacement of idealistic and utopian philhellenist ‘humanism’ by disenchanted and professionalized historicist scholarship. It is also (to this reader at least) unclear how far Marchand shares Morris’s concern for a positive ‘refiguration’ of the classical disciplines to suit contemporary times. Nevertheless, the overall arc of her story of how ‘the triumph of historicized classical scholarship over poetry and antiquarian reverie gradually eroded the very norms and ideals that underwrote philhellenism’s cultural significance’, as well as many more particular political and social changes she identifies as significant, also find their place in Morris’s account and will also have a ring of familiarity to those who followed, for example, the debates and controversies raised by Martin Bernal’s work.7 Both Marchand and Morris focus upon classical archaeology, but both also imply at points that their discussions are metonymic for those disciplines focused upon the study of the Greek and Roman past more broadly. This brings their work into proximity with my own discussion, which covers roughly the same period as Marchand’s first chapter. There are nevertheless ways in which my focus differs from both. To begin with, it is not part of my purpose in this book to argue towards or imply any conclusions about whether or not classical studies in the present day possess an ‘adequate intellectual justification’. This is partly because I do not believe the overall picture is as bleak as some have suggested—or, at least, I do not think it is a problem unique to classics (we stand or fall with the other humanities disciplines, and perhaps also with the pure sciences).8 My focus is on rather a different quarry. For I believe that even if classicists surrender (as surely we should and must) some of the grandiose claims our 7 Marchand 1996: xviii; see too Grafton 1983; Most 2002. Needless to say that in its sophistication, careful research, and documentation, Marchand’s work is very different from that of Bernal. For her own, judicious criticisms of Black Athena, see Marchand and Grafton 1997. 8 It is certainly not because I think classicists are exempt from the obligation to account for what we do. For some recent thoughts on the issue, see Harloe 2013 forthcoming.

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nineteenth- and early twentieth-century predecessors made about the superiority of Greek and Roman culture and the unique intellectual benefits offered by their study, there survive other remnants of the grand tradition of classical scholarship which are less frequently interrogated by contemporary practitioners. One of these, and perhaps the most important, is the idea of classical studies as a discipline which is (to borrow Wilamowitz’s words quoted more fully at the beginning of Chapter 1 below) ‘defined by its subject-matter: GraecoRoman civilisation in its essence and in every facet of its existence’.9 It is this idea of classics as a discipline focused upon the reconstruction of a distant past from multiple, yet ultimately complementary, perspectives that my investigation aims to defamiliarize and interrogate. I can date the time at which this defamiliarization began to occur for me quite precisely to autumn/winter 2000. After an enjoyable four years spent as a classicist at Oxford, I had made what seems sometimes in retrospect a rather unimaginative decision to go to Cambridge, where I was studying for a Masters degree in modern intellectual history and political thought. During my first term there, when I was trying to understand the alien world of sixteenthand seventeenth-century natural-law theory, I had the good fortune to be enrolled in a compulsory reading class on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan convened by Quentin Skinner. Quentin was one of the most brilliant teachers I have ever encountered, and—quite apart from the content of the seminars—I was deeply impressed by his teaching method when confronted with a group of new graduate students with very different background competences: get to know your students as individuals and find out what they already know, then ask them questions which are both within and just beyond the material with which they are already familiar, so that they are both challenged and find themselves able to contribute to the learning of others. My own role within our group was, unsurprisingly, as a source of classical learning; but as the term progressed it became clear to me just how different Hobbes’s view of that learning was from my own understanding of my undergraduate subject. Hobbes’s warnings that the teaching of Greek and Roman classics might lead to political rebellion appeared to have little to do with the pedagogic scene I had encountered two-and-a-half centuries later at the very institution

9

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 1.

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where he had studied, and the prominence of Graeco-Roman philosophical and rhetorical writers in his canon also came as a surprise to someone educated on Homer, Virgil, and Herodotus. I pursued my interest in the history of modern political thought until the end of my doctorate, but when I eventually decided to try to return to classics, it was with the hope that a project on changing conceptions of their subject might be of interest to my fellow classicists. For, in a nutshell, the overall story which interested me so much then is this: that, sometime between Hobbes’s day and the famous German nineteenth century, classics changed from a relatively elementary discipline aimed at inculcating good style and virtuous conduct through the study of exempla, to become a high-status, autonomous historical discipline focused upon comprehensive reconstruction of a suspiciously hybrid-sounding object called ‘antiquity’ or ‘the GraecoRoman world’. It is this transformation that interests me, and it is one small chapter in the much longer history of this change that this book aims to relate. Why, then, Winckelmann? One reason is that the earlier acknowledged fêting of him within the public discourse of nineteenthcentury German classics reflects a reality; for his work was undoubtedly important in shaping classical scholars’ ideas about the purposes, methods, and possibilities of the study of the ancient past.10 As I discuss in Chapter 4 below (and as I am certainly not the first to point out), Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums inspired not only one but several generations of German classicists with its vision of the total imaginative reconstruction of the Greek and Roman past. Yet Winckelmann is equally interesting for those features that made him an uncomfortable ancestor for later, more professionalized and institutionalized classicists to claim. In various ways he was not and could not be one of their number, and—as I hope I demonstrate sufficiently in Part I below—the most important

10 In that sense, this book may be seen as attempting to make good a suggestion made by Arnaldo Momigliano in a number of essays, that it is Winckelmann, as well as Gibbon, who must be seen as contributing to transformations in historical method in the later eighteenth century by attempting to combine the perspectives of philosopher and erudite antiquarian (Momigliano 1950: 311, 1954: 457). J. G. A. Pocock has now thoroughly investigated Gibbon’s role in the course of his magisterial study, Barbarism and Religion (see esp. Pocock 1999). While I cannot hope to emulate the brilliance and erudition of either Momigliano or Pocock, I hope that my study can contribute to filling in a small corner of the terrain they have sketched.

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context for the production and early reception of his work was perhaps not classics or ancient history at all, but rather eighteenthcentury ideas and practices of connoisseurship or aesthetic criticism.11 Moreover, Winckelmann’s writings were also important in dramatizing some of the problems and pitfalls inherent in the project of reconstituting antiquity, and it is these epistemological or methodological issues that are equally of interest to me. I am thus concerned with the ways in which Winckelmann presented a problematic ancestor for modern, professionalized and institutionalized, classical studies as much as the ways in which he belongs within its accepted genealogy, and the ‘and’ of my title should not be read as formulating a hendiadys. Rather, my aim is to demonstrate something of the complexities and contestations of Altertumswissenschaft during the decades when it was increasing in cultural and institutional significance in Germany but had not yet received its canonical, nineteenth-century configuration. It seems to me that this goal requires a form of investigation that is somewhat different from some of the excellent institutional studies of scholarship that have been produced in recent years. In his ‘Archaeologies of Greece’, Morris suggested that a historiography which sought to promote the form of reflexive knowledge he wished to encourage among archaeologists ought to be primarily ‘externalist’, in that it should investigate ‘the interaction between practitioners and outside forces’ rather than ‘what goes on inside the discipline’, and ‘non-cognitive’, in that it should emphasize the importance of ‘political, ideological, psychological and other forces’ rather than privileging ‘the substance of research and the rational factors in its development’.12 Marchand, too, opts to privilege ‘“external” processes of mediation between the world of thought and the world of political decision-making and social action’ rather than ‘description

11 Hence the ‘history and aesthetics’ of my subtitle. Despite Frederick Beiser’s (2010) recent attempt to bring Winckelmann into proximity with the eighteenthcentury German tradition of philosophical aesthetics which begins from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, I remain as unconvinced as was Friedrich August Wolf (see Conclusion to Part 2, below) that this, rather than the aesthetic discourse of eighteenth-century connoisseurship, was a significant intellectual context for Winckelmann’s work. The broader argument for the importance of literary and aesthetic criticism to the development of historical thought in the eighteenth century has been made in a classic article by Megill 1978. 12 Morris 1994: 8–10, drawing on Bourdieu 1988.

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of the “internal” development of archaeology as a scholarly field’.13 While I agree with both of them that the ideal form of disciplinary history would combine attention to ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors, my own goal requires more of a focus upon ‘internal’ and ‘cognitive’ factors than is to be found in either of their works. It is for this reason that I have chosen to focus upon the phenomenon of the quarrel or dispute. Historians of science have long recognized the fruitfulness of paying attention to disputes within disciplinary histories.14 Although any particular quarrel is likely to be prompted by a range of cognitive and non-cognitive factors (personal animosity, perceived challenge to status or interests), disputes tend to cluster at moments of tension or change within an intellectual field, when priorities and approaches are being reconfigured and contested. Disputes can therefore offer a window onto the competing visions of a subject being presented at a particular historical moment. As they are prosecuted most vigorously by those with vested interests, they can also help us to consider the range of actors who invested in eighteenthcentury Altertumswissenschaft and the concerns that led them to do so. This study focuses in particular upon a cluster of disputes which span the decades 1770–1800, and which were concerned with contesting Winckelmann’s ideas and their importance. They are traced through the writings of two eminent university classicists—Christian Gottlob Heyne and Friedrich August Wolf—and one extra-academic figure—Johann Gottfried Herder—who is nevertheless widely acknowledged as one of the most significant intellectual voices of the age. In analysing them, I seek to demonstrate that behind the personal and polemical tone in which they were conducted, these quarrels involved deep disagreements over the justification for and acceptable methods of studying the ancient world. In each case, consideration of the dispute provides a starting point for examination of the contesting visions of, and priorities being set out for, Altertumswissenschaft.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS The twin aims of recontextualizing, and then problematizing, Winckelmann’s place within the history of classical scholarship govern the 13

Marchand 1996: xxi.

14

See e.g. Grafton 1983; Jardine 1984; Most 1997.

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structure of this book. The first chapter serves by way of an introduction, which seeks to redirect classicists’ attention towards Winckelmann by examining the tradition of panegyric of him that played a central role in the self-representation of Altertumswissenschaft from the 1830s until the end of the Second World War. This tradition, the roots of which can be traced back as far as the 1790s, created a picture of Winckelmann as canonical in two senses: as a founding hero of the modern study of antiquity and as an inspirational figure, whose remarkable life story and deep love and commitment for the ancient world were held up as an example to future generations. I trace the vicissitudes of this picture, explore its purposes, and suggest ways in which it hindered rather than helped classical scholarship’s engagement with Winckelmann’s writings. The consensus that built up around this quasi-mythic picture of Winckelmann as the founder of Altertumswissenschaft in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contrasts with the manifold ways in which his work was discussed and contested during the eighteenth. In the rest of the book, I seek to recover some of those eighteenthcentury debates. Part I—‘Winckelmann in Context’—seeks to extricate Winckelmann from his traditional role within monumental narratives of the history of classical scholarship and to relocate him within his mid-eighteenth-century social and intellectual milieu. Chapters 2 and 3 consider his early career in Germany and his move to Rome against German Protestant traditions of classical education and the early modern ideal of the Republic of Letters, and examine his writings up to and including the Geschichte and their early reception in order to show that they were designed to appeal to broad constituencies of readers, far beyond the walls of the universities. A particular emphasis is placed upon the importance of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses of connoisseurship to Winckelmann’s writings: a focus which is most apparent in those works he completed in Rome in the period to 1764, but which also informs his later work. Chapter 4 uses the context explored in Chapters 2 and 3 to develop an analysis of the contents and the immediate reception of Winckelmann’s most acclaimed and influential work: the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764. After a brief discussion of divergent contemporary views about its originality, the first two sections seek to give an account of the particular character of Winckelmann’s work, seeking to account for its bipartite structure. Intellectual antecedents

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are again considered (principally Caylus and the philosophic historians of the French Enlightenment), but the main focus is upon interrogating Winckelmann’s claim that his history of art provided a ‘system’ (‘Lehrgebäude’). It is argued that Winckelmann saw the Geschichte’s systematic ambitions as realized principally in its first part, in which he appealed to the uniform operation of general causes in history in order to explain a pattern of artistic development that he felt was true, mutatis mutandis, of all cultures; and that the more detailed historical narrative of Greek art provided in Part 2 aimed at supporting this systematic analysis by demonstrating its validity for a period from which relatively rich material and literary source material had survived. Yet there are also hints in the Geschichte that Winckelmann was aware of the epistemic fragility of his reconstruction of Greek and Roman history, and this is especially apparent in a discourse (particularly marked in the preface and conclusion to the Geschichte) concerning the roles of conjecture and of imagination in historical scholarship. The chapter’s final section discusses some selected responses to the Geschichte from the 1760s, in order to demonstrate that their reaction to the Geschichte was consistent with the connoisseurial expectations established by his earlier writings. These responses provide a point of contrast to the receptions analysed in the rest of the book. After having established this context for the composition and contemporary reception of Winckelmann’s writings, the remainder of the book seeks to evaluate the contribution of debates over his work to the embryonic discourse of Altertumswissenschaft as it developed between Winckelmann’s death in 1768 and the end of the century. Part II (‘On the Contours of Das Altertum and the Possibility of its Recovery: Heyne versus Wolf ’) examines the fierce dispute that broke out in the 1790s between the two influential university classicists, Christian Gottlob Heyne and Friedrich August Wolf, over the originality of the arguments contained in the latter’s Prolegomena to Homer (1795). Apparently a dispute over academic priority, this quarrel is of great interest in revealing the two men’s divergent views of appropriate tasks and ambitions for study of the ancient world. Heyne’s long critical engagement with Winckelmann’s work was important in shaping his dismissive reaction to Wolf, and Winckelmann’s ideas are thus shown to have formed an important element of the intellectual framework within which eighteenth-century disputes over the methods and goals proper to Altertumswissenschaft arose.

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The book’s concluding section (‘Altertumswissenschaft and the Amateur: Johann Gottfried Herder’) examines the sustained engagement with Winckelmann’s ideas that occurs in the writings of the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder. By both professional status and intellectual orientation, Herder provides an eccentric perspective upon the attitudes and assumptions of the emerging discipline of classics: a position that was to earn him the enmity of Wolf. My discussion concentrates on the intense engagement with Winckelmann revealed in those writings of the 1760s and 1770s where Herder wrestles with problems of historical method. It is argued that Herder offers a theorization of some of the unacknowledged dilemmas of the Altertumswissenschaft practised by his contemporaries, and diagnoses an aesthetic and imaginative orientation towards the past as a constitutive element of classical studies. Overall, then, this study examines selected strands within Winckelmann’s early reception in order to provide a new perspective on classical scholarship in eighteenth-century Germany. It is motivated by the conviction that the eighteenth-century discussions and debates over Winckelmann were rich and interesting, and that they may therefore speak to classicists today. Recent work in the history of scholarship has tended to emphasize more and more the importance of the eighteenth century as a key time of transformation within the humanities, during which classical scholarship (Altertumswissenschaft) emerged as a paradigmatic historical discipline. What value this research has beyond the purely historical lies, I hope, in its bringing of these perspectives won by intellectual history to classicists, to help them understand the history of their own disciplinary formation and ideals.

1 Introduction: Winckelmann and the imagined community of classical scholarship, 1790–1930 Denn da wir nun einmal die Resultate früherer Geschlechter sind, sind wir nun einmal die Resultate ihrer Verirrungen, Leidenschaften und Irrthümer, ja Verbrechen; es ist nicht möglich sich ganz von dieser Kette zu lösen. Wenn wir jene Verirrungen verurtheilen und uns ihrer für enthoben erachten, so ist die Thatsache nicht beseitigt, dass wir aus ihnen herstammen. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, 3—KGW III.1: 266)

In 1921, the year he retired from his chair at the University of Berlin, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff published his Geschichte der Philologie. This work provided the eminent Greek scholar with an opportunity to reflect upon the development of the discipline of which he had become the foremost representative. He opened magisterially with a definition of his subject: The nature of classical scholarship (Philologie)—as it is still called, though it no longer claims the primacy the epithet implies—is defined by its subject-matter: Graeco-Roman civilisation (Kultur) in its essence and in every facet of its existence. This civilisation (Kultur) is a unity, though we are unable to state precisely when it began and ended; and the task of scholarship is to bring that dead world to life by the power of science—to recreate the poet’s song, the thought of the philosopher and the lawgiver, the sanctity of the temple and the feelings of believers and unbelievers, the bustling life of market and port, the physical appearance of land and sea, mankind at work and play. In this as in every department of knowledge—or to put it in the Greek way, in all philosophy—a feeling of wonder in the presence of something we do not

2

Introduction

understand is the starting-point, the goal pure, beatific contemplation of something we have come to understand in all its truth and beauty. Because the life we strive to fathom is a single whole, our science too is a single whole. Its division into the separate disciplines of language and literature, archaeology, ancient history, epigraphy, numismatics and, latterly, papyrology can be justified only as a concession to the limitations of human capacity and must not be allowed to stifle awareness of the whole, even in the specialist.1

If a note of nostalgia is detectable here, it may be explained by the circumstances of the work’s composition. The septuagenarian was surrendering his chair unwillingly, forced out by a Weimar law which imposed a mandatory retirement age for professors of 68. Moreover, the new constitution and government, arising as they had from the ashes of Germany’s wartime defeat, represented the crushing of the hopes and pride that Wilamowitz, who was at once an intellectual cosmopolitan and a patriotic Prussian, had once entertained about international collaboration in Altertumswissenschaft and the preeminence of German contributions to that cultural effort.2 But was the outlook quite so bleak? As early as 1915 Wilamowitz had lamented that the war, which had fractured the world of scholarship into fiercely opposing national camps, had meant that his ‘life’s work lies in ruins’;3 yet the end of his Geschichte strikes a more optimistic note: This long, and yet all too cursory, survey will have shown that over the past fifty years science has been busily engaged in recovering the life of antiquity in all its aspects by means of the historical method. How, if at all, it can extend its conquests, who would venture to say? But if we look back over the distance scholarship has travelled in the course of the centuries, we shall not despair of its vitality, even if the outlook is less hopeful than it was in the days when the co-operation of the whole civilised world was a reality.4

Even amid contemporary devastation, hope of future advancement survived. It was warranted by contemplation of philology’s awesome 1

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 1 (1921: 1). Wilamowitz’s reaction to the outbreak of war, his wartime addresses, and his action in signing the controversial manifesto ‘An die Kulturwelt’ are well documented: see most recently Norton 2008. Solmsen states that: ‘Fundamentally . . . he was not and indeed could never have become reconciled to the new political conditions’ of the Weimar Republic, and recalls him speaking of democracy with contempt and distrust as a system that hands power to the ‘mass that lacks judgement (urteilslose Menge)’ (Solmsen 1979: 116, 118). 3 ‘Die geschichtliche Ursachen des Kriegs’, Reden aus der Kriegszeit, 12, quoted in Norton 2008: 81. 4 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 178 (1921: 80). 2

Introduction

3

progress to date. For, following a long path of development from ancient roots and added to incrementally by scholars over the intervening centuries, Wilamowitz held that during his own lifetime classical scholarship had attained a state where it was, finally, ‘aware of its true nature and function’.5 In the light of Philologie’s new-found maturity, his Geschichte assumes an additional significance. It may be characterized as a ‘monumental history’ in Nietzsche’s sense: a contribution or ‘supplement’ to the events it relates, handing down the story of its progress in order to stir its practitioners to future achievement whenever and wherever future circumstances might allow.6 Wilamowitz’s Geschichte, therefore, functions as more than a loving memorial to an irredeemably bygone era. Nor is it simply a compensatory narrative: a making amends in thought for the weakness of German military, political, and cultural standing after the war. There are nevertheless elements of the compensatory to his account. Although he took the longest possible perspective on his discipline’s history, beginning from the grammatikē of the ancient Greeks and tracing its development through medieval, Renaissance, and early modern transformations, it is clear that he located a decisive juncture in the eighteenth century. While he gave due credit to figures such as Scaliger and Bentley, as ‘nothing can endure that is not built on the rock of solid linguistic knowledge’, he argued that their contributions merely paved the way for ‘the birth of a real science of antiquity’: The decisive factor was the awakening of a new spirit in Germany, which had an equally powerful effect on poetry and philosophy. The men of this second renaissance discovered the immortal Greek genius, to which they felt themselves akin, and eagerly drank in its life—the enhancing gospel of freedom and beauty. This led inevitably to an involvement with Greek poetry and sculpture which gradually turned into scientific scholarship and finally attained to the historic method. It was only with the help of this last that the ‘grammar’ of the ancients was finally left behind and the way opened to a real understanding of the past, not merely of antiquity.7

In the last analysis, the credit for philology’s latest giant strides belonged to German figures. At the head of his parade of Kulturbringer Wilamowitz placed Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

5 6 7

Ibid. 1 (1921: 1). KGW III/1.254–7 (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, 2). Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 91–2 (1921: 41).

4

Introduction WINCKELMANN: IN THE BEGINNING?

Given Wilamowitz’s own understanding of classical scholarship, his decision to fête Winckelmann in this manner may seem surprising. A vast gulf existed between their views of the goals and methods of classical studies. The trinity of developments Wilamowitz held responsible for philology’s astounding recent progress—‘scientific’ modes of excavation, papyrology, and above all epigraphy—owed little to the eighteenth-century scholar; indeed, he commented elsewhere that they ‘would have seemed fantastic not merely to Hermann and Lachmann but even to Boeckh’.8 More significantly, Winckelmann’s central conviction of the superiority of (a highly idealized and aestheticized view of ) Greek culture was opposed to Wilamowitz’s more global, historicist conception. The author of the Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (1755) would have been horrified by comments of Wilamowitz’s such as ‘the science of antiquity is no longer classical, nor even claims to be’, or ‘archaeology and history have coalesced so completely that the study of art, to say nothing of the careers of individual artists, has come to occupy an even less important place in archaeology than the classics occupy in the history of literature’.9 Wilamowitz’s discussion of Winckelmann sweeps such differences aside. In doing so, it differs markedly from his previous prosopographical entries. In the opening pages of his history, Wilamowitz had carefully specified his task as showing how ‘the science [of philology] . . . developed out of the grammatikē of the Greeks which, though scientific, was not yet a historical science but lived on in Rome and Byzantium, in however atrophied a form’.10 This focus upon scholarly or ‘scientific’ advancement necessitated passing

8

Ibid. 160 (1921: 72). Ibid. 159, 160–4 (1921: 72); 1982: 164 (1921: 74). Cf. too his comments in an article on philology contributed to the first volume of Paul Hinneberg’s patriotic encyclopaedia project, Die Kultur der Gegenwart: ‘Wohl aber steht neben dieser Philologie, die Griechen und Römer angeht, eine germanische, romanische, indische, semitische usw. Philologie . . . Nur die historische Kontinuität entschuldigt es, wenn die griechisch-lateinische Philologie den Gattungsnamen weiterführt; das Distinktiv “klassisch,” dessen man sich häufig bedient, beruht auf einem Werturteile, das in Wahrheit keine Geltung mehr hat . . .’ (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1903: 1). 10 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 1–2 (1921: 1). 9

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over many issues and events relevant to the history of ‘the classical tradition’ in a broader sense. Thus, Wilamowitz explicitly excluded from his consideration general questions of the influence of ‘the assimilation of the cultural heritage of antiquity’ on ‘the modern march of mind’. Nor were literary and artistic imitation of the classics relevant to his subject, nor the history of translation, nor indeed that of school and university education, despite its obvious importance ‘indirectly, for the business of scholarship’.11 These narrative priorities were reflected in Wilamowitz’s earlier treatments of great figures, which had tended to eschew discussions of broader cultural context and influence in order to concentrate on narrower considerations of scientific approach and specific contributions to the advancement of scholarly knowledge.12 When it comes to Winckelmann, however, the reverse is the case: It is an inspiring thought that so many of our best men worked their way up from the bottom, and that hardship only nerved them for the struggle. Winckelmann also had to drain to the dregs the bitter cup of want and humiliation before he found his way to Rome and, though writing in German, triumphantly made a European reputation for himself. With Lessing, incidentally, Winckelmann is the first German who can properly be numbered among our classics in point of style. He had the good fortune to have Goethe and Justi for biographers, so that we see him in his habit as he lived, with all the faults of character, grave as they were, which enabled him to fulfil his destiny.

Wilamowitz begins by celebrating Winckelmann’s contributions to German literary and artistic culture rather than to philology strictly conceived. Moreover, he presents Winckelmann’s importance to posterity as consisting not so much in the enduring value of his scholarship, but rather in the exemplarity of his life. If we ask what it is about Winckelmann’s life story that is so important, Wilamowitz answers that it is the personality or spirit his biography reveals. Winckelmann’s existence was characterized above all by a single-minded dedication to the cause of Greek antiquity, which displayed itself even in the unfavourable circumstances of his early life and compelled him onwards to greater things:

11 12

Ibid. 2–3 (1921: 1–2). See e.g. his treatment of Joseph Justus Scaliger (ibid. 49–53/1921: 24).

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It was his longing for ancient Greece, and for the freedom and beauty for which it stood, that drove him to Italy. He had absorbed enough from the poets not merely to equip him, in the knowledge of Greek mythology, with the key to the interpretation of the monuments, but also to allow him to discover Greek sculpture through Roman copies and to form a notion of its superb beauty and grace, which were so remote from the rococo—a notion merely, for in practice he missed much genuine Greek work.

Here indeed Wilamowitz alludes to some of Winckelmann’s scholarly publications: the Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (1766), Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), and Monumenti antichi inediti (1767). Yet aside from a passing acknowledgement of the inadequate evidentiary basis of Winckelmann’s studies of Greek art—a failure excused as inevitable, given the period in which he lived—there is no detailed critical evaluation of these works. Wilamowitz’s focus upon Winckelmann’s life and spirit rather than his scholarly output leaves no time for exploration of the differences between their conceptions of classical studies. Indeed, it enables Wilamowitz to dismiss any deficiencies Winckelmann may have displayed in this regard: The admirer of Raphael Mengs remained as blind to the splendour of the early Renaissance as Goethe on his Italian travels; so it was too early for him to appreciate archaic art, and even of Phidias he had no more than a vague perception. But Winckelmann was the first to look at Paestum with a just feeling of awe; the massiveness and severity of a Doric temple would have struck others as outlandish and barbarous. Archaeology as a branch of the study of art was the creation of Winckelmann, even if his aesthetic theory has been discarded, like most of the interpretations that were his special pride. It was the theory that the admiring world seized on, but his greatness lies rather in the courage to write a history of art at all and, moreover, to link it with the history of culture in general. The errors that scholars such as Heyne were able to detect in it immediately do not matter at all. In producing a history of style such as no scholar had ever dreamed of in the domain of either poetry or prose, Winckelmann set an example which all succeeding ages should look up to with veneration. It is the source of the sap that has made almost every branch of our science grow and put forth leaves.13

Unlike his other accounts of great figures, where scholarly discoveries form the main focus, Wilamowitz’s account of Winckelmann is based not so much on what he wrote but on what he represents. His 13

Ibid. 96 (1921: 43).

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7

description simultaneously historicizes Winckelmann and sets him up as an example: in his life, though not in his particular discoveries and theories, he remains a monumental inspiration for the classicists of the present and future.

THE MAKINGS OF A LEGEND Winckelmann thus appears as somewhat of an odd one out in Wilamowitz’s roll-call of Altertumswissenschaft’s heroes. From another point of view, however, both the lavishness of the praise and its specific form were to be expected; for in honouring Winckelmann in this fashion Wilamowitz was repeating a trope of nineteenth-century German classical scholarship. The period after 1815 saw Winckelmann swiftly elevated to the status of founding spirit of the university discipline of Altertumswissenschaft, as well as for the broader ‘neohumanist’ pedagogy with which it was associated and which, in the wake of Humboldt’s reforms in Prussia, was becoming established across the German lands.14 This rapid enshrinement of Altertumswissenschaft’s own hērōs ktistēs is most clearly indicated by the spread of the practice of celebrating Winckelmann’s birthday on 9 December each year—a custom that continues in many German universities today. The first such festivities are attested during the 1820s and 1830s among groups from the Altmark (the western province of Brandenburg in which Winckelmann’s home-town of Stendal was situated) resident in Berlin, as well as in the Prussian-led Institut für archäologische Korrespondenz in Rome. By the 1840s many German universities had followed suit, with Winckelmannstag celebrations established at Kiel, Berlin, Bonn, Greifswald, and Göttingen.15 Wilamowitz’s discussion of Winckelmann closely follows the contours of nineteenth-century Winckelmannstag addresses. Several of the earliest extant examples come from the pen of Eduard Gerhard, founding secretary of the IfAK, who was active in Berlin from 1833 onwards as archaeologist to the Prussian Royal Museum (he 14 Fuhrmann 1972; see too Sünderhauf 2004. On Humboldt’s reforms see Marchand 1996: 24–31; Paulsen 1919–21: II. 191–209. 15 On the spread of Winckelmannstag festivities see Schiering 1969, Sünderhauf 2004. On the IfAK see Marchand 1996: 54–6; Rodenwaldt 1929.

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was eventually to direct its sculpture department, and in 1844 to be appointed to a chair at the university).16 In her detailed study of Winckelmann’s reception in Germany in the period 1840–1945, Esther Sophia Sünderhauf credits Gerhard with supplying much of the impetus for the spread of Winckelmannsfeste, and his numerous Winckelmannstag addresses established the generic conventions to which other speakers adhered: enumeration of Winckelmann’s services to scholarship, art, and letters, all tied together with repeated reminders of Winckelmann’s exemplary character for the audience of established and aspiring scholars. For example, in an 1841 address to the Association of Winckelmann’s Friends in Brandenburg (Verein märkischer Winckelmann’s-Freunde), Gerhard’s chosen topic is the diverse ways in which Winckelmann presents a role-model (Vorbild) for the present generation.17 He goes on in a few brief sentences to enumerate how Winckelmann decisively influenced the study of ancient art, the overall refinement of artistic taste, and the development of a German national literature. Yet Gerhard ends by claiming that Winckelmann’s greatest legacy is the manner in which he furnishes a ‘paradigm of an inexorably striving German nature’, a characteristic which is said to be ‘no less significant’ than Winckelmann’s ‘achievements in research’. It is remembrance of this quality, which formed the ‘chief trait in Winckelmann’s life’, that Gerhard claims is more valuable for the present time than any of his other services.18 The emphasis on Winckelmann’s life is still more pronounced in the public lecture that Otto Jahn, newly appointed as Extraordinary Professor of Philology and Archaeology at the University of Greifswald, delivered there on Winckelmannstag 1843. Jahn (who was later to teach the young Wilamowitz at Bonn) makes claims for Winckelmann’s cultural relevance that are, if anything, even greater than Gerhard’s, for he opens with an ardent profession of neo-humanist faith in the social and culturally transformative powers of art: If Art may claim as her most intrinsic and finest virtue that she is a common good for all, that in her realm every distinction of status and occupation disappears and only a mind that is responsive to the beautiful and a belief in 16 Sünderhauf 2004: 1–2. On Gerhard’s activities more generally see Marchand 1996: 53–68; Schnapp 2004; Bruer 1994. 17 Gerhard 1841: 3. 18 Ibid. 4.

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its eternal power are required in order to participate in her rites, so those men are worthy above others to be revered, to live on in the memory of all and to be given thanks by all, who have fostered and cultivated the divine gift of art in word and deed and have bequeathed to humanity immortal proofs of her dignity and sanctity. Such a man was Winckelmann.19

Winckelmann deserves commemoration as a man who united ‘in one, shining example’ characteristics towards which not only Altertumswissenschaftler, but all men of culture, should aspire: ‘inspired devotion to antiquity, a freely inquiring mind that is unconstrained by prejudice, united with a most conscientious thoroughness which balks at no effort and an inner drive which strives towards the highest spiritual reward.’20 Like Gerhard and Wilamowitz, Jahn goes on to hail Winckelmann as a benefactor of German art and literature as well as classical scholarship. And when it comes to enumerating Winckelmann’s services in detail, Jahn’s analysis displays the same balance (or rather imbalance) between ‘life’ and ‘works’ as Wilamowitz. Two-thirds of the thirty pages of Jahn’s printed text are devoted to Winckelmann’s biography (with five pages devoted to his change of confession alone), whereas critical assessment of his works, from the reports on the Herculaneum discoveries to the Geschichte, are dealt with in a mere six pages. The remainder of the essay is dedicated to assessing Winckelmann’s influence on the generations who succeeded him, and here Jahn leaves us in no doubt that he sees Winckelmann’s main service to Altertumswissenschaft as lying not in particular theories or discoveries but in something less tangible: He inaugurated an approach to the whole of antiquity which not only contains in itself the seed from which the latest research into antiquity has developed in so rich and fine a manner, but which has become in the most important respects the basis of our contemporary educational system; indeed, in that he established art in her proper privileges, in that he ‘divorced its study from subordination to low aims and the mere imitation of nature’ and guided it to its true essence, in that he penetrated to the recognition of the spiritual in artistic creation, he gave a new direction to the strivings of the human spirit. This service of Winckelmann’s immediately found universal and vocal recognition. People felt that through him they had become free and wealthy, heavy blindfolds seemed to have been removed from everyone’s

19

Jahn 1844: 3.

20

Ibid. 4.

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eyes, the word pronounced that everyone had yearned for and yet no one had been able to find.21

Like Wilamowitz and Gerhard, Jahn treats Winckelmann as an exemplary or monumental figure. And like Wilamowitz and Gerhard, Jahn implies that Winckelmann’s enduring relevance lies in the example of his life and character, which continue to spur others on to achievement even while many of his particular theories and interpretations have been surpassed. What were the reasons for this repeated evocation of Winckelmann as a founder-figure? Recent scholarship has tended to link his canonization to the political and cultural conditions that attended the institutionalization of Altertumswissenschaft in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. In her path-breaking study of German philhellenism, Marchand argued that periodic reiteration of the idealistic aims and energies of neo-humanist Bildung was a strategic necessity during the Vormärz for scholars who aimed to maintain Altertumswissenschaft’s privileged academic position in the face of scepticism, whether on the part of the learned public or of state bureaucrats, about its cultural and social value. Reference to Winckelmann (whom Marchand discusses relatively briefly in her first chapter) formed a useful shorthand for the socially and culturally transformative promise of classical Bildung and a reminder of the age of Altertumswissenschaft’s ‘primacy’ in an era of a rather different political complexion. Sünderhauf agrees, characterizing philologists’ and archaeologists’ continuing evocations of Winckelmann as a form of ‘defensive ideology’ at a time when the cultural classicism of the decades around 1800 was beginning to be supplanted by other tendencies (Romanticism, Idealism) and classical scholarship’s own classicality—the enduring value of its Historie for Leben—was more in question than it had been for two generations.22 While these explanations undoubtedly pick up on some aspects of nineteenth-century classical scholars’ invocations of Winckelmann, they hardly do justice to a figure such as Jahn, whose profile does not fit that of the conservative and self-interested scholar. The opening of his Winckelmannstag address (quoted above) carries clear utopian and populist overtones, and this is borne out by his biography: Jahn, 21 22

Ibid. 28–9. Marchand 1996; Sünderhauf 2004: XII. 1–5, 16–18; see too Borbein 1986: 291–2.

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11

along with his colleagues Theodor Mommsen and Moritz Haupt, was dismissed from his Leipzig chair and prosecuted for high treason for his support for the all-German constitution proclaimed by the Frankfurt Parliament in spring 1849, and after his acquittal he refused reinstatement out of solidarity with his colleagues.23 The heroization of Winckelmann can, moreover, be traced back to before the eras of conservative retrenchment that followed 1815 and 1848; it is apparent in uses made of him as early as the 1790s. The early dissemination of Winckelmann’s writings in France allowed him to form an important reference-point for those revolutionary actors who, in the words of one of the Legislative Deputies in 1791, sought ‘for Paris to become the modern Athens . . . populated by a race of human beings regenerated by liberty’.24 Edouard Pommier and Alex Potts have explored how French revolutionary actors appealed to Winckelmann as a herald for their vision of a free society, including the controversial policy of translating ancient artworks from Rome to Paris under the banner of recovering the ‘heritage of liberty’ (patrimoine de la liberté).25 If the years before 1800 saw the French appealing to Winckelmann as avant-la-lettre justification for the ‘repatriation’ of the common cultural heritage of ‘liberty’, in the following decade his name was also harnessed to German cultural projects. Goethe’s pen-portrait was first published as one of three ‘Preliminary Drafts towards a Portrait of Winckelmann’ (‘Skizzen zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns’) appended to an edition of the art historian’s letters to his friend Berendis, which appeared under the aegis of the Weimarer Kunstfreunde in 1805.26 Goethe himself edited the collaborative volume, which united the letters with a narrative account of the history of art in the eighteenth century and a series of character sketches. This was by no means the first edition of Winckelmann’s letters to be published after his death, nor was it indeed the first attempt at a biographical treatment; but it was a significant one. Goethe’s essay was reprinted several times independently of the rest of the volume, and is arguably the most influential single discussion in shaping Winckelmann’s nineteenth-century reception.

23

Müller 1990: 230. A. G. Kersaint (speech of 15 Dec. 1791), quoted in Pommier 1989: 9. 25 Pommier 1989; Potts 1994: 223–38. 26 Goethe 1805; I cite below from the 1969 edition of Helmut Holtzhauer and the 1985 English translation by H. B. Nisbet. 24

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Introduction

Many of the elements we have seen in later treatments of Winckelmann are already present in Goethe’s volume.27 In the Preface, Goethe emphasizes the importance of letters as ‘among the most important monuments an individual man can leave behind him’, and recommends Winckelmann’s correspondence as offering a uniquely vivid perspective on the inner thoughts and dispositions of a significant figure.28 The accompanying essays are presented as extending the insights on Winckelmann’s life and character contained in the correspondence and rendering them more explicit. The beginning of Goethe’s own essay also extends and sharpens the theme of monumentality: The memory of remarkable men, like the presence of major works of art, periodically stimulates the spirit of reflection. Both exist as legacies to every generation, the former in the shape of deeds and posthumous fame, the latter through their continued reality as ineffable creations. All men of insight know very well that the only worthwhile approach is to contemplate each as an individual whole; nevertheless, we repeatedly try to extract some meaning from them with the help of reflection and words.29

Goethe goes on to ‘sketch’ Winckelmann’s character in a series of deft strokes: providing less of an interconnected biographical narrative than a series of vignettes. As the headings of the opening sections—‘Antiquity’ (Antikes), ‘Paganism’ (Heidnisches), ‘Friendship’ (Freundschaft), and ‘Beauty’ (Schönheit) suggest—these built into a picture of Winckelmann as an example, unprecedented in modern times, of a completely unified and natural—which is to say, ‘antique’—nature: a fully developed specimen of humanity, whose exemplarity stemmed from his inner nature but was nurtured and perfected by his long absorption in the masterworks of Greek art.30 There has been some debate lately over the place of Goethe’s Winckelmann book within the transformation and development of his own ideas. It has usually been seen as the culmination of the classicism expressed in the Propyläen and other activities of the Weimarer Kunstfreunde in the 1790s and also as an anti-Romantic Streitschrift, producing a counter-image of Winckelmann to contradict the Schlegels’ ‘Romantic’ genealogy, which also placed Winckelmann 27 For further discussion of the volume as a whole, see the Introduction to Part 2, below, Holtzhauer 1969 and Riedel 2006. 28 29 30 Goethe 1969: 45. Goethe 1985: 236. Ibid. 236–41.

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13

(together with Herder and indeed Goethe) at its head.31 Volker Riedel has recently contested this interpretation, suggesting instead that Goethe presents Winckelmann as paradigmatic ‘for a form of human existence that had been entirely superseded’: a classicizing attitude that already belongs firmly in the past.32 Yet it was undoubtedly Goethe’s essay that—more than any other single discussion—set the tone for Winckelmann’s later nineteenth-century elevation to a figure of cult.33 It is cited by Gerhard, Jahn, and Wilamowitz, and is quoted from at length by Carl Justi, who treats it almost as a primary source in his monumental biography of Winckelmann. Manfred Fuhrmann summarizes its impact well: Goethe’s memorial essay sought to elevate two facts to the status of absolutes: antiquity and Winckelmann’s person. In this connection, antiquity served as the projection of an ideal form of existence and Winckelmann as the guarantee of its realization. From that point onwards, in the eyes of his admirers Winckelmann was no longer (as he had been to his contemporaries) simply a scholar, an investigator into Greek beauty and a successful writer . . . he was now a totality of life and work, a ‘Gestalt’, paradigm and first representative of a new form of humanity, inserted into a referential framework of transcendent concepts.34

In placing emphasis upon Winckelmann’s character and life, and in treating these as inseparable (indeed, more worthy of comment) than his specific scholarly achievements, Goethe’s essay provided a pattern that those called upon to praise Winckelmann in succeeding decades would follow. From the end of the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth, Winckelmann has thus been evoked by various actors as foundational for one or another discipline or project. The tone for the nineteenth-century Winckelmann cult was set by Goethe, who also originated the emphasis on Winckelmann’s life as the focal point for discussions of his significance. It was taken up in the 1840s 31

See e.g. Holtzhauer 1969; Irmscher 1978; Fuhrmann 1972. Riedel 2006. 33 Goethe even anticipates (influences?) the specific form the cult would take; for in the Preface to the volume he offers it up explicitly as a literary monument, likening his literary and editorial endeavours and annual benefactors’ feasts and figuring his book as a dedication to a man ‘whose spirit affords us an inexhaustible endowment’, and whom it is therefore correct ‘to celebrate once more from time to time’ and to ‘present with a well-intentioned offering’ (1969: 47). 34 Fuhrmann 1972: 273. 32

14

Introduction

by classicists such as Eduard Gerhard and Otto Jahn, who used Winckelmannstag addresses to present Winckelmann as an ongoing example to new generations of classical scholars and men of culture. Intra- and extra-disciplinary factors combined to maintain the Winckelmann cult well into the twentieth century, where it finds its echo (among other places) in Wilamowitz’s Geschichte. The Winckelmann legend has deeper historical roots, and is compatible with a greater diversity of political positions, than analyses that seek to explain it in relation to the conservatism of mid-nineteenth-century Altertumswissenschaft would imply.

INVENTION AND TRADITION: CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP’S IMAGINED COMMUNITY This variation in context, together with the continuity of form, suggests that any attempt to account for the emergence of the Winckelmann cult wholly in terms of the interests of particular social groups (be they revolutionary or conservative) will fail to satisfy. Although such interests—and indeed individual actors, such as Gerhard—undoubtedly played their role in its spread and maintenance, to do justice to its longevity and continuity we need to appeal to a more generalized level of social explanation. I would suggest that the variety of Winckelmann’s contexts of reception from the 1790s onwards, together with the continuity in their general form (monumentality, foundational status, exemplarity of character), reflects the mileage that actors at the turn of the century saw in co-opting him for a variety of ‘imagined communities’ they were then engaged in conceiving. The term ‘imagined community’ is of course taken from Benedict Anderson’s classic study of the global rise of nationalisms. Anderson argued that far from having ancient and ‘natural’ roots, nations were a wholly new kind of ‘cultural artefact’ produced by the cultural, social, and political changes of the early modern period. According to Anderson, the emergence of the nation idea was the result of ‘the spontaneous distillation of a complex “crossing” of discrete historical forces’; once created, however, it ‘became “modular”, capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great

Introduction

15

variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations . . . [and to] arouse . . . deep attachments’.35 It is striking that Anderson understands the formative period of nationalism to be coterminous with that of German neo-humanism and the Winckelmann legend: the same historical factors that, Anderson argues, enabled the imagining of nations—the decline in the power of ideas of the universal religious communion and dynastic imperium, together with the rise of printcapitalism—also conditioned the phenomena discussed in this chapter. More important to my argument than Anderson’s specific (and contested) hypotheses about the historical causes of nationalist movements is the extent to which the shape of the Winckelmann legend corresponds to the general type of ‘cultural artefact’ he analyses, of which ‘nations’ form just one, albeit a particularly significant, example.36 Anderson characterizes the genus of imagined community of which nations form a species as ‘horizontal-secular, transversetime’.37 ‘Horizontal-secular’ expresses the point that these communities are imagined by their members as fraternities: as joining people in relations of equality and commonality in a manner independent of any higher divine or temporal power. ‘Transverse-time’ refers to the idea that, by contrast to some of the major forms of association that preceded it, the ‘nation’ is understood by its members as ‘a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time . . . a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’.38 Members of nations conceive of their community as extending beyond the set of individuals with whom they could possibly be in contact, whether through personal and reciprocal modes of communication such as conversation and epistolary exchange or more impersonal forms such as exposure to common literature in books and journals.39 Yet they also think of their communities as limited in extension: a nation forms an imagined entity among a plurality of like associations, each with its own independent identity and legitimacy.40 This spatial finitude (as we might call it) of such imagined communities contrasts with their open-ended temporal dimension: their histories are often projected back deep into the past, and are seen as continuing on indefinitely into the future. 35 38

36 Anderson 2006: 4. Ibid. 37, see too 65. 39 40 Ibid. 26. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7.

37

Ibid. 37.

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Introduction

In virtue of what do members of such communities imagine themselves as belonging together? One of the merits of Anderson’s analysis is that it shows the national idea to be compatible with a variety of what Max Weber would have termed bases of legitimacy: it is not necessarily race, nor shared language, nor other shared customs (such as religion), that bind together a community of this type. This is one aspect of their irrationality—what Anderson terms their ‘philosophical poverty and even incoherence’.41 Yet it is this feature of such communities that makes historical narrative so important to them; stories about the past, as well as practices and rituals that affirm a link between present and past, are crucial to such groupings in order to create a focus of attachment and a sense of their continuity and commonality.42 Precisely by virtue of its novelty and its ‘imagined’ status, this kind of community stands particularly in need of foundation narratives in order to affirm its self-image and foster a sense of solidarity among members.43 We can see the Winckelmann legend functioning in this way in each of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts discussed above. Whether for international citizenry of the patrie de

41

Ibid. 5. For Anderson, the importance of narrative in grounding communal identity is evident in what he identifies as the first paradox of nationalism: ‘The objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.’ In the course of his analysis he gives numerous (often amusing) illustrations of this point. Thus St Stephen I of Hungary, the monarch whose birthday is still celebrated in that country as a national holiday, wrote in his political testament that ‘a country united in language and customs is fragile and weak’; likewise: ‘A William the Conqueror and a George I, neither of whom could speak English, continue to appear unproblematically as beads in the necklace “Kings of England” ’ (ibid. 109). The metaphor of nationalist histories arranging great thinkers and doers as ‘pearls strung along a thread of narrative’ is Anderson’s brilliant metaphor for this form of imagining. 43 Anderson’s study here intersects with the studies that centred around the notion of an ‘invented tradition’ as developed in the contributions to a well-known 1980s collection edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. In the introduction to that volume, Hobsbawm (1992: 1–2) defines an ‘invented tradition’ as ‘a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition . . . [and] normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past’. Like Anderson, Hobsbawm characterizes such invented traditions as ‘responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition’. Although Hobsbawm’s formulation lays greater emphasis on repeated (ritual) practice when compared with Anderson’s focus upon narrative, both emphasize the oddity of such phenomena’s insistence upon continuity with a past that is ‘largely factitious’. 42

Introduction

17

la liberté imagined in revolutionary France, for the Kunst- und Kulturfreunde of Goethe, or the Altertumswissenschaftler of Gerhard and Wilamowitz, Winckelmann becomes a revered ancestor, a focal point for assertions of the antiquity and continuity of an imagined—and an utterly novel—sodality. The most fully envisioned as well as the longest-lived of the three is (perhaps surprisingly) the community of Altertumswissenschaftler, which is provided with its own foundation narrative in Wilamowitz’s Geschichte. This monumental history does not merely provide us with a wealth of detail about the activities of past philologists: it imagines classical scholarship as a horizontalsecular, transverse-time community, with its own well-defined yet inclusive entry criteria, its glorious roll-call of past heroes and a membership envisaged as extending indefinitely into the future.44 Winckelmannsfeste, with their overtly commemorative and celebratory character, were another nineteenth-century invented tradition that fulfilled this purpose. They should be seen as one among a number of institutions and practices that either developed or changed in function during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to the serve the purposes of academic disciplinization: such as the university department or academic institute, the research seminar, the doctoral degree, the specialist journal, or the professorial chair.45 Winckelmannsfeste in fact combined an element of ritual with the offering of a foundation narrative; for it was at these events that diplomas were awarded and prizes were given out, initiating students and other supporters into the sodality of Altertumswissenschaftler. The eventual audience was greater than those who were present at such events. The text of the speeches were printed— often within weeks of being delivered—and circulated across the community of classical scholars, and the IfAK would publish notices of such events in its Bulletin. Throughout the period 1840 to 1945

44 This is nowhere clearer than in Wilamowitz’s closing words: ‘What classical scholarship is, and what it should be, is clear from its history. Has this long parade of its worthies taught us what a scholar should be? All those mentioned have been selected because they served the cause of learning, but they differed greatly in intellectual power and character, in interests and abilities. So the most modest definition will probably be the best. A scholar may do any number of things, and may do them in any number of ways; but there is one thing he must be if he is to achieve anything that will endure, and that is vir bonus, discendi peritus.’ WilamowitzMoellendorff 1982: 178 (1921: 80). 45 See Clark 2006.

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Introduction

celebrations of Winckelmann thus played a central symbolic role among a set of practices by which the imagined community of German classical scholarship represented itself to itself and affirmed its identity, purpose, and continuity. Yet this particular foundation narrative contained an inherent weakness, which can be seen in all the examples discussed above. The focus on Winckelmann’s life and character at the expense of his scholarly production was not without its costs. It was this emphasis that allowed Winckelmann to continue functioning so long as a powerful reference-point for classical scholars. This was especially so given classical scholarship’s other preponderant self-image in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a discipline of everadvancing progress in Forschung and Wissenschaft. There was good justification for this view: the expanding evidentiary basis of classical studies, and the development and refinement of what we might call the technical sub-disciplines necessary to interpret this material (Wilamowitz’s papyrology, epigraphy, and scientific techniques of excavation), did indeed lead (and arguably still lead) to something we might call progress in the interpretation and reconstruction of the ancient world. Yet it was precisely this perception of the onward march of scholarship that rendered Winckelmann in danger of seeming outdated and irrelevant. Gerhard had conceded this as early as 1856, in a Winckelmannstag address published under the rousing title of ‘Winckelmann and the Present’: Winckelmann and the present. Winckelmann without end! Does the deputy headmaster from Seehausen, who in a strange fit of enthusiasm swapped his homeland and faith for Rome in order to write his now-outdated History of Art, still really have the right to be celebrated in the German lands, as he is by Germans in Rome, with eulogies and celebratory essays? The tally of his errors is great: he did not know the Orient; he misunderstood Etruria; he only guessed at the nature of Greek art; he despised the Middle Ages; in the study of Greek and Roman monuments he did not examine all the finds of vases, clay figurines, and wall-paintings; he concerned himself only a little with coins, hardly at all with inscriptions, and seeing as we have now come on so much further in all of these areas, ought we to still, ‘year in year out’, offer hero-cult to Winckelmann?46

The answer for Gerhard was, of course, ‘yes’. While conceding that ‘all temporal things must end’, he argued that commemoration of 46

Gerhard 1856: 1.

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Winckelmann was still relevant, for reasons that are by now familiar: ‘The unification of such great characteristics has for a long time made him a model of true research, while eulogies such as those paid him by Goethe and Schelling have long assured the spiritual grandeur with which he elevated himself so forcefully out of oppression and loneliness its inviolable reverence throughout the German lands.’47 Gerhard’s defence of Winckelmann betrays what reflection on the other treatments discussed in this chapter also reveals: that emphasis on the monumentality of Winckelmann’s biography enabled classical scholars to continue asserting his relevance even as (in their eyes) the onward march of scholarship discovered his theories to be wanting, his particular interpetations outdated. For a time then, the Winckelmann legend enabled classical scholars to overcome or ignore an opening cleft between ‘scientific’ and ‘humanistic’ conceptions of their activity.48 Yet the solution could only be temporary: in an insightful commentary on Winckelmann’s reception in German archaeology, Adolf Borbein observes that as scholarly selfunderstandings took the discipline ever further away from Winckelmann’s normative premisses, there arose within this ritualized fêting ‘a vacuum of meaning’, which ever-more striking rhetoric sought to disguise.49 This is apparent in both Wilamowitz’s and Jahn’s treatments of Winckelmann, in which his services to Altertumswissenschaft emerge as curiously indeterminate. Winckelmann ‘was the first to look at Paestum with a just feeling of awe’ (Wilamowitz); through his agency, ‘one felt that one had become free and rich’ (Jahn). How much less tangible, how much less aere perennis than the steadily increasing volumes of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum!

THE FADING OF THE SYMBOL Even before 1945, then, we see instances of speakers struggling to articulate the connection between past and present and to render 47

Ibid. 1–2. Robert Mayhew makes an analogous distinction between ‘a scientific republic of letters, where old claims will be consigned to oblivion in the face of new knowledge’, and a ‘humanistic republic of letters, in which voices will converse down the ages’ in his 2004 discussion of the imagined community of early modern geographers. 49 Borbein 1986: 292. 48

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Introduction

Winckelmann relevant to their own times. These provide some of the more interesting discussions of Winckelmann from the latter decades of the tradition, when the conventional praise of Winckelmann’s ‘life and services’ had hardened into a dead formula. One example is the archaeologist Ludwig Curtius’s ‘Winckelmann and our Century’ (‘Winckelmann und unser Jahrhundert’), delivered in 1929 at the centenary Winckelmannsfest of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and subsequently published in Werner Jaeger’s neo-humanistic journal Die Antike.50 Starting from the observation that Greek art had conquered the world but three times in history—under the Roman Empire, in the Renaissance, and in what he terms the ‘age of Winckelmann (Zeitalter Winckelmanns)’—and had each time been beaten back, Curtius announces the necessity for a new infusion of classicism in the face of the pathologies of the modern era.51 He goes on to compare a rich diversity of artefacts from the ancient and postRenaissance periods—ranging from reliefs from Persepolis to Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps—in order to redefine classicism for the twentieth century, arguing that its essentials consist neither in a particular conception of form nor the imitation of a particular artistic style, but on three qualities: heroic individualism, organic naturalism, and a refined sense of proportion.52 Curtius characterizes his aim as a far-ranging transformation of classicism in order to suit the conditions of a new century. Yet the qualities that define his ‘new’ classicism—‘free personality, a heroic destiny that is tied to it, and its organic connection to the world’—are also recognizably those that Goethe sought to discover in Winckelmann’s biography. For all that Curtius’s lecture departs from the conventional form of Winckelmannstag addresses, he is correct to claim that it follows in their tradition.53 It would take the trauma of the Second World War and the social and political changes of the quarter-century that followed before the cult of Winckelmann was fully abandoned. Classical scholars engaged in the wide-ranging questioning and self-criticism that was a feature of German cultural discourse during these decades, and many sought

Curtius 1930. On Jaeger and the ‘third humanism’ see Marchand 1996: 302–40. Curtius 1930: 103–4. 52 Ibid. 104. 53 Ibid. 124–5. Curtius elsewhere (1968) proved himself capable of producing a panegyric of Winckelmann in the traditional mode. 50 51

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to distance themselves and their discipline from the neo-humanist tradition that now, as with so many aspects of German pre-war culture, appeared suspect. In her discussion of ‘the decline of philhellenism, 1933–1970’, Marchand singles out Ernst Langlotz’s 1956 article ‘Antike Klassik’ as a significant intervention. Langlotz interrogated the history of neoclassical ‘humanism’, treating it as a movement that was decisively over and making reference several times to Winckelmann as one of its most important epitomes.54 Perhaps an even more important milestone in this regard was Fuhrmann’s 1969 Winckelmannstag address ‘Winckelmann, a German Symbol’ (‘Winckelmann: ein deutsches Symbol’), which has already been cited several times in this chapter. Fuhrmann examined selected moments of Winckelmann’s German reception from 1768 to the 1930s, presenting the emergence of the Winckelmann cult as a history of the progressive mythologization of the art historian, in the course of which he was cast ‘more and more as a monument, a mythical figure, a symbolic form of the German essence’.55 Fuhrmann concluded by claiming that the ritual he was performing had become not merely outdated but unintelligible. Winckelmann’s ‘scientific achievements’ had, inevitably, been surpassed ‘in the current of ever-advancing research’, and classical scholars no longer had the motivation or orientation to believe in the symbol that had been made out of him by their forebears. As this symbol was now thoroughly ‘faded’, the tradition of Winckelmannsfeier might more profitably be replaced by annual discussions ‘about a critical achievement or a problem in the field of art or literary theory’.56 Other voices agreed. In his introduction to the 1968 edition of Winckelmann’s Kleine Schriften, Hellmut Sichtermann reported that no less an authority than Walther Rehm, editor of the four-volume edition of Winckelmann’s correspondence, had dismissed the utility of a critical edition of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums on the grounds that Winckelmann has ‘shared in the fate of all scholars . . . science (Wissenschaft) advances beyond him and his work inevitably becomes outdated’.57 What still merited attention were those shorter pieces that displayed the historian as a ‘literary artist (Sprachkünstler)’, rather than scholarly texts ‘whose objective value is for the most 54 55 56

Langlotz 1970, first published 1956; see Marchand 1996: 362. Fuhrmann 1972: 266. 57 Ibid. 282. Sichtermann 1967: xvii.

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Introduction

part exhausted’. That Sichtermann, a historian of classical art, could agree with the Germanist Rehm on this point shows how far classical scholars had come from the panegyrics of the pre-1914 era. Since the late 1960s, then, scholarship on Winckelmann has exhibited a divide. On the one hand, there has been a tradition of commentary which—although notably less enthusiastic or inspired than some of the pre-war treatments, is offered by scholars who take what we might call an ‘insider’ perspective, seeing themselves as continuing in some sense within a tradition founded or importantly influenced by Winckelmann. These contributions have in the main come not from classicists but art historians, although Winckelmann continues to be presented in this manner in some histories of archaeology.58 On the other, Winckelmann has been investigated by intellectual and cultural historians who have aimed to take a more ‘external’ and detached perspective, seeking to both to contextualize him and locate him in narratives of the ‘rise’ of one or another of the great nineteenth-century ‘-isms’: historicism, romanticism, nationalism.59 From classical scholars, in the main, there has been silence. Yet there is a sense in which classical scholars are least of all able to ignore Winckelmann’s legacy and the tradition to which it gave rise. Writing (by virtue of both disciplinary training and conscious decision) from an externalist perspective, Marchand’s conclusion is a little too sanguine in this respect: . . . we have largely Germans to thank for the nineteenth century’s ‘conquest of the ancient world by scholarship’ . . . But perhaps we have had enough of conquests for the present, and enough of the sort of ascetic, aestheticizing, and aristocratic humanism that shaped German cultural institutions until very recently. We may still worship the Greeks, and admire the German scholars who have uncovered and recovered so much of their strange and marvelous world. Yet the unflattering record of German philhellenism’s entanglement with imperialist, elitist, and even racist policy makes it likely that even those who make the study of Greece their life’s work will now keep a cool, scholarly distance from their subject, and be wary of the excessive attachment and flaunting of ordinary morals our age sees in the spiritual marriage of Faust and Helen. The Greek gods, it seems, have come down from Olympus, and philhellenic neohumanism has lost its privileged place in German culture. And though the nostalgic may yet mourn the losses entailed

58 59

Potts 1994; Pommier 2003; Bruer 1994; Donohue 2005. See the excellent discussion by Seeba 1982.

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by this process of double demystification, it is certain that the way has been cleared for the creation of more inclusive—if ever imperfect—forms of individual cultivation and more varied—if less ‘pure’—ideals of beauty.60

While it may suffice for the institutional historian, classicists should reject this comforting conclusion. For both the Winckelmann myth and its discarding have had a masking function. To understand this we need to distinguish between the process of disciplinization and those of institutionalization and professionalization as they attended the development of classical scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Glenn Most’s helpful definitions: Disciplinization denotes the establishment of a defined field of objects of knowledge and of a set of methods designed to study it in a regulated and intersubjectively verifiable manner, in such a way as both to create a stable body of information which can be exchanged, examined, and modified synchronically among contemporary researchers on that field and to insure its diachronic transmission to future generations of researchers. Institutionalization refers to the creation of trans-personal organizational systems for the furtherance of specified goals (such as the study of these disciplines) which are taken to be of sufficient importance for society as a whole to justify a substantial financial subvention . . . Professionalization . . . designates the set of transformative processes which individuals are made to undergo so as to be able to make them appear suitable for fulfilling the functions out of which these institutions are composed.61

Recent critical histories and deconstructive debunkings of the German philhellenic tradition have tended to focus upon its role in the institutionalization and professionalization of classical scholarship. This is also the predominant manner in which the Winckelmann legend has been approached. But what of the role Winckelmann’s ideas played in the disciplinization of Altertumswissenschaft; in the constitution of its ‘field of objects of knowledge’ and ‘set of methods’? Both Wilamowitz and Jahn conceded Winckelmann’s importance in this respect in the writings we have examined. Wilamowitz stated that Winckelmann’s greatness lay ‘in the courage to write a history of art at all and, moreover, to link it with the history of culture in general’. Jahn also claimed that ‘he inaugurated an approach to the whole of antiquity . . . which contains in itself the seed from which 60

Marchand 1996: 375.

61

Most 2002: vii–viii.

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Introduction

modern classical scholarship has unfolded so wonderfully and finely’. But the demands and expectations of the Winckelmann cult led them to emphasize other aspects of what he had come to represent, laying emphasis upon his life and personal characteristics rather than his arguments. Thus neither the Winckelmann cult, which focused upon Winckelmann’s life and supposed ‘spirit’ at the expense of his theories and interpretations, nor the more recent debunking, which has focused largely on institutional factors and taken an ‘externalist’ approach, has really addressed the extent to which the constitution of ‘antiquity’ as a field of intellectual endeavour was influenced by Winckelmann’s ideas. Such reflections are to be found in the debates which occupied classical scholars in the decades immediately after his death. The three decades between Winckelmann’s murder and the end of the century witnessed the beginnings of some elements of the Winckelmann cult, but there was also a rich and varied seam of enthusiastic debate over his work, which had not yet coalesced into a canonical consensus. Nothing sums this up better than the contrast between the aspects of Winckelmann emphasized by Jahn and Wilamowitz and the strategy chosen by Herder in his Denkmal Johann Winckelmann’s, composed in 1778 but not published until 1882.62 Herder acknowledges the incipient monumentalization of his elder contemporary: a process in which his own writings have indeed played a role. But he refuses to pursue this route alone, suggesting that it is ‘too superficial and unworthy and would be an insult even to Winckelmann’s ashes’. Rather, ‘the writings of a scholar must themselves constitute his praise, or no costly garland can bring them praise’.63 It is because the eighteenth-century debates over Winckelmann were more varied than the nineteenth-century tradition of reception outlined above that I turn to them in the later chapters of this book. First, however, it is necessary to take a step back from these concerns and attempt to recover the intellectual, cultural, and social context within which Winckelmann developed his ideas. Like Herder, Winckelmann’s intellectual activities were pursued outside of the universities, and whatever the shape of the imagined community at which his writings were aimed, it was not a disciplinary community of classical scholars; for the future existence of such a community was

62

See Chapter 7 below for further discussion.

63

DKV II 632.

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not within his purview. The first part of the study is accordingly devoted to the attempt to relocate Winckelmann within his mideighteenth-century context: a world which the eminent historian Reinhart Koselleck has characterized as consisting of ‘social and political relations, which without [further] critical commentary are incomprehensible to us’.64 It is thus to Winckelmann’s education and his early career in Prussia that I now turn.

64

Koselleck 1972: xv.

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Part I Winckelmann in Context

Figure 1. Title page of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. Heidelberg University Library, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, III.

2 ‘Placez moi dans un coin de Votre Bibliotheque’: Winckelmann’s career in Germany and his self-positioning within the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters Liber pulcher est, modo ne, nescio quo furore aut qua libidine impulsus, transiisset a nostra Ecclesia ad Pontificiam. Et tamen vivit ibi satis tenui conditione, nempe conditione Ciceronis. Vocant autem Itali Cicerones homines antiquitatis peritos, qui deducunt homines peregrinos in loca antiqua. (J. M. Gesner, Isagoges (1784 [1756]), 276)

The front matter of the first edition of Winckelmann’s Geschichte contains much that is of interest for situating him within his eighteenth-century context. Beneath the title-page vignette of an engraved carnelian depicting five Greek heroes before Thebes (a gem Winckelmann had some years earlier declared to be one of the oldest extant works of ancient art),1 a banner declares that the book appeared in 1764 from the Dresden bookseller Walther, under the protection of a Saxon Royal privilege. Winckelmann was a Prussian by birth, and by the end of 1763—when the Geschichte actually appeared on the shelves—he had been resident in Rome for almost a decade. Yet it is unsurprising that he let his book appear in Dresden, for he had been closely associated with Saxony and its capital since entering Heinrich von Bünau’s service in 1748. Count Bünau came from a family with a long tradition of service to Saxon court, and had himself held the offices of chamberlain and privy councillor under August II before retiring to a 1

Winckelmann 1760: 344–7 (no. 172); see too Winckelmann 2006: 167.

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life of scholarship on his estate at Nöthnitz, near Dresden, where Winckelmann joined his household as librarian and secretary.2 Winckelmann’s conversion to Catholicism in June 1754 brought him into more immediate contact with court circles, and during the year he spent in Dresden before his departure for Rome he made friendships which he maintained for the rest of his life. Alongside the artist Adam Friedrich Oeser and the court physician Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi, his long-term Saxon correspondents included Walther himself, who had also printed the most important of Winckelmann’s earlier German-language writings.3 Winckelmann’s continuing Saxon connections are underlined by the Geschichte’s formal dedication: to Friedrich Christian, the sickly prince who lived to be Elector of Saxony for a mere three months, from October to December 1763.4 The epistle dedicatory is a typical piece of eighteenth-century courtly piety: it lists the prince’s many titles in full, compliments him as a fine connoisseur and judge of art, and—with delicate mention of ‘the high grace and favour you have shown me’—acknowledges the royal pension Winckelmann had continued to receive since his arrival in Rome.5 But these displays of deference are counterbalanced by another set of associations equally, if not more, prominent. At the top of the title page, the list of appellations joined to the author’s own name proclaims connections reaching far beyond the German lands. The first of these—‘Prefect of Antiquities in Rome’ and ‘Secretary in the Vatican Library’—are yet again courtly, indicating the salaried positions Winckelmann held in the Vatican of Pope Clement XIII. Added to them, however, is a trio that tells a different story: ‘Fellow of the Royal English Society of Antiquities in Rome, of the Artistic Academy of St Luca in Rome, 2

On Bünau see Justi I 193–9; Leppmann 1971: 72–7. These had included both the 1755 and 1756 editions of the Gedancken, Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben (1763), and Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (1762). The Gedancken’s second edition, which also included a letter in criticism of the work and a reply in defence (both penned by Winckelmann), was more influential than the first edition of 1755, which had a print run of only 50–60 copies. See Rehm 2002: 325. Walther would go on to publish the 1766 Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst, Winckelmann’s last major German-language work. On Walther’s relationship to Winckelmann see Richter 1898: 140–4. 4 Friedrich Christian had also been the dedicatee of Winckelmann’s 1762 Anmerkungen über die Baukunst. 5 Winckelmann 1764: v–viii. 3

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and of the Etruscan Academy in Cortona.’ This cosmopolitan set of affiliations, with the egalitarian connotations of the simple title ‘Fellow’ (Mitglied), are supported by an alternative dedication placed at the end of the Geschichte’s Preface: ‘I consecrate this history of art to Art, to the Age, and most of all to my friend Mr Anton Raphael Mengs.’6 The opening pages of the Geschichte thereby locate its author within two contrasting eighteenth-century socio-cultural worlds: the hierarchical and particular organization of dynastic powers and relations of patronage characteristic of the European ancien régime, and the cosmopolitan, scholarly community of the Republic of Letters. Each of these contexts is at least as important for understanding Winckelmann’s work as the disciplinary and national traditions in which he has subsequently been inscribed. The world of the old regime formed a complex of hierarchies of obligations and privileges that were particular, personal, and sometimes overlapping. Far from being centralized in a rational and clearly identifiable state structure, political authority and social allegiances were divided between dynastic rulers and a series of other individuals and groups: nobility, church, territorial or municipal administrations, and guilds.7 By contrast, the ‘citizens’ of the res publica litteraria (République des Lettres, Gelehrtenrepublik) formed a community at least as fully imagined as the disciplinary community of classical scholarship discussed in Chapter 1.8 Its civic character was if anything still more in evidence than that of the philologists; for its members frequently borrowed political analogies in order to describe their form of association. Common characterizations of the Gelehrtenrepublik, such as ‘a certain empire, which holds sway over only the mind’ or ‘an entirely free state . . . the empire of truth and reason’,9 bring out the point that its self-image was explicitly libertarian and meritocratic: the idea of a community blind to differences of birth, wealth, fatherland, or confession. Diffuse and decentralized in actuality, yet unified and cosmopolitan in outlook, the members of this community 6

Ibid. xxvi. Sheehan 1989: 72–143; Benecke 1974: 1–23; Blanning 2002. Daston 1991; Eskildsen 2004. 9 The first of these examples is from Histoire de la République des Lettres en France (1780), cited by Daston 1991: 367–8; the second is from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), cited by Waquet 1989: 484 (who also collects further examples). 7 8

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maintained it through a set of shared values, practices, and institutions of greater and lesser degrees of formality: networks of correspondence, learned academies and their published proceedings, independent literary and scholarly journals, and personal contacts gained through travel and conversation. Of course, reality often failed to live up to this cosmopolitan ideal. Barriers of language, religious and political affiliations, war, technological and geographic limits on the circulation of information, foci of interest, dependence on particular patrons, and personal, regional, and indeed national jealousies worked to keep interactions at some distance from the utopian proclamations of the érudits.10 Yet in principle, and to a remarkable degree in practice, the Republic of Letters was everything the absolutist state was not: cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and open to all.11 This formal opposition between the two systems has led to a number of influential readings that see the Republic of Letters as a utopian response to the constrained conditions of political action provided by absolutism.12 Yet such an opposition is too stark; while there can be no doubt that the Republic furnished some of the ideas taken up by critics of the old regime in the later eighteenth century, in other ways—and particularly during its heyday around 1700—they were mutually supporting. Daston describes how the increase in social status of intellectuals in seventeenth-century Europe was as important as technological advances such as the spread of printing and increased opportunities to travel in revitalizing the Renaissance humanist idea of a res publica litteraria and giving it a new prominence.13 Glory provided an interest that linked dynastic self-display, patriotic munificence, and cosmopolitanism, and princely patronage brought financial means to academies and to individual érudits while bolstering their independence and standing. At the same time, the Republic’s free and equal self-image rendered its ranks open—at least in principle—to figures from relatively humble backgrounds. The currency of renown, together with the possibility of transfer of allegiances between courts and other patrons, created opportunities that men of ‘talent’ and education could exploit, the Gelehrtenrepublik’s explicitly meritocratic ideology 10 11 12 13

McClellan 1993; Daston 1991: 378–81. Waquet 1989: 490–8; Goldgar 1995. Koselleck 1988; Habermas 1992; for critical discussion, see Blanning 2002: 5–14. Daston 1991.

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opening the way for them to claim membership in a group that proclaimed little regard for wealth or social background. Many of the most prominent themes of Winckelmann’s writings signal his allegiance to the community of knowledge and critical judgement that the Republic of Letters represented. For example, his arguments in both the Gedancken and the Geschichte about freedom as a precondition of cultural and artistic greatness have their roots in early modern debates encompassing religious toleration and freedom of thought and expression, and echo exhortations voiced at the turn of the previous century by figures such as Shaftesbury and Bayle. The importance Winckelmann placed upon homosocial circles of friends reaching across national, linguistic, and confessional boundaries also reflects a central element of the Gelehrtenrepublik’s self-conception. This is not to deny the relevance of other interpretations of these characteristically Winckelmannian tropisms. A more radical construal of Winckelmann’s emphasis on liberty was always possible and, as we have seen, was actualized as early as the 1790s. Winckelmann’s orientations were homosexual as well as homosocial, and the most insightful readings of his works are those that recognize the delicate interplay within them of the permissible as well as the impermissible faces of eighteenth-century homoeroticism.14 Yet professions of liberty and friendship were also the common currency of intellectual transactions in the Gelehrtenrepublik; in emphasizing these themes, Winckelmann’s writings advertised his understanding of and commitment to their values. Winckelmann’s life, with its apparently startling rise from poverty to prominence, also becomes comprehensible when read as the story of one man’s successful exploitation of the framework of constraints and opportunities presented by these seemingly antithetical, yet coexisting, socio-cultural systems. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries furnish numerous examples of men from poor or uneducated family backgrounds rising to important positions and, in some cases, gaining reputations of international prominence. The lives of some of these figures, such as Bayle in the seventeenth century or Christian Gottlob Heyne in Winckelmann’s own day, present

14 Potts 1994: 201–17; Davis 1994, 1996; Sweet 1988; for discussion of some Enlightenment conceptions of the Republic of Letters that were considerably more heterosocial than Winckelmann’s, see Goodman 1994.

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biographies even more dramatic than Winckelmann’s own.15 Yet for them, as for Winckelmann himself, the path of advancement was precarious and involved surmounting considerable social and material obstacles. Lacking the resources of family wealth and status, they were reliant on luck and the vagaries of individual or institutional patronage to a far greater degree than their wealthier and better-connected peers. The list of honorific titles appended to Winckelmann’s name at the start of the Geschichte signalled that he had arrived within the pan-European society of the learned. They also provide final confirmation (if any were needed) of his mastery of the codes governing their association. For the appellations listed there represent only a subset of the honours that had been bestowed upon the author of the Gedancken, Description des pierres gravées, Anmerkungen über die Baukunst, and Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen. Since 1756 Winckelmann had been a corresponding member of the Imperial Franciscan Academy of the Liberal Arts (Kayserlich Franciscische Akademie der freyen Künste) in Augsburg; election to the Royal Göttingen Society of Sciences was also in the offing. Yet extra-German affiliations take precedence at the front of his magnum opus, shrewdly advertising that international degree of recognition that, on Daston’s analysis, provides the highest confirmation of an érudit’s credentials.16 The success of the Geschichte thus represents the culmination of the long and difficult process by which Winckelmann established both his means of life and his reputation among the learned. The aim of this chapter and the next is to explore how Winckelmann engineered his progress in the Republic of Letters up to its publication. He proved adept at negotiating the codes of both courtly patronage and the Gelehrtenrepublik, and at exploiting the opportunities provided by these very different worlds. On the one hand, he sought out wealthy and sympathetic patrons; on the other, he assiduously cultivated those networks that were necessary for the maintenance of the ‘sociabilité savante’.17 Yet his progress was insecure; even after his transfer to Rome, the ever-present threat of poverty and obscurity continued to shape Winckelmann’s actions. This was understood by his contemporaries, and their awareness of it inflected the early reception of his work. 15 16 17

Heyne is discussed in Part II of this book. Daston 1991: 381–2. Waquet 1989: 475; see too esp. Goldgar 1995.

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MAKING ONE’S WAY IN THE WORLD: THE QUEST FOR EDUCATION He had reached the age of thirty without once having been smiled upon by fate, yet within him lay the seeds and potential of an enviable destiny. (Goethe, Winckelmann, 237)

Since the end of the eighteenth century it has been common to figure Winckelmann’s life story as the ideal and romantic quest of an original genius to realize his inner destiny. We saw in Chapter 1 that a large part of the responsibility for this picture lies with Goethe, whose characterization of Winckelmann as ‘an antique nature’ which ‘proved its mettle from the beginning by remaining unvanquished, unmoved, and unblunted by thirty years of abasement, malaise, and affliction’ set the tone for later responses.18 From this perspective, the three decades Winckelmann spent as a schoolboy, university student, private tutor, and schoolteacher in his native Prussia appear only as a miserable prehistory to his life proper: a set of constraints and obstacles from which he had to escape in order be reborn to a fulfilling existence in Rome. Even Justi, Winckelmann’s meticulous nineteenth-century biographer, subscribed at times to this viewpoint. He concludes the first volume of his monumental life with a reflective assessment (Rückblick) which argues for a strong caesura between the ‘German’ and the ‘Roman’ halves of Winckelmann’s life: ‘At this point there occurred a great revolution in his existence. In the second half of this biography we shall encounter an entirely different Winckelmann. He had found his own self, and the unity of his life’s purpose.’19 While such a view finds some warrant in Winckelmann’s own reflections, it is clearly also inflected by the mythopoeic processes that were exposed and criticized in Chapter 1.20 Yet even from 18

Goethe 1985: 238. Justi I 445. The strong caesura Justi locates here is reflected in the organization of his two volumes, as the titles (‘Winckelmann in Deutschland’ and ‘Winckelmann in Rom’) suggest. It is also reflected in Walther Rehm’s approach to the task of editing Winckelmann’s early correspondence. He arranges the first of his four volumes under the headings ‘Seehausen 1742–1748. Die Knechtschaft’; ‘Nöthnitz 1748–1754. Der Dienst’; ‘Dresden 1754–1755. Die Vorbereitung’; ‘Rom 1755–1758. Die Freiheit’. 20 See e.g. Winckelmann to Uden, 29 Mar. 1753 (Rehm I 94), in which Winckelmann characterizes his existence in Seehausen as ‘servitude’ (Knechtschaft). 19

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Goethe’s essay it is also possible to extract a more rounded perspective on this period of Winckelmann’s life. When Goethe concludes his programmatic discussion of Winckelmann’s longing for friendship and beauty with the statement that, ‘With such attitudes, and with such needs and desires, Winckelmann was for long a slave to the interests of others’, he alludes not only to his subject’s homoerotic attachment to his pupil, Friedrich Wilhelm Lamprecht, but also to his reliance upon wealthy patrons such as the boy’s father for financial support.21 And when he comments that, ‘A lowly childhood, inadequate instruction in youth, disjointed and fragmented studies in early manhood, the pressure of a schoolteacher’s duties, and the anxiety and tribulations which such a career brings with it—all this he had endured, as had many other young men in his position’,22 his words hint at a broader perspective, according to which Winckelmann’s early biography appears as one example, albeit perhaps a particularly striking one, of a familiar social type. In fact, everything we can recover about the first three decades of Winckelmann’s life suggests that he followed what by the second quarter of the eighteenth century had become a well-trodden route of upward social mobility for boys from impecunious and/or uneducated family backgrounds. In a path-breaking study of this group (traditionally overlooked in social analyses of the German old regime), Anthony La Vopa amasses a wealth of evidence to recover the experiences of such poor students (arme Studenten, pauperes), who were numerous enough to form a ‘distinct species of young men’ in eighteenth-century Protestant Germany.23 Their educational progress was encouraged by the church and aided and abetted in many cases by the territorial states, as both institutions were concerned to maintain a supply of suitably qualified young men to fill clerical positions and the growing number of administrative offices. The result was a system of limited ‘sponsored mobility’, which was restricted in scope by the perceived needs of church and state, but which nevertheless resulted in significant numbers of young men from families with little or no tradition of academic education entering

21 22 23

Goethe 1985: 241. Ibid. 237. La Vopa 1988: 1–46; see too Sheehan 1989: 125–43; Benecke 1974: 12, 19–21.

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the universities.24 Figures available from Winckelmann’s alma mater Halle for the years 1785–7 suggest that as many as 45 per cent of its matriculands may have come from families with no tradition of university education. As university admissions declined throughout the 1700s, the proportion may have been even higher during the first half of the century.25 In Prussia, where Winckelmann spent his first three decades, this social mobility was partly a consequence of the far-reaching militarization of the aristocracy instituted by its Hohenzollern rulers, which resulted in a nobility which was unwilling to fill the offices of church and state, or in some cases was incapable of doing so.26 Its primary ideological and economic motor was, however, Lutheranism, with its emphasis on charitable works and donations. The result was a network of specific opportunities furnished by governmental, church, and private patronage, which together provided a ladder to enable promising young men to ascend to the lower ranks of the ecclesiastical or municipal hierarchy. The route taken by such students usually included education in the local Latin School or Gymnasium; entry into the universities, where they tended to take the basic theological degree in the minimum time possible (usually two years); followed by a series of poorly paid tutoring or teaching positions while they waited for an ecclesiastical office that might finally offer financial security, if not affluence. Their progress was facilitated by a host of charitable interventions of greater and lesser degrees of formality: free or discounted places in schools; stipends for clothes and books offered by better-off relatives, beneficent aristocrats or other patrons; subsistence needs met by the charitable refectory or by free meals (Freitische) in local households; opportunities to supplement their income by singing in the municipal street choir

24 La Vopa takes the notion of ‘sponsored’ mobility, where ‘elite recruits are chosen by the established elite or their agents, and elite status is given on the basis of some criterion of supposed merit and cannot be taken by any amount of effort or strategy’, from the work of the sociologist Ralph Turner. It is contrasted with ‘contest’ mobility, where ‘elite status is the prize in an open contest and is taken by the aspirants’ own efforts’ (La Vopa 1988: 32). 25 Mueller 1984: 89–90. In the highest-status faculties (law and medicine), enrolments of pauperes were far lower than in the lowest-status (theology). For a breakdown by faculty for the years 1768–71 and 1785–7 see La Vopa 1988: 41–2; see too Sheehan 1989: 137–42. 26 For a general discussion see Mueller 1984: 37–90.

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(Currende), tutoring younger students from better-off families, or performing clerical duties for teachers and other benefactors.27 The early decades of Winckelmann’s life conform to the trajectory sketched by La Vopa. Admittedly, little secure information survives about his school and university years. The letter-writing habit that supplies such a vivid picture of Winckelmann’s life in Dresden and Rome does not appear to have developed until the mid-1740s, and many of the reminiscences recorded by friends and acquaintances—such as the sensationalizing account of his Seehausen colleague Paalzow or the ‘life’ by Michel Huber, the Geschichte’s first French translator—are shaped by awareness of Winckelmann’s subsequent fame and (in some cases) of his notorious death, and consequently must be treated with some caution.28 There nevertheless seems little reason to doubt Justi’s surmise that, as the only child of a family of artisan stock (his father, a cobbler, was admitted to the Stendal guild the year before Winckelmann’s birth), his parents allowed him to pursue education in the hope of a clerical career.29 Given his parents’ modest means, it was fortunate for Winckelmann that he had no younger brothers and sisters, support of whom might have forced him to contribute to the family income from a young age. His parents nonetheless struggled to finance their son’s schooling: the earliest letters that survive from his pen are elaborate Latin compositions thanking Johann Rudolf Nolte, Superintendent of the Altmark and Priegnitz, for his support.30 Throughout his years of schooling in 27

In addition to La Vopa’s examples, relevant primary source material is collected in Lahnstein 1970. 28 Paalzow, ‘Kurzgefaßte Lebensgeschichte und Character des Herrn Präsidenten und Abt Winkelmanns in Rom’, Rehm IV 111: 183–9 (first published in the Altonaische Gelehrte Mercurius of 19 Apr. 1764). Winckelmann knew of the piece, and characterized it in a letter to a friend as ‘voller Lügen, aber solche, die ohne Boßheit und mir keine Schande machen’ (Winckelmann to Stosch, 7 Dec. 1764: Rehm III 683: 66). Other such accounts are collected at Rehm IV, nos. 104–35; it is on such material that Justi’s reconstruction of Winckelmann’s early life is based. Michel Huber’s life was first published in his 1781 French translation of the Geschichte and reprinted in subsequent French editions, such as Jansen (1793). Huber had helped Caylus to translate Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen for French publication in 1764, following it two decades later with a translation of his remaining Herculaneum writings. For more information on Huber see Griener 1998: 49–56. 29 Justi I 18. 30 Rehm I 2–4, 6. See too Rehm IV 213: a letter written by Tappert on Winckelmann’s behalf to a charitable foundation, asking them to grant him a regular allowance for the purchase of school books.

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Stendal, Berlin, and Salzwedel, Winckelmann was reliant upon the patronage of teachers and other charitable benefactors: he sang in, and from 1734 onwards was prefect of, the Stendal Currende, acted as amanuensis to his school principal Esaias Wilhelm Tappert, and during his year spent at the Cöllnische Gymnasium in Berlin earned board and lodgings by acting as Pädagog (tutor) to the children of its principal, Rector Bake.31 Winckelmann went on in 1738 to study at the University of Halle, where he was excused from payment of the matriculation fee and from which he graduated with a diploma in theology in February 1740.32 Once more, this pathway is compatible with the aspiration towards the church, for a law of 1729 had made a two-year residence at the university compulsory for all candidates in theology and would-be entrants into the Prussian civil service.33 Moreover, the efforts of the Pietist scholar August Hermann Francke at the turn of the previous century meant that Halle offered more charitable opportunities to poor theology students than any other German academic institution.34 Throughout his two years at Halle and the series of tutoring positions that followed (interrupted only by a brief period of medical and mathematical studies at Jena), Winckelmann was once more sustained by such arrangements: indeed, Leppmann claims that Winckelmann continued to be dependent upon Freitische throughout his time at Seehausen (April 1743–August 1748), achieving independence from such hand-to-mouth forms of charity only once he had entered Bünau’s service.35 Stories abound of Winckelmann’s early and precocious orientation to the ancient world. His childhood friend Uden reports that he took a fierce interest in Latin and Greek literature even at school, observing also that he read avidly in what little literature the school library had to offer on famous works of art and architecture.36 It is also Uden who tells us of a pilgrimage Winckelmann undertook shortly before going

31

Justi I 28. Extracts from Halle’s matriculation registers and the text of Winckelmann’s diploma are reproduced as Rehm IV 214–16. 33 Leppmann 1971: 30. 34 La Vopa 1988: 145–55. 35 Leppmann 1971: 54. 36 Rehm IV 104: 167; see too the brief biography that prefaces [Riedel] 1776, where it is reported that the young Winckelmann used to conduct amateur archaeological excavations in various locations around Stendal (p. xxxv). 32

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to Halle: a round-trip of some 170 miles from Salzwedel to Hamburg and back in order to spend what little money he could command on the purchase of Greek and Latin texts from the library of the recently deceased polymath Johann Albert Fabricius.37 Several memoirs also attest to Winckelmann’s embarkation on a post-university voyage littéraire to Paris in 1740 or 1741; the journey seems to have been cut short in Gelnhausen, when news of a nearby muster of French forces prompted fears that he might be forcibly recruited to fight in the First Silesian War.38 For the authors of these anecdotes, they form evidence of the inner vocation that beckoned Winckelmann from his earliest days: ‘it was exactly as if, even then, he could somehow already dimly foresee that in future he would gain renown more through knowledge of languages and antiquities than through theological knowledge.’39 Yet if Winckelmann did entertain any such aspirations at this stage in his life they were clearly subordinate to his primary aim of securing a teaching position. Thus Genzmer (a university friend) reports that even the encouragement of the Halle theology professor Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten was not enough to persuade Winckelmann to return there and prepare for his Master’s degree.40 Instead he resumed his position as Lamprecht’s tutor, until by the offices of Superintendent Nolte he gained the post of VicePrincipal (Konrektor) of the Latin School in Seehausen, a mere twenty-five miles away from his home town of Stendal.41

37

Rehm IV 104: 168; see too Paalzow (Rehm IV.111: 184–5); Justi I 42–3. See the memoirs by Genzmer and Paalzow (Rehm IV 106: 174; 111: 186); and Justi I 103–6. 39 Rehm IV 111: 185. 40 Rehm IV 106: 174. Baumgarten’s offer of support was said to have come as the result of another academic journey, when Winckelmann walked from Hadmersleben to Halle and back (a round trip of more than 100 miles) in the hope of consulting a volume in the professor’s library. In accounts of this episode in the secondary literature, he is often confused with his younger brother, the philosopher and ‘founder’ of aesthetics Alexander. 41 Riedel reports that the young Winckelmann applied to Johann Matthias Gesner for a place in his famed Göttingen philological seminar (1776: xli; see too Huber 1781: xli and Rehm’s notes to I 1). I have found no primary evidence to support the claim; such an attempt would, nevertheless, be consistent with Winckelmann’s career path, as the seminar under Gesner was known primarily as an institution that prepared theology students for teaching and clerical positions. On Gesner, now see Legaspi 2008; see too the discussion of Heyne and the Philological Seminar in Chapter 6 below. 38

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ANXIETY AND TRIBULATIONS Throughout his later life, Winckelmann was apt to look back upon his youth as a time of ‘grief, want, and toil’.42 The ‘anxiety and tribulations’ identified by Goethe in Winckelmann’s life find ample support in his correspondence; they were also typical of the lot of the poor student. La Vopa details the numerous and humiliating signs of impecuniosity that marked such young men out from their better-off contemporaries: threadbare clothing, the inability to afford hot food or beer, imperfect pronunciation of Latin or German, and the highly visible reliance upon demeaning sources of income such as singing in the street choir. In addition to these external signs of dependence, the vagaries of the patronage system also generated psychological and social pressures, with beneficiaries expected to express heartfelt gratitude and deference and constantly to acknowledge their reliance upon a social (if not always an intellectual) superior.43 Nor did these difficulties cease with the end of formal education: the standard two or more years’ wait between university and a clerical appointment imposed a need to find income from another source, such as school-teaching or—more commonly— employment as a live-in tutor (Hauslehrer, Hofmeister).44 Such tutors were on the whole poorly paid, their university studies had often left them ill-prepared for the range of academic and polite accomplishments they were expected to inculcate in their charges, and—while their assumed expertise conferred upon them some status—their uneasy position as dependants within the household left them vulnerable to various petty humiliations, and perhaps even more serious exploitation, at the hands of unpaternalistically inclined employers.45 Again, this social reality is reflected in Goethe’s essay in oblique and unexpected ways. It is apparent in his otherwise patronizing comments on Winckelmann’s reaction to the social informality he encountered in Rome:

42 ‘Kummer, Noth und Arbeit’: Winckelmann to Usteri, 14 Nov. 1761 (Rehm II 449: 189); see too Winckelmann to Marpurg, 8 Dec. 1762 (Rehm II 527: 275): a famous letter in which Winckelmann quips that his life might be said to have begun truly only upon his move to Rome. 43 La Vopa 1988: 83–110. 44 Ibid. 111–33. 45 Ibid. 112, 116–20.

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[Winckelmann] himself observes that prominent people there, particularly in clerical circles, live on a relaxed and familiar footing with members of their households, however ceremonious they may outwardly appear; but he failed to observe that this familiarity is in fact a disguise for the oriental relationship between master and servant . . . . Winckelmann describes such scenes with great satisfaction; they make his otherwise dependent position more tolerable and sustain his sense of freedom, which dreads any threat of servitude.46

There is clear condescension in this verdict of a grand bourgeois, who had successfully crossed the threshold into nobility, about a figure who had lacked his advantages. Yet Goethe’s words not only pick up on a theme that recurs in Winckelmann’s own letters; they also reflect his awareness of a widespread social experience.47 Winckelmann’s broad and varied studies had perhaps left him better equipped than some of his peers to impart the kind of allround education expected from a live-in tutor, and Justi comments that he enjoyed ‘exceptional luck’ in the tutoring appointments that fell to his lot.48 He described his treatment in his first post, in the household of the minor Prussian nobleman George Arnold Grolmann in Osterburg near Stendal, as generous.49 His second appointment, as tutor to Friedrich Wilhelm Peter Lamprecht, the son of the Dean of Magdeburg Cathedral, was ‘on sufficiently comfortable terms’,50 and during his first few years in Seehausen Winckelmann continued to tutor the young Lamprecht—to whom he formed what appears to have been at the very least an ardent emotional attachment—as a private boarding pupil.51 Winckelmann was nevertheless not immune from some of the more subtle and pernicious 46

Goethe 1985: 255. See e.g. Rehm II 441 (to Berendis, 28 Sept. 1761), II 527 (to Marpurg, 8 Dec. 1762), both boasting of his close and friendly relationship with Cardinal Albani. Winckelmann had made similar satisfied comments about earlier patrons such as Bünau and Passionei: see e.g. Rehm I 63: 90–1 (Winckelmann to Uden, 31 Aug. 1749); Rehm I 128 (Winckelmann to Francke, 29 Jan. 1756). 48 Justi I 92. 49 Winckelmann to Bünau, 10 July 1748 (Rehm I 53: 79). It should be noted that this letter formed part of Winckelmann’s application to Bünau for patronage; he may therefore have attempted to ‘talk up’ his status. 50 Rehm I 53: 80. 51 There has always been a strong interest in the nature of their relationship, which appears to have undergone a sharp and unexplained vicissitude some months after Lamprecht went to university in 1746. Winckelmann’s letters to Lamprecht undoubtedly cast their relationship in romantic and erotic terms, calling him his ‘deliciae’ and 47

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43

psychological pressures involved in such an existence. The ambivalence that had attended the movement of poor students into the church and civil-service positions in eighteenth-century Prussia generated a pervasive double-bind, which hampered the attempts of such young men to claim a position in accordance with their ‘talents’. On the one hand, the increasing focus of the nobility upon military careers generated a need for young men from ‘lower down’ the social order to move through the educational system and take up these roles. On the other, this upward mobility generated widespread anxieties within a society that must still be characterized as ‘neocorporate’, in that moral rectitude was widely held to consist in the dutiful adherence to the lifestyle and form of work prescribed by one’s family status or Geburtsstand.52 From such a perspective, the poor student who sought too eagerly to improve his social position appeared untrustworthy. Lacking not only the familial contacts but also the sense of ‘honour’ that was felt to inhere (both by nature and by upbringing) in the sons of good families, poor students were suspected of approaching education solely as a means of material and social advancement; a taint that could only be allayed by continual protestations of good character combined with emphatic demonstrations of ascetic self-denial.53 The suspicions that were liable to attend the armer Student’s attempts to better his position are relevant to understanding the sensation that surrounded Winckelmann’s 1754 decision to convert to Catholicism. Goethe’s attempt to dismiss this event as insignificant (because Winckelmann was always a pagan at heart, and therefore indifferent to confessional distinctions within Christianity), contrasts with the entire preceding tradition of commentary, which displayed an intense and often scandalized interest in Winckelmann on this account even before his life story was further sensationalized by its

declaring his enduring love. Interpretation should bear in mind that such a mode of address was legitimated, at least to some extent, by classical precedent, as well as by the eighteenth-century discourse of sentimental friendship. Winckelmann maintained a correspondence with Lamprecht for many years after the break. See e.g. Rehm I 94 (a letter from Winckelmann to Uden in 1753, asking him to make Lamprecht a present of books he did not intend to take with him to Rome). 52 La Vopa 1988: 145–55, 197–207; see too Walker 1971: 73–107. 53 La Vopa 1988: 201–5.

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violent end.54 For example, Paalzow’s Kurzgefaßte Lebensgeschichte und Charakter des Herrn Präsidenten und Abt Winkelmann in Rom, first published in the Altonaische gelehrte Mercur in 1764, was offered up as a contribution to church history as well as to scholarship, not only because of the inherent interest of Winckelmann’s ‘scholarly writings’ but also ‘because of his apostasy from the Protestant Church’.55 The story that Winckelmann embraced his new faith with the quip, ‘Rome vaut une messe’, is probably apocryphal, but it serves as a useful reminder that such changes of faith were not unprecedented. The Electors of Saxony themselves provided a recent example, as August the Strong had converted to Catholicism in order to gain the crown of Poland, which he, and then his son (August II), ruled in personal union with Saxony until the death of the latter in 1763. But it was one thing for a prince to change confession on pragmatic grounds, quite another for a humble public servant to do the same: the action gained added ignominy from the social status of the apostate. Letters Winckelmann wrote to Berendis and to Bünau shortly after his conversion display a strong awareness of the moral opprobium that might follow upon such a step. The letter to Berendis may well strike modern readers as histrionic, mixing as it does ardent confession of sin (Winckelmann quotes from Psalm 32, ‘When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long’) with passages of self-justification: I see no good fortune ahead of me (reflect upon it well!); retreat is no longer possible for me . . . If the Count should die, I cannot earn my crust in any proper fashion, since I cannot speak a single foreign language. Schoolteaching holds no pleasure for me, I am no good for the university, my Greek is not valued anywhere. Where are there posts for librarians?56

Yet admissions of material necessity are balanced by protestations of honour and independence: I swear to you, that even though it should be easy for me after a little time in Rome to obtain the post of tutor to the youngest princes or the PrinceElector’s son, I would nevertheless prefer freedom to all worldly opulence.

54

For some observations on the tendency of modern scholarship to underplay the scandal (from a mid-eighteenth-century point of view) of Winckelmann’s religious ‘profanity’ see Ruprecht 2010. 55 Rehm IV 111: 183. 56 Winckelmann to Berendis, 12 July 1754 (Rehm I 99: 144).

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I shall now see with how little I am able to satisfy my stomach. A simple broth contents me and agrees with me better than any meat . . . 57

While poverty may have affected Winckelmann’s decision, he was anxious to dispel any suspicion of having acted out of a desire for material or social gain. Johann Matthias Gesner’s comments (which form the epigraph to this chapter) provide further illuminating—though ambiguous— evidence of how Winckelmann’s change of faith was greeted by contemporaries. In his Isagoges of 1756 (one of his many encyclopaedic and introductory pedagogical works), the Göttingen professor had the following to say about the recently published Gedancken: The book is a fine one, but driven by who knows what passion or mad desire he crossed from our church to the Vatican. And yet he lives there in a modest enough condition, namely, in that of a ‘Cicerone’. ‘Cicerones’ are what the Italians call those experts in antiquity who guide tourists around the ancient sites.

Do these remarks voice Gesner’s surprise that Winckelmann’s decision, assumed to be materially motivated, brought so little financial reward? Or is the reference to his modest lifestyle intended to defend the exile against such a charge? Either way, it is clear that Gesner considers Winckelmann’s spiritual and material situation to be matters that are both connected and worthy of comment; for he continues: ‘The life he leads at Rome is such that he often goes hungry, unless some prince arrives who offers him payment in return for his outstanding services.’58 More generally, this social ‘censure of ambition’ (La Vopa) goes some way towards explaining the heroic displays of self-abnegation attributed to many eighteenth-century German scholars from humble backgrounds. Heyne is said to have made himself ill from study during his time at the University of Leipzig, allowing himself only two nights’ sleep each week in order to cram in as much reading as possible.59 Winckelmann too showed a marked tendency towards the ascetic life, if we are to trust his childhood friend Uden’s memories of a visit paid in Easter 1747: The father of his former charge, Lamprecht, had sent the boy to him from Heimersleben, and he slept in the room where Winckelmann had also set his own bed. But the latter set not a foot in bed the entire winter long, and 57

Rehm I 99: 146.

58

Gesner 1784: 276.

59

Carlyle 1860: 339.

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instead sat in an easy chair placed before a table in one corner. Writing-desks were placed on either side. He would spend the entire day teaching in the school, and then with tuition of his Lamprecht. At around ten in the evening the boy would go to bed, and Winckelmann would pursue his own studies until around midnight, when he would extinguish his lamp and sleep soundly in his chair until four in the morning. Around four he would wake up once more, light his lamp, and follow his studies until six, when he would recommence with instruction of young Lamprecht until it was time for school. In such a situation I found him, and so he made use of his time in Seehausen.60

Winckelmann appears to have maintained such modest habits throughout his time in Rome. Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmansdorff, who sought instruction from Winckelmann in Rome in 1765–6 (he had accompanied Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of AnhaltDessau on his Grand Tour, and was later to go on to design the prince’s noted neoclassical palace at Wörlitz), gave the following retrospective account of Winckelmann’s living arrangements at that time: At Rome he lived in Albani’s palace, where he occupied the top floor—as befits a man of letters, concerned less with his fortune than with his glory. Homer, Euripides, and certain other authors furnished his entire library. Moreover, he had no need of any other books, because he had a free run of the library of Albani, in which no one else took any interest. His entire wardrobe consisted of two black robes and a big fur coat which he had brought with him from Germany, and which he used to wear in winter because it was his habit never to light a fire in his quarters except in order to heat his chocolate. He kept no one to serve upon him.61

The point of Winckelmann’s conspicuously modest lifestyle was not only to save money. It was also an important aspect of the poor-yethonest man’s self-presentation: dedication to a life of knowledge, not dedication to advancement or comfort, was the mark of an honourable scholar. 60 Rehm IV 104: 169. Paalzow (who would not himself have witnessed it) gives a description of Winckelmann’s parsimonious mode of living at Halle (Rehm IV 111: 186). 61 Erdmannsdorf to Huber (Rehm IV 131: 249). The letter was most likely composed in 1780 in response to a request for information by Huber, who quotes from it at length in his life of Winckelmann (Huber 1781: cxxxviii–cxliii). Leppmann comments that clerical garb (which Winckelmann wore without having taken orders) was a useful form of ‘protective clothing’ for someone who held an irregular position of personal patronage under a cardinal: Leppmann 1971: 155.

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SEEKING BÜNAU’S PATRONAGE: THE EMERGENCE OF A MAN OF LETTERS Writing in August 1743, some four months after Winckelmann took up his post in Seehausen, his predecessor Friedrich Eberhard Boysen recalled how eager Winckelmann had been to obtain employment there: As I was travelling back to Magdeburg I found in the canteen at Heimersleben a potential candidate named Winckelmann, who at the time was employed by Commissioner Lamprecht in Heimersleben. He studied at the same time as us in Halle, and you must often have seen him in the public libraries. As he is a very poor man he could not afford to purchase books for his own use, and so he would visit the reading-rooms in the Orphanage, the University, and the Market Church in order to sit there reading the writings of the ancient Greeks. But when I encountered him again, quite by chance, he was clothed so poorly and was so disfigured by long-standing grief that I scarcely recognized him. With a plaintiveness that pierced my heart he made himself known to me and pleaded with me to recommend him for my position in Seehausen, because someone had written to him that I had been invested with the authority to find an able successor. After he had convinced me of his great talents and his strength in Greek literature by means of a series of remarkable trials, I exerted all my efforts on his behalf, and brought it about that he became my successor in the post.62

Justi comments that Boysen’s description of Winckelmann is odd, given the relatively comfortable life he seems to have enjoyed within Lamprecht’s household.63 Yet whatever Winckelmann may have hoped to gain from a change of employment, his expectations were to be disappointed. As we have seen, school-teaching offered little material improvement on the insecure and meagre existence he had formerly led; and it is well known that he found the work of elementary instruction deeply unsatisfying.64 Boysen’s testimony suggests that the burghers of Seehausen were equally displeased with their new schoolmaster:

62

Boysen to Gleim, 10 Aug. 1743 (Rehm IV 107: 175). Justi I 116–17. By contrast, Wangenheim (2005: 47) suggests that Winckelmann’s salary of board, lodgings, and a mere 20 Reichstaler a year was hardly enough to keep him in clothes and books. 64 Justi I 115–90; Schadewaldt 1960; Leppmann 1971: 53–9; Wangenheim 2005: 60–2. 63

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Everyone in Seehausen thinks that I have looked out more for Winckelmann than for the school, and several of my friends have offered me bitter reproaches. The new Conrector cannot preach, he neglects the most basic educational duties, and perhaps the stage is too narrow for him: in short, the number of enrolments has declined markedly, and Winckelmann has asked me, both in writing and face-to-face, to post him elsewhere.65

Nor did matters improve with time: in a series of letters addressed to friends in summer and autumn of 1746, Winckelmann announces his extreme dissatisfaction with his situation and his desire for change.66 In the most melodramatic of them—dated by Rehm to September of that year—he confesses that he has contemplated bringing his ‘worthless life’ to an end.67 Yet there is no need to take such desperation at face value. Although it was most likely composed for his darling Lamprecht, this letter is one of a series of similar drafts to various addressees, in which Winckelmann rehearses his unhappiness in an overblown and melodramatic style replete with classical commonplaces.68 Other correspondence of the period shows him considering less drastic means of escape. Riedel suggests that it was at this point that Winckelmann formulated his plan to travel to Italy and study the antiquities there.69 Yet his correspondence provides no indication of this: although some letters announce his intention to return to university, Winckelmann’s first attempts at bettering his situation were still within the orbit of school-teaching, applying unsuccessfully for positions at schools in Magdeburg, Salzwedel, and Brunswick.70 Any of these possibilities would have been safer than Winckelmann’s eventual decision to abandon the Latin School for a position in Bünau’s household. Considered from the purview of his life up to that point, this action appears almost as momentous as his later change of confession. Life at Seehausen might involve intellectual 65

66 67 Rehm I 107: 175. Rehm I 34–40. Rehm I 38: 65. These drafts are preserved in a single notebook: see Rehm’s note to I 34: 514. Winckelmann recycles the Diogenes commonplace in letters I 34 and 36, addressed to other friends. 69 [Riedel] 1776: xliv–xlv. A letter from Boysen to Genzmer in April 1745 (Rehm IV 107: 176) states that Winckelmann was saving up for an antiquarian voyage to Egypt. 70 For Winckelmann’s intention to resume his university studies, see Rehm I 37 (addressee unknown, [August 1746]); I 39 (to Genzmer, 16 Nov. 1746). For his unsuccessful applications for teaching positions see Leppmann 1971: 56–69. Rehm I 41 is a letter of application for a position at the renowned Schule zu Kloster Berge near Magdeburg. 68

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isolation and drudgery, but teaching at least held out the promise of eventual promotion to something superior. Boysen had, after all, been elevated to a clerical position in Magdeburg; even though Winckelmann had by now decided the church was not for him, there was always the hope of gaining employment in a different school, where the level of learning might be greater and more challenging instruction could be given. To leave this familiar route of advancement and instead enter into the service of an aristocrat, no matter how great his reputation as a lover of learning, carried its own dangers. The contemporaneous case of Heyne, whose association with Heinrich von Brühl reduced him not once but twice to a state of destitution, serves as one example among many of the hazards of relying upon the patronage of an individual nobleman. The moral and cultural expectations explored earlier also weighed against such a move. Sheehan describes how the corporate institutions that characterized the traditional social order ‘were supposed to protect their members, by erecting real or symbolic walls between them and those outside . . . To be outside the confines of a household, a trade or a community was to be in the ranks of those without somewhere to go, a last resort, a final source of sustenance.’71 Sheehan has runaways in mind, but while Winckelmann’s decision to join Bünau’s household did not constitute as extreme a cutting of ties as that, it did involve the abandonment of his homeland and the path that had been marked out for him from a young age by his parents and patrons. Accusations of ingratitude and disloyalty from family and other patrons were a distinct possibility, and it is perhaps no accident that Winckelmann waited until after his mother’s death before seeking to leave Prussia.72 Winckelmann’s determination to seek employment with Bünau in June 1748 was therefore a daring move. Written in highfaluting, yet halting, French (a language perhaps chosen to suggest courtly elegance as much as scholarship), his first letter to the count is a meticulous composition: 71

Sheehan 1989: 79, 86; see too La Vopa 1988: 197–206. There is perhaps an implicit reproach in Nolte’s words to Winckelmann in July 1748, when he was about to leave Seehausen: ‘I seek this one thing from you: that, before you depart you visit your father, since the utterly wretched state of his soul, which you will see for yourself, demands of you the task of leading him back to the path (for at present he is straying greatly).’ (Rehm IV 33, Nolte to Winckelmann, 10 July 1748; original in Latin). 72

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My Lord, I dare bring forth this letter from out of the dust of the schoolroom before the enlightened gaze of Your Excellency. I am emboldened by the indulgence which you display towards the needs of men of letters, and it is for this reason that I believe my temerity justified. Ever since I began to study your Excellency’s admirable History of the Empire my sole desire has been to bear witness that I too wish to participate in that veneration which the whole world has formed for a learning so vast and so rare, in a person of such high distinction and in such a perfect Minister. Happy are they who are engaged in the service of such a great genius, and moreover a man of virtù, and even I have conceived the ambition of such glory. I am a man who desires only to devote himself to study; this is the extent of my wishes, never allowing myself to be dazzled by the favourable conditions which obtain in the Church. In this manner I buried myself for five years in the schoolroom of my native land, with the aim of teaching letters. But the deplorable state of all our countries’ schools revolted me utterly and at the same time inspired in me the idea of forging, so to speak, my destiny in an Academy. I began to give the matter careful thought and to reflect upon the course that my career has taken up to this point, and so to chance my fortune in a Metaphysical Century, where letters are trampled underfoot. Eventually seeing myself without means and deprived of the help of others for my advancement, I also abandoned that plan. What else can I do? My only recourse is to resort to the grace of one of the greatest men of the Century—a man whose humanity, which shines through every line of his immortal writings, inspires in us such high ideas that it can only give rise to hope. My Lord, I beg pardon for the display of my limited capacity. Make use of it. I am ready to give myself over to the service of Your Excellency. Seat me in a corner of your library to transcribe rare anecdotes, which will be published, as they say.73 I foresee the ray of a potent protection extending over me—a ray which has already kindled in my heart the sweet hope of further acquainting myself with the Muses. Perhaps I shall be of greater use to the Public in future when, plucked from obscurity by whatever route, I find a means of living in the Capital. I beseech God to look graciously upon Your Excellency’s exalted destiny and to grant all the ardent wishes of the Public, which yearns for so accomplished a History to be continued. I am

73 As Winckelmann’s ‘comme on dit’, coming as it does at the end of the sentence, is very curious, I give the French: ‘Placez moi dans un coin de Votre Bibliotheque, pour copier les rares anecdotes, qui seront publiées, comme on dit.’

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My Lord Your Excellency’s very humble and very obedient Servant, Winckelmann.74

This was, essentially, a ‘cold’ approach to a man of far higher social status, who had no reasons based in considerations of common fatherland, social, or familial ties which might persuade him to advance Winckelmann’s ambitions. Winckelmann’s opening lines acknowledge this, drawing attention to the distance that separates Bünau’s nobility and lumières from his own humble status. Yet from the letter’s very first paragraph Winckelmann also stakes a pressing claim to Bünau’s aid based upon his and his addressee’s common interests as men of letters. It was the codes of intercourse that defined the Republic of Letters that allowed such boldness, which in other contexts might well have been seen as a serious breach of etiquette. In her analysis of the evolution of the forms of discourse that came to characterize the Republic in the first half of the eighteenth century, Anne Goldgar emphasizes its nature as a ‘community of obligations’: a conception which was widely held to license its members to demand assistance of each other.75 Such requests were based on more than the likelihood of a mutually advantageous exchange of information, for the provision of services to fellow seekers after knowledge was held to be an important moral characteristic of the man of letters: an expression of the civility and good grace that marked the honnête homme. Winckelmann’s letter exploits the ideal self-presentation of the res publica litteraria to the full. By composing his approach not as a request for employment but an offer of service, he is able to stake a claim about the independence and consideration due to a fellow scholar, while giving the acknowledgement of his own inferiority and assurances of loyal subordination that were necessary when approaching a man of higher social status. Moreover, elaborate recognition of his addressee’s erudition enabled him to establish his own credentials as a man of judgement and learning, portraying himself as someone who may in future be of use not merely to the count, but also ‘au Public’.

74 75

Winckelmann to Bünau, 16 June 1748 (Rehm I 51). Goldgar 1995: 13, 32.

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Bünau was well judged as a target of Winckelmann’s bid for advancement. Décultot comments that the count was ‘in many respects the incarnation of an aristocratic model which was already in decline: that of the prince érudit’; and in any case, unlike France and England, the German lands had little tradition of noble patronage of scholarship and the arts.76 Even if the appointment was partly down to luck—Winckelmann apparently heard by chance that Bünau was seeking a librarian during a visit to Stendal, and Bünau’s reply to Winckelmann makes it clear that he was already employing two people in this role—it was also the fruit of Winckelmann’s own aspirations towards a life of scholarship, and his ability to demonstrate his qualifications in this regard.77

WINCKELMANN’S READING A clue as to where Winckelmann gained this confidence in his potential standing as an homme de lettres is provided in his next letter to the count, in which he responds to the latter’s encouraging request for further details as to his age, experience, and qualifications.78 In addition to his cursus vitae, Winckelmann’s rather breathless reply (composed this time in Latin) gives a detailed conspectus of his reading to date. This reveals a man well versed not only in theology and medicine, the subjects he had studied at university, but who had also amassed smatterings of learning in a wide range of fields: Greek and Hebrew, law, history and genealogy, Italian and English, geometry and elementary philosophy.79 Such broad reading, as Winckelmann explains, was the not simply the fruit of his university studies; it was also the result of the life of concentrated self-study to which he had devoted himself over his years at Seehausen. We have already cited Uden’s testimony as to how intensively Winckelmann devoted himself to his studies during these years, and there is plentiful evidence to suggest that it was then that he amassed the wide-ranging knowledge that enabled him to recommend himself 76 77 78 79

Décultot 2000: 26. Justi I 184; see Bünau to Winckelmann, 1 July 1748 (Rehm IV 32: 68). Rehm IV 32: 68. Winckelmann to Bünau, 10 July 1748 (Rehm I 53: 79–8).

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to Bünau. Winckelmann’s letters from this period reveal him to have been an avid consumer of books and journals, often travelling on foot to Magdeburg, Hadmersleben, Braunschweig, Halle, and even Leipzig in order to purchase, borrow, or consult literature in libraries.80 His voracious reading is also attested to in his manuscript remains, an important and largely unpublished resource which has not yet been exploited fully for Winckelmann studies, but which has recently been the subject of important studies by Susanne Kochs and Élisabeth Décultot.81 The majority of Winckelmann’s notebooks do not contain drafts of his published works, but consist of pages of notes copied out carefully from a staggering variety of authors, amounting to a ‘personal library’ representing some twenty-five years’ worth of reading, from the early 1740s to the mid-1760s. They provide a rich set of sources which can supplement Winckelmann’s correspondence in helping us to reconstruct the intellectual context of his published works. Justi, who devotes some sixty pages of the first volume of his biography to an analysis of Winckelmann’s reading during his Seehausen period, draws on Uden’s reminiscences (and alludes to a famous passage of Machiavelli) to give us a romantic picture of his scholarly activities: Like all slaves, he was by day only half himself. It was at night that he first began to live, when he invited the ancients into his chamber. The pale, thin man sat there in the narrow, bleak, freezing monk’s cell behind the churchyard of the Petrikirche; his small, dark eyes twinkling over his aquiline nose; peering from the depths of his overcoat into an old volume of Plutarch or Socrates; dreaming amid the impassable, snow-covered wastes of the South, of its seas and its peoples, while the north wind rattled the rotten frames of the small, round, dirty windows, and behind the bleak, heavy towers of St Peter’s and Paul’s the moon began to decline towards the west.82

Yet Justi searches in vain in the manuscripts for clear signs of the direction Winckelmann’s scholarship was to take. Although the

80

Justi I 122–3. Décultot 2000; Kochs 2005; for other, less comprehensive discussions, see Justi I 136–79; Kraus 1935; Schadewaldt 1960. 82 Justi I 124; see too Winckelmann’s 1764 comment to Füssli (Rehm III 673: 55): ‘Ich habe den Schulmeister mit großer Treue gemacht, und ließ Kindern mit grindigten Köpfen das Abc lesen, wenn ich während dieses Zeitvertreibs sehnlich wünschte zur Kenntniß des Schönen zu gelangen, und Gleichniße aus dem Homerus betete.’ 81

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dating of many of Winckelmann’s manuscripts is uncertain, those that have tentatively been attributed to his Seehausen years suggest that Winckelmann immersed himself in a vast range of literature on almost every imaginable subject. While Latin and especially Greek authors feature prominently, Winckelmann also devoted time to the study of law and English grammar, to encyclopedic works such as the Dictionnaire historique et critique of Bayle and the Historisches Lexikon of Johann Heinrich Zedler, the correspondence of scholars such as Heinsius and Gronovius, and the famous Leipzig journal Acta eruditorum.83 While Justi concludes, somewhat despairingly, that Winckelmann’s reading during this period was ‘planlos’ (without direction), Décultot—the author of the most extensive study of Winckelmann’s Nachlaß to date—characterizes it more accurately as ‘polyhistorical’.84 Although some of Winckelmann’s reading was such as to equip him for his roles as schoolteacher and private tutor, his studies went far beyond this: Winckelmann read across almost the entire range of eighteenth-century learning in apparently disinterested fashion.85 His aim was not, as later in Rome, to pursue any particular project. Rather, his activities proceeded in the traditional model of erudition; his goal the conventional one of reconstituting the entirety of the world of learning in his own, personal library of excerpts. This evidence of Winckelmann’s broad reading enables us to view his activities during his university and Seehausen years in a new light. His numerous, abortive plans for an akademische Reise may be seen as attempts to conform to the paradigm of the travelling man of letters: a model absorbed from the books and periodicals to which he had access. His attempts to keep up with the world of knowledge through periodicals, and to cultivate a learned correspondence network, were also occupations typical of the would-be early modern savant.86 And it must also have been from this encyclopaedic reading 83 For the content and dating of individual volumes, see Tibal 1911, with corrections/criticism by Bockelkamp 1996. 84 Justi I 109; Décultot 2000: 57–78. 85 Décultot points out that Winckelmann ignored the latest developments in, for example, the sciences or historiography; passing over, for example, those pages of the Acta eruditorum in which Leibniz reported his latest researches into calculus. This ties in with reports of his lecture attendance at Halle, where he ignored, for example, Alexander Baumgarten’s lectures on aesthetics, attending only his more traditional, encyclopedia lectures because of the knowledge of books imparted in them. See Décultot 2000: 62–4; Rehm IV 106 (Genzmer to Ballenstedt, Summer 1768): 173. 86 Goldgar 1995: 4, 54–104.

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that Winckelmann gleaned his understanding of the forms of interaction and obligation that characterized the Gelehrtenrepublik. For the idea of the common commitment to knowledge as binding scholars and inquirers was part of the way the Republic styled itself as a community that was outside of—and in some senses an alternative to—traditional bonds of fatherland, religion, or family status. This was reflected in the literature of erudition: generations before Winckelmann, Pierre Bayle had observed how the rules of this form of association ignored—indeed reversed—usual social mores: This republic is a state of extreme liberty. The only authority recognized is that of truth and reason, and under their auspices one is free to wage war against whomever it may be. There, friends must be on guard against friends, fathers against children, stepfathers against stepsons. It is like the Age of Iron: . . .Non hospes ab hospite tutus, Non socer a genero.87

Winckelmann’s importuning of Bünau is the corollary of Bayle’s Ovidian-Hesiodic vision of father standing against son. In a realm where allegiances were created by a common dedication to knowledge at the expense of patriotic, social, or family interests, one might request—indeed, importune—aid in accordance with those intellectual commitments. Several of the most perceptive modern commentators on Winckelmann have observed that the programme of self-education he pursued during his Seehausen years followed a model of erudition that was already in many respects outmoded. Décultot points out that this project of universal learning rested on the assumption that the totality of human knowledge could be surveyed and digested by one man, a notion that seemed implausible to many as early as the 1720s.88 Even in Germany, where the polyhistorical paradigm persisted for longer than in France or England, quite different and more ‘modern’ notions of the reading public were being fostered as early as the 1750s by figures such as Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Nicolai. Yet it was Winckelmann’s outdated reading that gave him the intellectual, social, and discursive tools necessary to make his way in a very 87 Bayle 1820: 584 (headword: ‘Catius’), quoting Ovid, Met. 1.444–5. The passage is quoted, in the context of similar formulations, by Waquet 1989: 484. 88 Décultot 2000: 57–78, esp. 62–7; see too Justi I 103–6; Goldgar 1995: 1–7.

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different world from that of his birth, and what one might term this ‘passive’ citizenship of the Republic of Letters, obtained through his wide reading of books and journals, which enabled him to make his first bid for active citizenship of that realm.

‘DIE KENNER UND NACHAHMER DER GRIECHEN’: THE GEDANCKEN AS CALLING-CARD The contrast between the mode of learning on display in Winckelmann’s letters to Bünau and that of the Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst, his first published work, seems at first extreme.89 The Gedancken are the product of the immensely fruitful year Winckelmann spent in Dresden between leaving Bünau’s service in summer 1754 and setting out for Rome in September the following year: a period characterized by Justi as ‘the most significant and decisive in Winckelmann’s entire life’.90 Winckelmann wrote the essay relatively quickly in the spring of 1755, while awaiting confirmation of the position in Cardinal Passionei’s Roman household that was the promised reward of his religious conversion. It was published in May, in an edition limited to fifty copies. The second, enlarged edition, which included the Sendschreiben and Erläuterung as well as a description of a mummy contained in the cabinet of antiquities at Dresden, was prepared throughout the summer of 1755 and seen through the press by Walther after Winckelmann’s departure from the city. It is hard to imagine a work that differs more, in both content and form, from those projects with which Winckelmann had assisted during his time in Bünau’s service: the collation of sources for his master’s history of the Holy Roman Empire and the cataloguing of his library’s holdings in church history. Compared to these laborious undertakings, the Gedancken strike an urbane and elegant note. Although Winckelmann did not dispense entirely with footnotes, his essay’s forty-four pages of text wear their erudition lightly. His enthusiastic German, which reaches its high point in the celebrated 89

KS 27–59.

90

Justi I 334.

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ekphrasis of the Laocoön as the epitome of the ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ of the ancients, is a far cry from the Latinate world of the polyhistor. Most obviously, the Gedancken are the first utterance—public or private—in which Winckelmann sounds the twin emphases upon art and upon ancient Greece that were to distinguish his later work. It is thus hardly surprising that this essay has been read as marking a rupture with Winckelmann’s previous aspirations; a programmatic statement of his desertion of the world of Bücher for that of Bilder. A tradition of commentary, beginning in Winckelmann’s lifetime and including both Goethe and Justi, has attributed Winckelmann’s new-found interest in art to the circle of friends with whom he associated in Dresden. This included artists and connoisseurs, such as the collector Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn (later to become director of the Electoral art collections and to publish in 1762 Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey, one of first German-language works of art theory) and the classicizing painter and engraver Adam Friedrich Oeser. Winckelmann had got to know both men earlier in the 1750s as regular visitors to Bünau’s library; the impression made by such visitors from the city is reflected in letters from 1752 onwards, in which Winckelmann talks of his own visits to galleries in Dresden and his desire to seek out the company of artists.91 His commerce with them increased once he was installed in the Residenzstadt, and the claim that Oeser—with whom Winckelmann lodged for most of his year in Dresden, whom he described in a letter of the period as his ‘sole friend’ in the city, and who receives lavish acknowledgement at the end of the Erläuterung—was a particularly important influence upon Winckelmann has been repeated frequently since the eighteenth century.92 91

See e.g. Winckelmann to Uden, 3 Mar. 1752 (Rehm I 81). Winckelmann lodged with Oeser and his family from December 1754 until he left for Rome, and took drawing lessons from him. Oeser, who had trained in the Viennese classicizing school of Georg Raphael Donner, lived in Dresden from 1739 until the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756. After a short period in the employ of Heinrich von Bünau (overseeing the decorative schemes of his new palace at Dahlen), in 1764 he became the first director of the newly founded Leipzig Academy of Drawing, Painting, and Architecture, a position secured for him by Hagedorn. The Gedancken’s three title vignettes are Oeser’s work, and he also supplied engravings for the 1781 French edition of the Geschichte. Winckelmann’s designation of Oeser as his ‘sole friend’ in Dresden comes in a letter to Berendis of 29 Dec. 1764 (Rehm I 106: 163). On Oeser more generally see Dürr 1879; John 1999; Kunze 1977. 92

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The connection between Winckelmann’s friendship with Oeser and the intellectual preoccupations revealed in the Gedancken was first drawn during Winckelmann’s own lifetime by a man well acquainted with both men. In the Preface to his German Dactyliothec of 1767, the artist and manufacturer of gem-casts Philipp Daniel Lippert named Winckelmann as an example of a scholar who had learnt much from associating with artists: Winckelmann was, as a German scholar, much admired on this account in Rome. It was he who really discovered Rome in Rome, and showed many Italians things that they had seen without being aware of what was in front of them. For all his diligence and scholarly erudition, however, he would, like many others, have restricted his wide-ranging learning to books, had he not previously formed his knowledge and strengthened his eye over a period of time by the good taste of our common friend Oeser, who is now Professor and Director of the Academy of Art in Leipzig. He acknowledges this in his first published work . . .93

The anonymous author of one of the many memoirs that appeared in German periodicals after Winckelmann’s death repeated these comments, embellishing them with various, very likely speculative, details.94 Among these were the claims that Winckelmann had been unable to detect the beauty of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the work the Gedancken pairs with the Laocoön as its equivalent in ‘Stille’ and ‘Grösse’, until Oeser explicated it to him, and that Winckelmann wrote the Gedancken at Oeser’s suggestion.95 Comments such as these, together with Goethe’s rather more cryptic claim that the Gedancken are ‘so wayward and eccentric that it would be futile to try to make any sense of them without prior knowledge of the personalities of the connoisseurs and critics who were congregated in Saxony at that time’, fuelled subsequent debate over the extent of Oeser’s contribution to that work, with Justi going so far as to endorse the suggestion (made originally in 1799 by Johann Gottfried Seume— 93

Lippert 1767: xiv. Rehm IV 116: 204, with Rehm’s notes ad loc. The comments come in a review of ‘Einige Nachrichten aus dem Leben des Abts Winkelmann’ (an essay published in Unterhaltungen, Hamburg, 1769), which appeared in Christian Adolph Klotz’s Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften in 1770. The review’s author appears not to have known Winckelmann personally, and it contains various inaccuracies, for example, the claim that Winckelmann lived with Oeser for almost two years, leaving for Rome only at Easter 1756. 95 Rehm IV 116: 205. 94

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like Goethe, a former student of Oeser) that the entirety of Winckelmann’s description of Raphael’s painting was dictated to him by his artist friend.96 Little independent evidence survives that might help assess the truth of these anecdotes. Winckelmann’s letters of 1754–5 contain ample testimony about the importance he placed upon his friendship with Oeser, but little detail as to the contents of their discussions. His only general comment about Oeser’s contribution to the Gedancken, apart from creating its three engraved vignettes, is that he was ‘very supportive of the undertaking’.97 Unlike Hagedorn and Lippert, Oeser did not publish theoretical or connoisseurial works that might enable comparison of his and Winckelmann’s views. It nonetheless seems entirely plausible to suppose that Oeser influenced various of the judgements of taste Winckelmann pronounced on particular works in the Gedancken, Sendschreiben, and Erläuterung, most obviously his high praise of Oeser’s own teacher, the Viennese painter Georg Raphael Donner.98 Beyond this, it is tempting to suppose that association with Oeser and his circle prompted Winckelmann to turn to the overall project of improving the taste of German artists. This is the primary aim expressed in the opening paragraphs of the Gedancken: the famous claims that the ‘good taste’ which germinated in Greece is spreading throughout the contemporary world, and that ‘the only way for us to become great— indeed, if possible, inimitable—is imitation of the ancients’, are, above all, exhortations to artists to study Greek models as a means to improve their own styles. Winckelmann’s conjectural reconstruction of Michelangelo’s method of working from models submerged in water is not only a display of learned virtuosity in its own right (it purports to correct Vasari); it ends with an explicit recommendation to artists to adopt similar practices. A letter to Nolte of 3 June 1755, which accompanied a copy of the Gedancken, connects Winckelmann’s new-found enthusiasm for art to his time in the Saxon capital:

96 Goethe 1985: 243 (1969: 216); see Seume 1799: 155; Justi I 406–17; Dürr 1879: 49–63. 97 Winckelmann to Uden, 3 June 1755 (Rehm I 110: 171). 98 Kunze 1977: 15; see too Käfer 1986: 132–6; Kunze 1977: 12–17; John 1999: 48–58. Käfer discusses how the doctrine of allegory propounded towards the end of the Gedancken may have been influenced by Oeser’s views upon the topic.

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Since my arrival in Dresden I have allowed my passion for studying the Greeks to develop in full force, and I would have advanced further, had I the leisure to do so . . . I shall henceforth use my meagre knowledge for no end other than the restoration of Greek taste in painting and sculpture. My greatest efforts in Rome will concern these arts.99

Such a goal is consistent with Oeser’s own activities in Saxony, most obviously his accumulation of a cast gallery and his activities teaching local craftsmen as well as younger students while director of the Leipzig Academy of Drawing, Painting, and Architecture in the 1760s. It also finds a partial analogue in Lippert’s project to produce a dactyliotheca ‘for the advantage of the fine arts and of artists’ (see next chapter).100 Yet Lippert’s and Oeser’s Enlightened endeavours to spread a taste for the antique among unlettered craftsmen sit oddly with Winckelmann’s decision to limit circulation of the Gedancken by restricting the first edition to fifty copies, and delaying the publication of the second, enlarged version.101 And even if Winckelmann’s declared aim of improving artistic practice was consistent with the aspirations of his new-found friends in Dresden, it was also ingrained in the traditions of early modern art theory and criticism with which Winckelmann was well versed through his reading. This point has been argued most fully by Gottfried Baumecker, in a thesis that has not been reprinted since 1933 and has thus not received as much attention as it merits. Baumecker examined the extracts on art contained in volumes 61–2 of Winckelmann’s Paris manuscripts in order to argue, pace Goethe, that Winckelmann’s turn to art in the early 1750s is attributable at least as much to literary as to social influences. Unlike Justi and Décultot, who both emphasize the eclecticism of Winckelmann’s readings in European literature on the fine arts, Baumecker argues that the Gedancken, Sendschreiben, and Erläuterung have a systematic intent.102 While Winckelmann’s

99

Rehm I 111: 174–5. Lippert himself understood their projects as to some extent complementary: ‘Und da er von allem Eigennutz frey ist, so bestrebet er sich auch nach allem Vermögen, uns als seinen Landesleuten recht nützlich zu werden; und er hat bishero schon mehr gethan, also viele Gelehrte in hundert Jahren, durch ihre sonst gute, aber lateinische Werke, noch nicht zuwege gebracht, weil unter den deutschen Künstlern sich gar wenige finden, die Latein verstehen. Wir hoffen auch noch mehr von ihm zu erhalten’ (1767: xiv–xv). 101 Justi I: 386. 102 Baumecker 1933: esp. 9–34; contrast Décultot 2000: 83–8. 100

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indebtedness to Italian theorists such as Vasari and Bellori for general features of his doctrine of ideal imitation has often been noted, Baumecker’s contribution is to emphasize that Winckelmann’s eloquent defence of this conception and of its realization in ancient art constitutes a declaration of allegiance within a set of debates over the goal of art and the relative merits of artists that had occupied French writers on art during the previous century. More specifically, he was taking sides in a debate that had occupied the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture between those, like Charles Le Brun and André Félibien, who had sought to develop a system of neo-Aristotelian rules for beautiful composition in painting, and upstarts such as de Piles, Saint-Evremond, and La Bruyère, who advanced less orthodox and rationalistic notions of art.103 In the older literature on this topic these differences have sometimes been presented as an extension of Italian Renaissance debates over the relative priority of disegno and colorito as element of the painter’s art. Yet the implications of the disagreements between the poussinistes and the rubenistes in the seventeenth-century French Academic art world went beyond this, comprising a quarrel over nothing less than the nature and status of artistic representation. De Piles’s first major work, the Dialogue sur le coloris of 1673, was an influential salvo on the side of the latter. In opposition to the literary-theoretic discourse on art that had ‘characterized the official doctrine of the early academy under Le Brun and had been an almost permanent feature of traditional theory’, de Piles aimed at ‘defining the visual interest we have in pictures in contrast to our intellectual, moral or religious interest in the picture’s subject-matter’.104 The result was a theory that prioritized naturalistic imitation above the idealization preferred by the poussinistes, and which defined the purpose of art as attracting and deceiving the eye. Although de Piles’s notions had seemed iconoclastic in the 1670s and 1680s, by the time of his death in 1709 they had been adopted as the official doctrine of the French Academy. 103

Barasch 1985: 349–72; see too Teyssèdre 1957; Lichtenstein 1993: 138–68; and Puttfarken 1985. The classic discussion of this doctrine of ideal art in Renaissance art theory is of course Panofsky 1968, see his n. 22, pp. 242–3 on Winckelmann’s debt to Bellori. Both Perini (2005: 265–7) and Baumecker (1933: 130–2) note that Winckelmann’s description of Raphael’s Expulsion of Attila (KS 45) closely follows that of Bellori in his 1695 Descrizzione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino nelle Camere del Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano. 104 Puttfarken 1985: ix.

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Baumecker is correct to identify de Piles as Winckelmann’s main adversary in the Gedancken, Sendschreiben, and Erläuterung. The various value-judgements on ‘modern’ (that is, Renaissance and post-Renaissance) works that Winckelmann pronounces throughout these essays align him closely with the poussiniste side of the debate, and the lengthy paean to the Greek ability to find the ideal in and beyond nature which fills the first fifteen pages of the Gedancken is also an extended argument against de Piles’s position. Poussin himself is praised as (like Raphael) an artist who modelled his works on ancient ideals; conversely, comments about Rubens, whom de Piles had praised as a prime example of excellence in coloris, are less complimentary.105 In the Sendschreiben, de Piles’s arguments that ‘amusement of the eyes’ is the end of painting, that coloris is a higher skill than dessin, and that ‘a painter is in truth nothing other than an ape of nature’ (note the tendentious formulation of this tenet) are put in the mouth of Winckelmann’s supposed opponent; and although polite, Winckelmann’s sole explicit reference to de Piles in the Gedancken is just as telling.106 Shortly before he turns from his opening discussion of imitation to the question of the superiority of Greek contour, Winckelmann again invokes Poussin as an example of an artist whose long study of ancient art enabled him to progress to discerning the beautiful in nature. He then comments: We should understand in this manner the anecdote recounted by de Piles, when he reports that when death was overtaking Raphael, he strove to leave behind the marbles and instead to follow nature directly. The true taste of antiquity would have accompanied him continually in his journey through common nature, and, through a kind of chemical transformation, all his observations of it would have been changed into what his own nature, his soul made of them.107

105 For example, Winckelmann‘s ardent declaration that ‘Man muß mit ihnen [the ancients], wie mit seinem Freund, bekannt geworden seyn, um den Laocoon eben so unnachahmlich als den Homer zu finden’ is followed by the comment that: ‘Mit diesem Auge haben Michael Angelo, Raphael und Poußin die Wercke der Alten gesehen’ (KS 30). By contrast, ‘Der grosse Rubens ist weit entfernt von dem Griechischen Umriß der Cörper, und in denenjenigen unter seinen Wercken, die er vor seiner Reise nach Italien, und vor dem Studio der Antiquen gemacht hat, am weitesten’ (KS 39). He nonetheless praises Rubens as ‘der vorzüglichste unter grossen Mahlern’ who have tried to develop the poetic or allegorical mode of painting (KS 56). 106 107 KS 78. KS 38.

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A footnote refers the reader to de Piles’s Conversations sur la connoissance sur la peinture, et sur la jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux (1677), where the philo-Rubenist character Philarque recounts this anecdote as evidence of Raphael’s eventual realization that he ‘still had not studied nature adequately’ and therefore needed ‘to liberate himself from the marbles’.108 Winckelmann turns a story de Piles had cited as evidence of Raphael’s apostasy from ancient models into a reassertion of their priority. If somewhat sotto voce, then, Winckelmann’s Gedancken conduct a debate with high Academic traditions of art theory. This insight of Baumecker’s must be added to studies by Stammler, Décultot, and others, which have shown how many of the most memorable passages of the Gedancken are indebted to the authors Winckelmann copied out so meticulously in his commonplace book.109 Décultot rightly observes that for all its urbanity, Winckelmann’s compilatory mode of writing displays affinities with early modern forms of erudition.110 Although the authors upon whom Winckelmann relied were a very different set from those he read for his work on Bünau’s History, the Gedancken equally present the discerning reader with a display of learning. To what audience was this show of learned elegance addressed? The Gedancken’s immediate dedicatee was Friedrich August II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, a fact of which Winckelmann boasted in letters to friends. Lavish praise of the Elector as ‘the German Titus’ and his father as ‘the great Augustus’ was surely calculated to catch the royal eye, and the Gedancken provide a lyrical advertisement for Dresden and its royal collections, casting a connoisseurial spotlight on some of their most exciting recent additions.111 On this reader it had its desired effect: upon receiving his copy, the Elector’s reaction was, reportedly, to comment that ‘Dieser Fisch soll in sein rechtes Wasser kommen’.112 Winckelmann travelled to Rome four months later in the knowledge that he would receive a 108

de Piles 1677: 260–1. Stammler 1961; Décultot 2000 (see p. 98 for her close analysis of the sources for the Gedancken’s famous sixth paragraph ‘Die eintzige Weg für uns, groß, ja, wenn es möglich ist, unnachahmlich zu werden . . . ’). 110 Décultot 2000: 36–43. 111 Winckelmann to Nolte, 3 June 1755 (Rehm I 111: 173): ‘Die Schätze unsers Antiquen-Cabinets sind auch hier zuerst bekannt gemacht.’ 112 Justi I 385. 109

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modest monthly pension from the Saxon court, which enabled him to delay entering the service of a new master for some years. Yet the intended audience of the Gedancken was likely somewhat broader than this. Although Winckelmann’s letters emphasized how much he relished the freedom of his year in Dresden, finance had also been a concern. Royal patronage was slow in coming; that of Cardinal Passionei equally insecure. Winckelmann’s communications to friends before and even once he reached the Eternal City indicate that he intended to stay in Rome for only a year or so; on his return, his hope was that the experiences and learning he had amassed there would be sufficient to secure him a comfortable position as a librarian or tutor in the royal court. A letter to Uden of 3 June 1755 reveals Winckelmann’s acute awareness of the importance of making some name for himself in Saxony: ‘My whole destiny depends upon this book, and I have strong hope that they will seek to use me here and will not allow me to fall into the hands of the Romans. The trip to Rome can still take place at any time, but with more optimism as to my future circumstances, which actually right now appear rather philosophical.’113 Although they espoused a different model of learning from the one paraded in his letters to Bünau, the Gedancken were equally a piece of strategic self-positioning. We may view the essay as something between an insurance policy and a calling-card: an attempt—and a highly successful one at that—at staking a claim to recognition in the urbane pursuit of appreciation of art.

113

Winckelmann to Uden, 3 June 1755 (Rehm I 110: 172).

3 ‘Kennzeichen der griechischen Meisterstücke’: Winckelmann’s early Roman writings and the discourse of connoisseurship Ich kam nach Rom, nur um zu sehen; ich finde aber so viel noch unbekannte Schätze, so viel Unrichtigkeit in allen Büchern, so sonderlich das Schöne in den Werken der Alten haben berühren wollen, daß ich die Gelegenheit, die sich mir anbietet, nutzen muß. Ich habe Plane zu verschiedenen Schriften gemacht, sonderlich zu einem Werke, von dem Geschmacke der griechischen Künstler. Diese Untersuchungen sollen mein Hauptwerk bleiben . . . (Winckelmann, 1756, quoted in Nicolai’s review of the Gedancken, BSW 1.1 (1757), 347)

We have seen that the Gedancken were successful as a self-advertisement intended to augment Winckelmann’s position among prospective patrons in Dresden and in Rome. Their effect beyond this circle also exceeded his expectations. Reviewing the 1756 edition in the first issue of Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (henceforth BSW), the journal he had recently co-founded with Moses Mendelssohn, the young Friedrich Nicolai praised ‘Herr Winckelmann, who has now embarked upon a voyage to Rome’, as a man ‘from whom the fine arts will undoubtedly derive great benefit’.1 Nicolai voiced some disagreement with Winckelmann’s remarks

1

Nicolai 1757: 332. Although Rehm (I 555) proposes Hagedorn as the review’s author, the signature initial ‘N’ suggests otherwise.

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on allegory and mildly criticized the ‘minor grammatical infelicities’ of his German, but was overall complimentary. In peroration, he went so far as to apply Winckelmann’s ‘distinguishing characteristics of Greek masterpieces’ to the evaluation of his own work: If we were to pronounce a general judgement upon this work, we would compare it to Raphael’s Madonna.—One must not seek within it the trivial refinements of a work that aims at amusement, just as in Raphael one should not seek the ivory skin tones of a van der Werf. Everyone can see the minor faults, but the greatest beauties do not meet the eye immediately; nevertheless they gradually and continually increase, like calm grandeur in the artist’s masterpieces. One can never visit this work without discovering new beauties and without learning something from them.

By his adoption of Winckelmann’s own art-critical register and his programmatic opposition of Raphael and Adriaen van der Werff, Nicolai appeared to endorse Winckelmann’s call for a renewal of ideal art. The close of his review suggested that the German reading public was hungry to hear more from this new voice: We stated above that the fine arts would receive great benefits from Herr Winckelmann’s voyage to Italy; we cannot therefore omit repeating a passage from one of his letters, dated from Rome on 1 June last year, which a willing hand has shared with us and which tends to confirm this pleasant hope. He writes: ‘I came to Rome only to see; but I have found so many hitherto unknown treasures, such errors in all those books that have attempted to treat beauty in the works of the ancients, that I must use the opportunity before me. I have made plans for various writings, in particular for a work on the taste of the Greek artists. This undertaking shall remain my chief work.’ All connoisseurs and lovers of the fine arts will await the fulfilment of this glorious project with the greatest impatience, and how glorious it will be for our fatherland, that one of its sons will be the first to shine a new light upon those arts which, only a short time ago, appeared to belong only to our neighbours.2

Winckelmann was far from deaf to such exhortations. In addition to a letter in which he described new works being painted and ancient ones excavated at Rome, the very next issue of BSW carried what amounts almost to an advertisement for the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums:

2

Nicolai 1757: 346–7.

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This worthy scholar’s Essay in the History of Art is almost finished, and will occupy approximately an alphabet.3 So far as is possible, however, he wishes to provide a complete work, and thus to see Naples and Florence [before publication]. He intends to visit these cities in October of this year. This work does not contain biographies of ancient artists, nor lists of their works taken from the ancient writers; for the author presupposes all this and it can be sought elsewhere. Its most important object is the style of the ancient artists: the difference and the distinguishing characteristics of the Egyptian, Etruscan, ancient, high and beautiful Greek styles. For the Roman style in antiquity is but a dream. It has two parts. The first treats of the style of the artists, especially of sculptors, and of the alternations which art has received by itself (welche die Kunst durch sich selbst gehabt). The second discusses the alterations and fate of art in relation to the circumstances of Greece. The author is treading a path which, until now, not even the most expert antiquarians in Rome have attempted. How many contradictions will he not expose! . . . He will, moreover, demonstrate that many objects commonly taken for beautiful are not so, and that various engraved gems which have been accounted antiques should be considered modern copies. Some passages of the ancients which have not formerly been understood will be emended and explicated with the aid of ancient manuscripts. In the second part, he tries so far as is possible to indicate the age of the best statues, and at the appropriate point he includes a description of each. He ends with Constantine.4

The Geschichte would take another six years to appear, and would run to almost twice the length envisaged here. In the intervening years, Winckelmann would produce a string of publications in French and in German that would cement his position as a leading authority on ancient art. These works were often undertaken for adventitious reasons, and were quite different in form from each other and from the Geschichte. Composed contemporaneously with it, they bear examination both as important parts of the ‘prehistory’ of Winckelmann’s Hauptwerk, and as works that played a crucial role in conditioning the expectations of its early receivers. These works are also important because they draw our attention to an important feature of Winckelmann’s writings, which is also crucial to understanding the Geschichte: his continued engagement with 3 ‘Ein Alphabet’ was a printer’s term, denoting twenty-three sheets or 184 pages in quarto. 4 BSW II.1 (1757) 225–7; see Rehm I 183.

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seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses of connoisseurship. Chapter 2 has shown that Winckelmann’s arguments in the Gedancken were deeply inflected by prior traditions of French and Italian art theory; some twenty-first-century readers may, however, be troubled by the claim that these traditions continued to shape Winckelmann’s understanding of ancient art once he had moved to Rome and was enjoying daily opportunities for autopsy of ancient works of art. Winckelmann is traditionally hailed as the originator of a wholly new, empirically and historically based approach to art, founded upon close observation of ancient monuments; moreover, it is not uncommon nowadays for students of material antiquity to draw a sharp contrast between a ‘connoisseurial’ approach and a properly historical or contextual understanding of ancient objects. For such scholars, demonstration of the importance of connoisseurship to Winckelmann’s working methods may temper his claims to originality or historicity, and be enough to render them suspect.5 A sharp opposition between historical and aesthetic appreciation was, however, foreign to the early eighteenth century, when antiquities often sat side by side with ‘modern’ works, and indeed with objects from the natural world, in the cabinets of the virtuosi or curieux.6 Winckelmann’s well-known criticisms of senior ‘Alterthumsverständige’ in the Geschichte’s Preface bring together connoisseurs and antiquarians indiscriminately; some of his most influential contemporaries, such as Count Caylus (see below), pursued an intellectual career that spanned both. The activities were also linked in the caricatures of their practitioners produced by hostile commentators. Affectation, a pedantic tendency to dwell upon minor details, and wayward or excessive desires were characteristics associated with both the connoisseur and the antiquarian, a set of idiosyncrasies neatly expressed in the image of the finely dressed monkey with a magnifying glass, which recurs in satires upon both.7 In the decade before Winckelmann left for Rome, a small group of amateurs had begun to apply ideas and methods of modern connoisseurship to the analysis of works of ancient art. Winckelmann

5 6 7

See e.g. Spivey 1996: 14–15; Chippindale et al. 2001. For a stimulating overall discussion see Pomian 1990. Ibid. 172–3; Mount 2006: 171–3.

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was aware of the major recent antiquarian publications by AnneClaude Philippe de Tubières, comte de Caylus, and his friend and collaborator Pierre-Jean Mariette, which used comparative stylistic judgement to attribute ancient objects to periods and places and to illuminate the ‘origin’ and ‘progress’ of the arts.8 Winckelmann appears to have been wholly unsympathetic to the strenuous attacks upon the cherished notions and practices of connoisseurs that, by the 1750s, were issuing from the circle of artists, critics, and philosophers around Diderot and d’Alembert.9 It is no accident that Caylus formed a target for Diderot’s cruel wit, for from 1731 onwards he had used his position as ‘Honorary Amateur’ of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture to uphold the status of the amateur as one qualified to advise and judge painters by virtue of his superior, objective, and theoretically and historically informed knowledge of the essentials of art. The dignity that Caylus, and before him de Piles, had claimed for ‘connoissance’ was bound to appeal to Winckelmann, who was financially reliant upon offering such services to Grand Tourists during his early years at Rome.10 It was, moreover, connoisseurship’s insistence upon the authority of the eye—the possibility of determining not only the quality of a painting but the identity of its master and whether it is an original or a copy on the basis of visual analysis—that was to ground Winckelmann’s own ambitious erection of an entire historical scheme upon the distinction between visual styles of ancient art. This chapter traces the development of Winckelmann’s ideas in this area through the cluster of writings published between the Gedancken and the Geschichte: a group I shall refer to as his ‘early Roman writings’.

8 Mariette 1750; Caylus 1752–67; for a discussion of the importance and innovative character of their approach and its relevance to Winckelmann, see Potts 1978: 53–74. On Caylus see further Fumaroli 2007; Schnapp 1996: 138–42; Aghion 2002. A monograph on Caylus by Fumaroli is in preparation. 9 Saisselin 1964; Seznec 1957: 80; Pomian 1990: 53–60. The only references to d’Alembert in Winckelmann’s correspondence are scathing, and I have found no reference to Diderot anywhere in his correspondence or published works. See in particular Rehm I 593: 344 (to Usteri, 14 Sept. 1763), where he gives his scathing (and misinformed) verdict on the article ‘beau’ from the Encyclopédie: ‘er ist von Herzen schlecht, und dieser ist von dem großen Dalembert.’ 10 See e.g. Caylus 1910: a discours on the role of the amateur delivered before the Academy on 7 September 1748.

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Some of Winckelmann’s earliest publications from Rome also appeared in BSW. Its fifth volume, which arrived on the shelves in the second half of 1759, carried as its first four articles four essays by Winckelmann. These had been solicited by Christian Felix Weisse, who had taken over BSW’s editorship from Nicolai at the beginning of the year. Weisse’s earliest letter to Winckelmann survives, and reveals that the connection was facilitated by Hagedorn, who had also, some eighteen months earlier, shared Winckelmann’s plans for a history of art with Nicolai. Although BSW and other journals had already carried extracts from Winckelmann’s correspondence, this appears to have been the first time that Winckelmann sent contributions directly to a German periodical.11 To the ever financially conscious Winckelmann, Weisse’s offer to pay an honorarium of one gold louis was probably as much of an inducement as his flattering words.12 Weisse had requested ‘some essays, treatises, or remarks . . . on the subject of antiquities and works of art’.13 What he received was rather a mixed bag, comprising the ‘Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst’, ‘Von der Grazie in Werken der Kunst’, ‘Nachrichten von dem berühmten Stoßischen Museo in Florenz’, and ‘Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom’. These pieces had received their final form in Florence, where Winckelmann was residing between September 1758 and April 1759 in order to catalogue the gem collection of the recently deceased Philipp von Stosch. With the obvious exception of the ‘Nachrichten’, however, they have a

11 Rehm I 183 (Hagedorn to Nicolai, 6 Sept. 1757); IV 46 (Weisse to Winckelmann, 27 Feb. 1757). 12 In addition to the four pieces discussed below, Winckelmann also sent BSW a short set of ‘Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der alten Tempel zu Girgenti in Sicilien’ (‘Remarks on the Architecture of the Ancient Temples at Girgenti in Sicily’). Winckelmann may have sent this contribution a month or so later than his other pieces (see Rehm’s commentary at KS 411–12, 429); in any case, their publication on pp. 223–42 of the volume did not accord them the same prominence of his other four contributions. For reasons of space, and since Winckelmann’s writings on architecture were not as influential for Altertumswissenschaft as his writings on sculpture and painting, I have not included consideration of them in this study. Interested readers are advised to start with the recent critical edition of Winckelmann’s architectural writings edited by Adolf Borbein and Max Kunze (Winckelmann 2001). 13 Rehm IV 46: 78.

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longer history in Winckelmann’s work. The ‘Erinnerung’, ‘Von der Grazie’, and the Torso description all derive from the somewhat inchoate plans for a work on taste that Winckelmann had talked about during his first year in Rome.14 The conclusion to the ‘Erinnerung’ indicates its target readership: those ‘young travellers’ whom Winckelmann had seen being conducted around the ancient monuments in Rome by ‘blind guides’, and who therefore stood in need of more adequate instruction in how to appreciate the masterpieces of ancient art.15 For this reason it seems appropriate to introduce these pieces under the heading ‘instructions for the connoisseur’, the title chosen by Johann Heinrich Füssli for his free English translation.16 It seems that Winckelmann found a model for this essay in the writings of Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1665–1745), the English portraitist and collector who is often credited with being the first to produce a systematic treatise on the practice of connoisseurship.17 Carol Gibson-Wood, author of the most extensive study of Richardson to date, has portrayed him as offering a distinctive laicization and ‘Englishing’ of high continental art theory.18 In his Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715, 2nd edn. 1725), and especially in his Two Discourses (1719, comprising ‘An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting’ and ‘An Argument on behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur’), Richardson refocused French Academic doctrines through the lens of Lockean philosophy, aiming explicitly at the ‘publick’ of connoisseurs and collectors that formed the burgeoning London art market. For Winckelmann, who read him in the French translation of 1728, Richardson’s idiosyncratic originality was perhaps less striking than the comprehensive guidelines he provided on how to go about judging art. Richardson expanded the slender remarks on the art of ‘connoissance’ contained in de Piles and earlier writers into a comprehensive discussion of the capacities

14 Rehm I 124: 197 (Winckelmann to Bianconi, 18 Jan. 1756); I 150: 232 (Winckelmann to Bünau, 7 July 1756). For discussion, see Pretzler 2007: 122–5; Harloe 2010. 15 KS 156; see too his comments in ‘Von der Grazie’ (KS 162). In both places Winckelmann says that he intends to produce a fuller work on the subject: an object fulfilled by the Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und in dem Unterrichte in derselben, written after the Geschichte but published before it in 1763. 16 Winckelmann 1765. 17 See e.g. Stanley Price, Talley, and Melucco Vaccaro 1996: 29. 18 Gibson-Wood 2000; see too Gibson-Wood 1984.

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that were traditionally held to distinguish the connoisseur: the ability to distinguish the good and bad qualities of a painting, to identify the hand of its author, and to decide whether it is an original or a copy. Together with his Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy (1722, completed in collaboration with his son), Richardson furnished the aspiring amateur with a comprehensive manual for the evaluation of works of art. In the Preface to the Geschichte, Winckelmann accords Richardson somewhat grudging praise.19 In reality, he had been a diligent student of Richardson since his Nöthnitz days. One of his earliest attempts at art criticism, a description of ‘the most outstanding paintings in the Dresden Gallery’ (probably written in 1752), includes critical comments on Richardson’s discussion of a painting by Correggio; Richardson is also cited approvingly (though for somewhat different reasons in each case) in both the Sendschreiben and Erläuterung von den Gedancken.20 Comments in Winckelmann’s letters suggest that during his early years in Rome he worked with Richardson almost constantly in mind: One could write so much: but one needs more time and opportunity than I have . . . The restorations that have been made to statues are the cause of countless errors on the part of travellers and other writers. I am collecting material on this . . . Richardson ought to have stayed longer in Rome and associated more with the artists here. I have given first shape to my first work in Rome, ‘On additions to antique statues’, and I hope that one may find a very great deal in it that has not already been said. Now I am beginning to turn to a greater work: ‘On the taste of Greek artists’. Apart from these I am thinking of a description of the galleries in Rome and Italy after the manner of Richardson, who only passed through Rome. If I only had the wings of an eagle, to visit you for a few months! How much I would tell you, how much you should hear—matters contained in no books, and of which even Richardson was ignorant. He is still the best of the bunch, but a great sinner. I am venturing to make new investigations and observations on the monuments of antiquity, beginning with a treatise on the restoration of statues and bas-reliefs. This work pertains both to antiquarian studies (la Savente Antiquité) and to Art in particular. It contains certain rules for distinguishing a 19

Winckelmann 2006: 73.

20

KS 1, 76, 99.

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restoration from an original, a forgery from a true work . . . The proper name and attributes of each statue are identified and the antiquarians refuted, among them Montfaucon, Richardson, etc.21

The Account made Richardson a model for emulation by anyone proposing to write on the antiquities in Rome, but the BSW essays suggest that Winckelmann saw him as more than a mere source of information on individual monuments. Richardson had suggested that his writings formed a system: the Theory of Painting gave an exposition of ‘the Principles of the Art’ of painting, and the Art of Criticism and the Account a demonstration of their application in judgement, both in general and with reference to specific examples.22 Winckelmann’s ‘Erinnerung’ relates to the Gedancken much as Richardson’s Art of Criticism does to his Theory of Painting. In each case, the earlier work discusses the ideal qualities of art in general terms, while the second gives more explicit advice about how to go about detecting and discoursing upon these qualities in any given work. Richardson’s discussion is, admittedly, far more detailed than Winckelmann’s, and his list of the features to which the connoisseur must pay attention far fuller. Richardson’s system of judgement, worked out over some 220 pages of the Art of Criticism with reference to his Theory of Painting, encompasses remarks on a painting’s subject, expression, light and shade, drawing, colour, lightness and accuracy of hand, and ‘grace and greatness’.23 Winckelmann’s system is far simpler, recalling the Gedancken in its threefold emphasis on ‘Nachahmung’ (‘imitation’), ‘Schönheit’ (‘beauty’), and ‘Ausarbeitung’ (‘execution’). The result is essentially a repetition and reinforcement of the views on the ideality of Greek art set out in the Gedancken. Yet the ‘Erinnerung’ also shows Winckelmann operating with an enlarged understanding of the goals and power of connoisseurship which must derive from his reading of Richardson. This is particularly apparent in those sections of the essay where Winckelmann appeals to visual details in order to determine the relative antiquity of sculptures. Although the Gedancken had contained scattered 21

Rehm I 138: 217 (to Hagedorn, 3 Apr. 1756); I 150: 232–3 (to Bünau, 7 July 1756); I 152: 236 (to Francke, probably 7 July 1756); I 157: 242 (to Bianconi, 29 Aug. 1756). 22 Richardson and Richardson 1722, Preface (unnumbered part). 23 Richardson 1719: 26.

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observations on the signs which distinguish ancient from modern works, these had not been presented as clues that might help an observer to solve a problem of dating.24 In numerous passages of the ‘Erinnerung’ this possibility is foregrounded, not least in Winckelmann’s emphasis (to be repeated in the Geschichte) on the idealized Greek profile: ‘the line that slopes softly from the brow to the nose (der sanft gesenkten Linie von der Stirn bis auf der Nase)’: The best ancient artists have kept the part upon which the eyebrows rest sharply incised, and both in the period of the arts’ decline in antiquity and in their degeneration in more recent times, this part became rounded and blunt, and the chin altogether too small. From the bluntness of the eye-sockets, among other details, one can decide that the renowned and falsely so-called Antinous in the Belvedere cannot come from this highest period of art; just so little can the [Medici] Venus.25

As well as presenting study of the antique as a means of learning to recognize beauty, the ‘Erinnerung’ here presents observation of beauty as a means of distinguishing the antique in art. It also differentiates between the best (‘highest’) period of ancient art and a later period of ‘decline’, assigning works to each on the basis of their visual qualities. Such passages represent a new departure for Winckelmann and are likely the fruit of his attempts to practise connoisseurship on the ground, Richardson in hand.

‘VON DER GRAZIE’ The project of defining and elucidating the distinctive visual characteristics of Greek art also helps to explain why Winckelmann’s early Roman writings include an essay devoted to ‘grace’. His turn to the topic should be seen as part of his effort to discover stylistic indicators that do not rely upon technical skill. The opening of the ‘Erinnerung’ is unequivocal on this point: ‘No characteristics in which technical proficiency alone plays a role are sufficient for recognition or for distinguishing the old and the new.’ Rather than marvelling at the 24 See e.g. KS 36, where Winckelmann offers up the portrayal of wrinkles and creases as a ‘Kennzeichen’ to distinguish ancient from modern statues. 25 KS 153. Winckelmann had earlier suggested that the dimples in the Medici Venus’s chin revealed her to have been copied from nature, rather than idealized.

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naturalism of a still life or the finish of a statue of Bernini, Winckelmann directed the connoisseur to ‘pay attention to whether the artist of the work you are considering has thought for himself or imitated, whether he is acquainted with the noblest end of art, beauty, or whether he has shaped it according to forms with which he is familiar, and whether he has worked like a man or played like a child’.26 ‘Von der Grazie’ extends these reflections by giving a special prominence to the question of whether a particular work manifests grace. ‘Grace’ is an aesthetic and critical concept with a history that stretches back to antiquity, and was frequently discussed in early modern treatises on the art of painting.27 It had been treated in different ways by art theorists before Winckelmann. De Piles’s rather summary discussion reflected his position that grace was an innate, indefinable quality insensible to rational explication or rules: A painter only possesses grace by nature, he knows neither whether it exists in him nor the degree to which he possesses it, nor how he communicates it in his works; it takes the spectator by surprise, as he feels its effect without being able to discover the true cause; but this grace only touches his heart in proportion to the disposition [towards sensing grace] that it encounters. One may define it as follows: what pleases, and what wins over the heart without passing through the understanding (Ce qui plaît, & ce qui gagne le coeur sans passer par l’esprit).28

For Richardson, who devotes some fifty pages of the second edition of the Essay on the Theory of Painting to ‘Grace and Greatness’, this quality is closely connected to that nobility of conception famously associated by (pseudo-) Longinus with ‘the sublime’.29 Unlike de Piles, Richardson does venture to lay down ‘Rules’ for obtaining grace in representation. His principal recommendation to the painter who seeks to attain this excellence is, nevertheless, that he ‘Fill and Supply his Mind with Noble Images’, be they from books or ‘the Works of the best Master[s] in Painting, and Sculpture’.30 Both critics held that grace was required in addition to competence in those ‘parts’ of painting that could be taught (invention, expression,

26

27 28 KS 149. See Monk 1944. De Piles 1715: 10, see too 64–5. Richardson 1725: 172; see too Richardson 1719: 30; with Gibson-Wood 2000: 174–8. 30 Richardson 1725: 201–2. 29

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composition, drawing, and colouring) in order for a painter to produce works which approached perfection. Comments Winckelmann makes in the ‘Erinnerung’ are occasionally reminiscent of de Piles. His claim that, ‘In terms of execution, the hand of the artist reveals itself in its freedom and sureness of hand’, points to the kind of ease in execution, unobtainable by study, which was a staple of discussions of grace in both the ancient and early modern traditions.31 Yet, the opening statement in ‘Von der Grazie’, that ‘Grace is what is rationally pleasing’, indicates the distance that separates him from the French author. While agreeing that the capacity for grace is innate (‘a gift from heaven’), Winckelmann holds that it can, and indeed must, be perfected through ‘education and rational reflection’.32 All of this bears a greater resemblance to Richardson than it does to de Piles, but there are other areas in which Winckelmann carries his arguments further than his English predecessor. Although he was somewhat equivocal on the topic, Richardson had suggested that grace and greatness could be imparted even to a ‘Low Subject’, such as a landscape, still life, or even insect drawing.33 By contrast, Winckelmann states that ‘Grace in works of art pertains only to the human figure’.34 Winckelmann also exceeds Richardson in the absolutism of his judgements about the superiority of ancient art. Richardson had assented to the general consensus ‘That the Greeks have had a Beauty, and Majesty in their Sculpture, and Painting beyond any other Nation’, but had merely awarded them first prize in a contest between a number of peoples, amongst whom the Romans, the Italians, and (in anticipation) the English were also capable of achieving heights of grace. For Winckelmann, the traditional preference for Greek sculpture is sharpened to an absolute: If one were to set out to speak of the history of grace since the restoration of art, one would find rather its opposite. In sculpture, the imitation of one great man, Michelangelo, has distanced artists from antiquity and from knowledge of grace. His haughty understanding and his great expertise would not be confined to imitation of the ancients, and his imagination was too fiery for delicate sentiments and for lovely grace.35

31

32 33 KS 155. KS 157. Richardson 1725: 171–2, 192. KS 158. This appears to be contradicted by the famous passage from the Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen quoted at the end of this chapter. 35 KS 161. 34

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Winckelmann traces a decline in Italian sculpture through della Porta, Bologna, Algardi, and Fiammingo, until it reaches its nadir with Bernini. Where Richardson had closed his discussion of grace and greatness with the hope that English art might one day exceed that of the ancients in regard to these qualities, Winckelmann presents grace as a temporally bound category: a ‘Kennzeichen’ of Greek art, to be sure, but one that is all but absent from the modern world.

THE ‘NACHRICHTEN’ AND THE DESCRIPTION DES PIERRES GRAVÉES Alex Potts has suggested that Winckelmann’s focus upon the profile, and in particular the eyebrow line, for the stylistic discriminations made in the Geschichte is partly a function of the visual material upon which he drew.36 Deprived—by his own admission—of all but a very few monumental statues in the high style, Winckelmann was forced to derive his ‘Kennzeichen’ of classical Greek art from other sources. Pre-eminent among these were coins, medals, and engraved gems. Winckelmann’s reliance upon this material is already evident in the ‘Erinnerung’, where idealized profiles on coins from the ‘free states’ of Greece provide the main evidence for his statement that: ‘The Greeks seem to have cast forth small-scale beauties just as [easily as] a pot is turned.’37 Coins, medals, and gems were equally important to the Geschichte, and they form the subjects of a full half of that work’s engraved headpieces and tailpieces. The study of gems was yet another area of eighteenth-century intellectual life in which the activities of the antiquarian and the connoisseur met. As beautiful, highly worked objects in costly materials, gems were coveted collectibles that held a cherished place in the cabinets of those who could afford to purchase them.38 As offering visual representations of the myths, history, and customs of the Greeks and Romans, and as examples of ancient craftsmanship, they were also of interest to antiquarians. This dual appeal of gems within the worlds of art and erudition is evident in Johann Friedrich Christ’s disquisition on the utility and pleasures of their study, published in 36

Potts 1994: 84–9.

37

KS 153.

38

Zazoff and Zazoff 1983.

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1755 as the preface to Lippert’s Dactyliotheca universalis. Christ, who in the 1750s was one of the most knowledgeable students of antiquities in the German lands, emphasized the overall importance of visual sources as a form of evidence ‘often scarcely less useful than the most outstanding literary monuments, and sometimes even more certain’.39 Christ’s emphasis on the superior reliability of material over literary sources is a reflex of seventeenth-century Pyrrhonist debates, but leaves no doubt that gems are important to the historian as well as the curieux. The fineness and elegance of their depictions, and the fact that large numbers had survived intact into the present, increased their potential as a rich archive for those ‘who, with little or only moderate capability in Latin, nonetheless seek to gain knowledge from these monuments of the affairs of the Greeks and the ancient Romans or the wonders of their arts’.40 Those who could not obtain access to the cabinets of the great and good had to content themselves with the study of gems in reproductions. These varied in kind and quality. Gems were published in printed books of various sorts: in lavishly illustrated selections from the cabinets of famous collectors; as one form of evidence among others illustrated and interpreted by antiquarians such as Bernard de Montfaucon, Antonio Gori, or Paolo Alessandro Maffei; or in the summary descriptions provided in sale catalogues, when a collector’s cabinet was broken up because of debts or death.41 Mariette’s Traité des pierres gravées (2 vols., 1750) is a fine example of a work that united antiquarian and aesthetic interests, for it combined elegant engravings and descriptions of the most outstanding gems in King Louis XV’s cabinet with a series of erudite discourses: on the origins and progress of gem-carving among the ancients and the foremost such craftsmen among the moderns, the various materials used by the ancients for carving gems, and the techniques of their production and reproduction. Rightly seen as a landmark in glyptic studies, Mariette’s treatise also shows the potential pitfalls of studying gems via the medium of print. In the introduction to Volume II, he warns that one of his collaborators, the noted sculptor Edmé Bouchardon, was so perfectly susceptible to ‘the striking beauties (les beautés piquantes) of the engravings of ancient Greece’ that certain pieces, ‘strong in invention but weak in execution, have I dare say occasionally improved somewhat under his hands’.42 39 41

40 Christ 1755: x–xi. Ibid. xvii. 42 Zazoff 1981; Stante 2006. Mariette 1750: II xi.

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Winckelmann was involved in another important project of the 1750s which aimed to present gems to a wider audience. This was the aforementioned Dactyliotheca universalis of the Saxon artist and craftsman Philipp Daniel Lippert: an attempt to produce a universal library of impressions taken from gems in the most important European collections.43 Winckelmann was one of many European correspondents who helped Lippert by sending him casts of the finest gems encountered during their travels, and Lippert boasted that his dactyliotheca contained representations more precise than any printed work. Accuracy was clearly a desideratum for antiquarians who sought to reconstruct ancient cults and social practices in detail; but in the German edition of 1767, Lippert explicitly designated his work ‘for the use of the fine arts and of artists’.44 His work is another sign of the burgeoning interest in glyptics in Winckelmann’s day, and also reflects a set of growing concerns about authenticity and reproduction which could only be addressed through connoisseurship. Winckelmann’s own contribution to this field was his catalogue raisonné of more than three-and-a-half thousand intaglio gems collected by Baron Philipp von Stosch: a noted collector of Prussian birth, who by the time of his death in 1757 had spent almost four decades in Rome and Florence as an agent of the Dutch and English crowns. Stosch had first become interested in antiquities as a young man; like Sir William Hamilton in the second half of the century, his diplomatic duties in Italy enabled him to cultivate the passions of a curieux. Several decades earlier he had himself made an important contribution to glyptics in the form of his Gemmae antiquae caelatae scalptorum nominibus insignitae / Pierres antiques gravées, sur lesquelles les graveurs ont mis leurs noms (Amsterdam 1724): a publication of seventy gems inspired by debates in the French Académie des inscriptions about the class of ancient gems that bear the name ‘Solon’.45 From summer 1756 onwards Winckelmann and Stosch engaged in a mutually congenial commerce de lettres; an open invitation to Winckelmann to visit Florence had also existed from that date and was renewed after the Baron’s death by his nephew and heir, Wilhelm Muzell-Stosch. Despite the attraction of free board and 43 Lippert 1755, 1767; see Graepler 2010: 438–40; Zazoff and Zazoff 1983: 153–61; Kerschner 2006. 44 Lippert 1767: vii–xviii. 45 Stante 2006: 112–14; Zazoff 1981: 367–9.

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lodging, as well as the opportunity that Florence promised for extending his knowledge of ancient and modern art, Winckelmann put off the opportunity until after his first visit to Herculaneum. That he should be the one to catalogue the collection had—so he proudly informed his friends—been the Baron’s dying wish.46 The Description des pierres gravées du feu baron de Stosch was published in Florence in spring 1760. Winckelmann was aided in its composition by Joannon de St Laurent, an old friend of the Baron and a member of the Società Colombaria, the Florentine academy of arts and letters. Remarks made in both the ‘Nachrichten’ and the Description’s Preface indicate that the work was undertaken in something of a hurry: the sudden death of Cardinal Archinto in 1758, together with the rapidly waning fortunes of Cardinal Passionei, had deprived Winckelmann of two of his most important Roman protectors, and by November 1758 he had decided to take up an offer of employment from Cardinal Albani.47 Rather than producing the ‘fundamental description’ originally requested by Stosch’s heir, Winckelmann attempted only ‘a description of those ancient gems that are the most important, the hardest to elucidate, and the most beautiful’, and organized his discussion according to the thematic ordering favoured by their late owner.48 The Description nonetheless shows Winckelmann beginning to test his new theories about the distinction between earlier and later styles of ancient art on an extended corpus of classical material. These themes are more immediately evident in the ‘Nachrichten’ than in the Description itself, where the relatively small number of works Winckelmann discusses in stylistic terms are swamped amid the hundreds that receive some form of learned, iconographic discussion.49 In the ‘Nachrichten’, the links between the Description and his other major work in preparation are made explicit:

46

Rehm I 421: 243 (Winckelmann to Francke, 30 Sept. 1758). Rehm I 253 (Winckelmann to Hagedorn, 16 Nov. 1758); see Leppmann 1971: 201–3. 48 KS 163–4; Winckelmann 1760: i–ii. 49 Zazoff and Zazoff (1983: 84) state that Winckelmann includes comments on dating and stylistic attribution for some seventy to eighty of the 2,733 gems discussed in the first four classes. They aptly characterize these parts of the Description as ‘nicht nur ein Gemmenkatalog, sondern zugleich eine Art Enzyklopädie der griechischrömischen Mythologie und Geschichte an Hand einer riesigen Gemmensammlung’. My discussion below is indebted to their detailed and stimulating analysis. 47

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In this work I have proceeded as in my Essay on the History of Art in Antiquity; I have avoided saying what has already been said; if what a particular stone depicts is already known it is merely listed; but if its value consists more in its art, I have attempted to elucidate it in such a way that the reader may derive instruction or pleasure [from my description] even without seeing the stone or a cast of it.50

The emphasis here is twofold: on providing new iconographic interpretations, and on advancing knowledge of ‘art’, which is specified further in the Description’s Preface as a form of knowledge consisting ‘principally in the difference in manner of the various nations and epochs, and in the perception (sentiment) of the beautiful’.51 In Winckelmann’s comments on these topics, scattered as they are throughout the Description, one can indeed see the outlines of the view of art’s rise, progress, and decline presented in a more systematic manner in the Geschichte. As examples of Winckelmann’s approach, let us consider the two gems advertised in the ‘Nachrichten’ as ‘die seltensten’ in the collection.52 Both are illustrated in the Description, and Winckelmann returns to them again in the Geschichte, where they also form the subjects of two of its twenty-four engravings.53 The reason for his repeated return to the pair is, as he explains in the Description, that together they encompass ‘the entire system of the Etruscans’ art’.54 For Winckelmann, the Tydeus gem furnishes an example of the highest point of perfection that was attained by Etruscan art. Its still more famous partner, the Stosch gem, is the oldest extant work of Etruscan art, and indeed a candidate for the oldest surviving masterpiece of all art.55 The Stosch gem (AGD II, no. 237) or, as Winckelmann called it, the ‘Five Heroes before Thebes’, was well known in eighteenth-century antiquarian literature, as a controversy had arisen over whether the

50

51 52 KS 164. Winckelmann 1760: ix. KS 164. Namely, the title vignette, and the tailpiece to part 1, chapter 3, section 2 on Etruscan art (Winckelmann 1764: 114). Interestingly, when Winckelmann comes to describe these gems in the Geschichte he states that the Tydeus gem ‘is illustrated at the start of the second part of this study’ (ibid. 167–8). This not the case, but the placement may have been what Winckelmann originally intended, and would certainly have underlined these two gems’ programmatic significance within Winckelmann’s system. 54 Winckelmann 1760: 345–6. 55 Ibid. 347, 348; see too Winckelmann 2006: 167–8. 53

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Figure 2. The Stosch gem, or the ‘Five heroes before Thebes’. Heidelberg University Library, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, III.

letter-forms of its inscription were Pelasgian or Etruscan. In the Description, Winckelmann notes that Gori, Antonelli, and Stosch himself had already published the stone before him, but refrains from intervening in this long-running antiquarian debate. He also dispenses with any discussion of its iconography, ‘because the expedition of the Seven against Thebes is sufficiently well known’. Instead, he announces that he will treat ‘what concerns the design (déssein) and the art that one may observe in this engraving’.56 Because of its importance to Winckelmann’s construction of the history of ancient artistic style, his description of the gem merits quoting at length: In the ‘Five Heroes’, one can see the design of artists from a century when beauty had not yet become the principal object of art, any more than it was among the Greeks at the time of the first medals of Syracuse, Messina, Croton, Athens, and other free states, which went on to mark themselves

Winckelmann 1760: 345, 347. Winckelmann uses the French term ‘déssein’ in the technical, art-theoretic sense of ‘disegno’. 56

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out by inimitable features. We are licensed in this judgement by the attitude of the heads, which is very uniform and lacks character. Likewise, the proportions of the human figure were not yet established according to the canons of beautiful nature: one can see that the heads of our heroes are certainly larger than a seventh part of the whole figure. This was also the period when architecture had none of that elegant proportion in columns which forms its beauty, as is shown by the Temples of Attica which Mr le Roy has sketched for us in his Monuments of Greece. Finally, there was no idea of beautiful variety in composition: Tydeus and Polynices are placed next to each other in the same attitude, and the latter when compared with Amphiaraus sits just as he does, without any variation in their disposition. The folds of Parthenopaeus’ and Polynices’ drapery all run in parallel along the same line: a sure characteristic of the most ancient style. The artists of this primitive age of art nevertheless knew the material aspects of the human figure very well, and they knew at least how to shape those parts of it in which the imagination plays no role. The feet are elegant in shape; despite the smallness of the figures the heel is demarcated without hardness and with grace; one can see Polynices’ arms right to the veins. Amphiaraus’ chest is raised, just as one can see in statues of the most beautiful style. The high finish of this engraving is proof in itself that skill in the mechanical aspects of art advanced before beauty in design was achieved— an observation one can also make in the case of works of painters before Raphael: their paintings are highly finished.57

The parallel Winckelmann draws between the style of this gem and that of Renaissance art before Raphael shows that he is still working within the framework provided by early modern art criticism. The categories of his description are the same as in his earlier works: as if describing a painting, Winckelmann focuses on the artist’s conception or ‘design’, his handling of composition (the proportions and arrangements of the figures), and the variety or monotony of the whole. Nevertheless, his diagnosis of the artist’s as-yet-imperfect understanding of the rules of beauty, which coexists nonetheless with some hints of grace, reveals his attempt to categorize this gem within a broader developmental scheme which encompasses Greek as well as Etruscan art. Finally, the artist’s prowess in execution is an indication that the ancients perfected the mechanical aspects of art before they attained the representation of ideal beauty. This provides confirmation of Winckelmann’s thesis that it is to this, and not to

57

Winckelmann 1760: 346–7.

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Figure 3. The ‘Tydeus’ gem. Heidelberg University Library, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 114.

technical skill, that one must look in order to arrive at a proper stylistic diagnosis.58 Winckelmann’s description of the ‘Tydeus’ gem (AGD II, no. 238) proceeds in a similar vein. In this case he pauses longer over the iconography, as he interprets the gem as representing an episode from the Theban legend that is less well known.59 Yet again, however, most of his description is orientated towards analysis of the gem’s ‘art’: If, as stated above, the engraving of the Five Heroes is the most ancient monument of art as a whole, this is certainly the most perfect of that of the ancient Etruscans: it is executed with a precision and a finesse that are in no

58 Zazoff and Zazoff 1983: 88: ‘Winckelmanns Beschreibung der “Fünf Helden” ist de facto eine Stilanalyse, eine klare Kennzeichnung von Merkmalen des Archaischen Stils (älteste Manier, erster Stil), die ihm weitere Zuschreibungen möglich und uns verständlich macht.’ 59 Winckelmann interprets it as a depiction of Tydeus wounded after escaping an ambush arranged against him by Eteocles. Zazoff suggests it is probably not Tydeus at all, but an athlete.

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way inferior to the most beautiful Greek engravings. Thus one may do more than conjecture about the condition of art during those times, indeed one may reach a decision about it by sure means, and by combining insights furnished by other Etruscan monuments one may use this figure of Tydeus to establish the character and the properties of Etruscan design. The general proportions of the human figure have by now been established according to canons of harmony formed by the study of beautiful nature, and the figure is finished and free (finie et dégagée) to the extent we find in the most beautiful Greek statues. The engraver’s profound anatomical knowledge is evident throughout: each part is in its proper place and is demarcated surely; and in truth the artist’s subject was appropriate to showing off the study he had made of nature. The sharp pains felt by Tydeus and the effort expended in pulling the spear-shaft from his leg required a violent attitude, and all the muscles are moving and tensed. And the skill of the artist extended just this far, yet did not proceed to achieve the beautiful ideal. Tydeus’ head, indeed, possesses neither nobility nor elevation, its idea is taken from common nature. Another defect: by dint of parading his knowledge it has become exaggerated and stiff: all the parts are over-emphasized, and although the pain by which Tydeus is afflicted calls for muscles in contraction, the bones are excessively demarcated and the joints too loose and forced. In order to give an idea of all this to those who do not have the opportunity to see the gem, nor even its impression, I would go so far as to compare the design of this figure to that of Michelangelo: the same stylistic relation obtains between this figure and those of the Greeks as between the design of Michelangelo and that of Raphael.60

It is clear that Winckelmann is again employing the techniques and categories of connoisseurship in order to insert this gem into a broader historical scheme. When compared to the figures on the Stosch gem, the Tydeus’ more graceful proportions and its greater naturalism show that art was advancing towards the peak that it would obtain in Greece. Yet the absence of idealization, and the excessive violence and hardness of contour, reveals that its Etruscan artist was incapable of achieving such heights: ‘The engraver’s design in this work should not be considered a characteristic unique to the particular artist: the stiffness of contour and the harshness throughout all the parts was the character of Etruscan art in general.’61 The Tydeus gem stands not just as an example of Etruscan

60

Winckelmann 1760: 348–9.

61

Ibid. 349.

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style, but for all that this people were capable of: a symbol of the overall position the Etruscans occupy in the history of art. In his fundamental discussion of the Description, Peter Zazoff notes that its initial reception was—to say the least—muted.62 He also warns that its achievement has frequently been misunderstood by modern scholars. Winckelmann was misled in his discussion of the style of the Stosch and Tydeus gems because he believed that those gems to which he was comparing them represented the classical Greek ideal of beauty in art; but most of the gems in Philipp von Stosch’s cabinet were, in fact, Roman. Winckelmann overlooked almost entirely the few genuine Greek gems that lay before him, and so—just as in his determination of the ‘Kennzeichen’ of classical Greek sculpture—the scarcity of genuine Greek material in the eighteenth-century archive led him into error.63 Rather than dismissing his work because of this failing, however, Zazoff concludes that Winckelmann deserves credit for posing a question (that of the distinction between Etruscan and Greek styles) that was ‘theoretically justified’ even if it was ‘de facto without application’. Moreover, Zazoff locates Winckelmann’s understanding of the ancient and high styles in ancestral relation to the influential stylistic schemata worked out after him by Heinrich Wölfflin and Kurt Bauch. He is correct to conclude that this, Winckelmann’s ‘first large-scale work’, must be seen as ‘a precursor to and preliminary study for the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums’.64

THE TORSO DESCRIPTION Although Winckelmann’s statue descriptions constitute some of the best-known parts of his writings, the independent publication of the Torso description in 1759 calls for comment. We are used to considering Winckelmann’s showpiece descriptions of monumental statues (such as the Niobe, Belvedere Apollo, Torso, Antinous, and 62 Zazoff and Zazoff 1983: 76–7. It was reviewed poorly by Johannes Lami in the Novelle letterarie, a Florentine periodical, and coolly by Mariette in Journal étranger. See Rehm II 375; Justi II 330. Nevertheless, Zazoff notes that Winckelmann’s election to the Etruscan Academy of Cortona, the Academy of St Luca, and the Society of Antiquaries followed on its publication. 63 Zazoff and Zazoff 1983: 91–2. 64 Ibid. 99.

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Laocoön) in the context of the Geschichte, where they punctuate Part II’s overarching narrative of the rise and decline of Greek art in relation to its ‘external circumstances’. To consider them exclusively in this regard, however, is to overlook their longer history independent of that work. The short introduction Winckelmann provided to the BSW Torso description presents it as a fragment from a larger work he had begun with Anton Raphael Mengs during his early months in Rome.65 This project—to produce extended descriptions of the principal statues of the Belvedere and to publish them with accompanying engravings—eventually foundered through lack of funds, but not until the descriptions themselves had reached a fairly advanced stage. Both the Torso and the Apollo were substantially complete by August 1757, when Winckelmann included drafts of the latter in letters to Wille and to Stosch.66 The extended description of individual works of art was a longestablished element of the art-theoretical tradition, and was necessitated by its didactic intent. While accounts of progress in the artistic techniques and the lives of artists could be sketched in general terms, appreciation of individual works demanded a different approach. For this, early modern theorists had recourse to the ancient rhetorical figure of ekphrasis: a form of descriptive speech characterized by its vividness (‘enargeia’) and its attempt to ‘bring what is to be shown before the eyes’.67 Antiquity provided models of such vivid descriptions of art in the works of Homer, Martial, Philostratus, and Lucian, to mention only the foremost examples. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Philostratus in particular was often taken as a model for the description of works of visual art.68 In her important 1960 study of the character and function of Vasari’s ekphrases, Svetlana Alpers argued that his descriptions conformed to ancient paradigms. Starting her discussion from ‘the astonishing fact that wherever one opens the Lives, whether at the beginning of [Vasari’s narrative of the progress in] art with Giotto or toward the end with Raphael, the descriptions are alike’, Alpers

See too the end of the ‘Nachrichten’ and Kunze 1998: 433–5. Rehm I 184, 185; see Zeller 1955: 31–5; Harloe 2007. 67 Webb 1999; Elsner 2002; Webb 2009; Alpers 1960: 196–201; Harloe 2007: 236–7. The discussion below modifies considerably the position on Winckelmann’s relation to Richardson taken in that article. 68 Alpers 1960: 198–200; Harloe 2007: 242–3. 65 66

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argued that Vasari concentrates exclusively on the narrative and psychological aspects of the paintings he describes: Vasari does not indicate the arrangement of the figures. His interest is specifically in the subject of the picture, which he attempts to make as real for the reader as it is for the viewer. In each case his major concern is psychological—the artist’s depiction of certain real emotions . . . accompanied by exclamations on the skilful imitation of certain physical or material details.

Vasari’s focus on ‘psychological’ and ‘narrative’ aspects means that even where he notes such details, his descriptions as a whole ‘are not concerned with the relative or individual technical merit of the painting’. The result is a series of descriptions that indicate nothing about the relative historical positions of their artists within Vasari’s understanding of the development of art, but which convey a vivid impression of their subject matter, and emotional and psychological expression.69 Richardson had recommended the composition of descriptions as a useful exercise for would-be connoisseurs, and included several examples in his Art of Criticism.70 Although some of these encompassed comments on the artist’s skill in ‘less considerable incidents’ such as composition, colouring, and drawing, he instructed his students to devote the greatest attention to ‘Thought’ and ‘Expression’: those parts of a painting in which its ‘Principal Beauties’ consist.71 Consequently Richardson’s ekphrases, like those of Vasari’s, tended to privilege these aspects of the work of art. Their inimitable register notwithstanding, the ekphrases of paintings and sculpture given in Winckelmann’s Dresden writings follow in this tradition.72 Below, Winckelmann’s description of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (in H. B. Nisbet’s translation) is juxtaposed with Richardson’s raptures over an (unidentified) composition by Annibale Carracci and Vasari’s description of Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno: Just look at the Madonna, a figure of more than female stature and with her face full of innocence, in a posture of blessed calm, and with that tranquillity which the ancients imparted to the statues of their deities! How grand and noble is her whole contour! The child in her arms is exalted above ordinary children by a face from which a ray of divinity seems to shine forth through 69 71

70 Alpers 1960: 191–2, 193–4. Richardson 1719: 57–97. 72 Ibid. 94. See Pfotenhauer 1995.

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the innocence of childhood. St Barbara kneels below her at her side in adoring tranquillity of spirit, but remains far beneath the majesty of the main figure. The great artist has compensated for her lower station by giving her features a gentle grace. The saint opposite her is a venerable old man, whose face seems to bear witness to his dedication to God since his youth. That reverence which St Barbara shows towards the Madonna, and which is given more tangible and affecting expression through the beautiful hands she clasps to her breast, is partly conveyed in the case of St Sixtus by the movement of one of his hands. This action expresses the ecstasy of the saint, which the artist, for greater variety, wisely tried to associate rather with male vigour than with female modesty. Time has admittedly removed much of the visual splendour of this painting, and the intensity of the colours has faded to some extent; but the soul which its creator breathed into his handiwork animates it to this day.73 The Subject of it is The Blessed Virgin as Protectress of Bologna; As appears by the Prospect of that City at the bottom of the Picture under the Clouds on which she is seated in Glory, encompass’d with Cherubims, Boy-Angels, and others as usually describ’d: But oh! the Sublimity of Expression! What Dignity, and Devotion appears in the Virgin! What Awful Regard! What Love! What Delight, and Complacency is in these Angelick Beings towards the Virgin-Mother of the Son of God! The Aspect of the Christ is proper to the Character he here sustains; He is now only to denote the Virgin, as St. Jerome’s Lyon, St. John’s Eagle, and the like. He is not here as the Second Person in the Adorable Trinity; The Virgin is the Only Principal Figure; This is as it were a Part of Her, Whose Character is Alone to be consider’d in This Case; And accordingly every thing contributes to raise It as much as possible; And That is done prodigiously. But as every thing else in the Picture is Address’d towards Her, She in the Humblest, and most Devout Manner lifts up her Eyes towards the Invisible, Supream Being, Directing our Thoughts thither also, with like Humble, Pious, and Devout Sentiments. If She to whom the Angels appear so vastly Inferiour is in His Presence but a poor Suppliant, What an Exalted Idea must this give us of Him!74 Next . . . he made a Madonna in the sky, with a most beautiful landscape, a S. John, a S. Francis, and a S. Jerome represented as a Cardinal; in which Madonna may be seen a humility and a modesty truly worthy of the Mother of Christ; and besides the beautiful gesture of the Child as He plays with His Mother’s hand, there is revealed in S. John that penitential air which fasting

73

Nisbet 1985: 44–5. Richardson 1719: 95–7. Although unidentifiable, the picture Richardson describes resembles the engravings of the Madonna and Child on the Clouds attributed to Agostino and Annibale Carracci (Bartsch 1920–22: Agostino 33, 36; Annibale 10; DeGrazia Bohlin 1979: Agostino 99, Annibale 3). 74

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generally gives, while his head displays the sincerity of soul and frank assurance appropriate to those who live away from the world and despise it, and, in their dealings with mankind, make war on falsehood and speak out the truth. In like manner, the S. Jerome has his head uplifted with his eyes on the Madonna, deep in contemplation; and in them seem to be suggested all the learning and knowledge that he showed in his writings, while with both his hands he is presenting the Chamberlain, in the act of recommending him to her; which portrait of the Chamberlain is as lifelike as any ever painted. Nor did Raffaello fail to do as well in the figure of S. Francis, who, kneeling on the ground, with one arm outstretched, and with his head upraised, is gazing up at the Madonna, glowing with a love in tone with the feeling of the picture, which both by the lineaments and by the colouring, shows him melting with affection, and taking comfort and life from the gracious sight of her beauty and of the vivacity and beauty of her Son. In the middle of the panel, below the Madonna, Raffaello made a little boy standing, who is raising his head towards her and holding an inscription: than whom none better or more graceful could be painted, what with the beauty of his features and the proportionate loveliness of his person. And in addition there is a landscape, which is singularly beautiful in its absolute perfection.75

All three descriptions eschew detailed comments on composition, colouring, and drawing in order to focus upon the emotional and moral expression of the figures as revealed in face and gesture. The same is true of the Gedancken’s famous description of the Laocoön, which again focuses upon the emotional expression of the face, and is introduced as an example of the ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ of ancient statues ‘in both bearing (Stellung) and expression (Ausdruck)’.76 Winckelmann’s presentation of his ekphrasis of the Torso as ‘a test of what there is to say about such a perfect work of art, and as an example of the inquiry into art’, was therefore in tune with prior traditions; his next comment, that ‘it is not enough to say that something is beautiful: one should also know to what degree and why it is beautiful’, closely recalls Richardson’s insistence that: ‘Whatever we look upon . . . should be consider’d Distinctly, and Particularly, and not only seen in General to be Fine, or Not, but wherein ’tis One, or the Other.’77 Yet Winckelmann’s 1759 treatment of the Torso (far longer than the version eventually published in the Geschichte) shows that he was now moving away from the traditional mode of 75 77

76 Vasari 1996 1: 724. KS 43. Winckelmann 2005: xiii–xiv; compare Richardson 1719: 51.

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ekphrasis practised in his earlier work. Winckelmann tells his readers that he had originally intended to give each of the Belvedere statues a description in two parts: ‘the first from the standpoint of the ideal (in Absicht des Ideals), the second in accordance with technique (nach der Kunst)’. The failure of the project meant that the technical descriptions were never published; only the description according to the ideal appeared in BSW.78 As we have seen, however, it was in such aspects, rather than in skill in execution, that Winckelmann felt that the ‘Kennzeichen der griechischen Meisterstücke’ were to be found. As a test (‘Probe’) of what there is to say about a perfect work of art, the description of the Belvedere Torso combines allusion to the precepts set out in the Gedancken with a set of implicit, yet highly focussed, stylistic observations. As Winckelmann observes, the loss of the Belvedere Torso’s head, upper chest, arms, and lower legs meant that his analysis had to proceed in the absence of its ‘most graceful and significant parts’.79 This furnished a particular handicap to appreciation of its expression, as the tradition laid particular emphasis on facial features and bodily gesture as those elements of a painting particularly relevant to assessment of this quality.80 Such remarks as Winckelmann makes about the Torso’s overall expression are therefore strongly marked as inferences, conjectured from the disposition of the trunk alone. Winckelmann adopts this strategy even in the version published in the Geschichte; in the BSW description this conjectural strategy is elaborated at greater length and is consequently more jarring: If it seems incomprehensible to locate a thinking power in some part of the body besides the head, then one learns here how the hand of a creative master is capable of animating matter. It seems to me that the back, which appears bent by lofty considerations, forms for me a head occupied with a cheerful memory of its astonishing deeds; and by raising such a head full of majesty and wisdom before my eyes, the remaining missing limbs begin to form in my thoughts, flowing forth and back together from what is present and effecting, as it were, a sudden restoration . . . 81

In addition to this somewhat bizarre restoration in thought, Winckelmann also pursues two other strategies. The first, which he also

78 79 81

Winckelmann 2005: xiii (KS 169). 80 Ibid. xiv (KS 170). See e.g. Richardson 1725: 48–63. Winckelmann 2005: xvi (KS 172); compare Winckelmann 2006: 323.

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adopts in the Apollo description, is the formation of an overall interpretation of the statue’s iconography by means of a combination of imagination and learned literary reference. Winckelmann’s suggestion that the Apollo Belvedere presented the god in his triumph over the Python was not unprecedented, but his evocations of ancient literary works, in particular the great Homeric Hymn to Apollo, worked to reinforce the identification.82 The Torso description carries this strategy further, reading off a different labour of Hercules from each part of the statue’s anatomy: I see in the powerful contours of this body the invincible force of the conqueror of the mighty giants who rebelled against the gods and were laid low by him in the fields of Phlegra; and at the same time the soft features of this outline, which make the edifice of the body light and pliable, place before me its swift turns in the fight with Achelous, who, with all his various forms, could not escape the hero’s hands . . . I cannot consider what little there is still to be seen of the shoulder without reminding myself that the entire weight of the heavenly spheres rests on its outstretched strength, as if on two mountain ranges. With what greatness does the chest swell, and how magnificent is the swelling curve of its vault! Such a chest must this one have been, against which the giant Antaeus and the three-headed Geryon were crushed.83

This approach has no precedent in Richardson, whose iconographic identifications are normally announced in summary style. It is combined with a repeated emphasis on the Torso’s contour: Ask those who are familiar with what is most beautiful in the nature of mortals whether or not they have seen a flank which may be compared with the left one. The action and reaction of its muscles has been wonderfully weighed out with a wise measure of alternating motion and quick force, and the body must have been made capable by the same means for all it was intended to accomplish. As in the rising motion of the sea the previously still surface swells into a lovely tumult with playful waves, where one is swallowed by the other and is again rolled out from the very same wave, here, just as softly swollen and drawn in suspension, one muscle flows into the other, and a third, which raises itself between them and seems to strengthen their motion, loses itself in the latter, and our glance is, as it were, likewise swallowed.84

82 Harloe 2007; see Zeller 1955 for a full discussion of Winckelmann’s various drafts of the Apollo description. 83 Winckelmann 2005: xiv–xv (KS 170). 84 Ibid. xv (KS 171).

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Touches of this passage (the comparison to the sea, the focus on contraction of the muscles) evoke Winckelmann’s 1755 treatment of the Laocoön, and there is evident eroticism in Winckelmann’s lingering description of the Torso’s rising and swelling curves. But it should also be remembered that contour was the second category in which, so Winckelmann had argued in the Gedancken, the Greeks could be seen to excel the moderns in art. Winckelmann’s surviving manuscript drafts of the Torso description show that he had been particularly concerned with observation of its contour as a clue or ‘Kennzeichen’ that it originated from the ‘best’ periods of Greek art: The ancient Greeks adopted a godlike style in order to represent godlike beings: that is, without any superfluous detailing such as small folds of skin, veins, overemphasis of the bones and sinews. The prevalent taste (Haupt Gusto) of this figure is quite like that of Michelangelo in his figures for the tomb of the Grand Duke of Florence; but the ancient artist surpasses Michelangelo by far in delicacy and charm. For Michelangelo’s statues always lack somewhat in lightness, in elegance of contour, in the grandeur of the curves, and remain always stone, which this appears to be flesh. The flowing contours of an Apollo are also to be found in this piece. Yes, I can say that it approaches closer to a higher period of art than the Apollo itself.85

To an even greater degree than his other ekphrases, Winckelmann’s ‘Torso’ succeeds in realizing the traditional goal of a description that ‘brings what is to be seen before the eyes’. He leads his readers around the statue, celebrating in turn its chest, left side, hips, back, and thighs, and surviving knee, a process by which ‘the mind is led through all the deeds of his strength up to the perfection of his soul’.86 The manuscript notes suggest that Winckelmann’s close description of the Torso’s flowing contour is not simply an erotic and lyrical response to its manly beauty.87 While stylistic conclusions are drawn 85 (KS 280–2); see Pfotenhauer 1995: 324–9; Kunze 1994. On the centrality of contour to ideas about the ‘noble simplicity’ of the ancients before Winckelmann, see Stafford 1980. 86 Winckelmann 2005a: xvii (KS 162). 87 Borg (2000) has emphasized this element of Winckelmann’s Torso description, and like me she interprets it as the product of an interpretative method which aims to reconstruct the historical ‘idea’ of the ancient artist. Her focus on allegoresis concerns primarily Winckelmann’s interpretations of the Torso’s subject matter or iconography. Her discussion constitutes a complementary approach to my argument here.

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somewhat sotto voce in an ekphrasis that remains broadly within the tradition from Vasari to Richardson, Winckelmann’s emphasis on the Torso’s contour is demonstrably based in the close observation of those features of the statue that would lead him to attribute it—in this case not entirely implausibly—to the late Hellenistic period.88

THE HERCULANEUM LETTERS Two of the last works Winckelmann published before the Geschichte enjoyed contrasting fortunes. The Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und in dem Unterrichte in derselben, which was completed after the Geschichte but published before it in 1763, comprised an expansion of the themes of the ‘Erinnerung’ in the form of an open letter to Freiherr Reinhold von Berg, a young Latvian nobleman to whom Winckelmann had acted as a cicerone in Rome. Apart from the statue descriptions it is one of Winckelmann’s most lyrical pieces of writing, and it was certainly influential in shaping subsequent understandings of his life and character, including the biographies of him by Goethe and Herder.89 In the scholarly and antiquarian circles that are our prime concern in this study, however, it received a rather cooler reception, and it is likely that some of its early readers were dismayed by its homoerotic overtones.90 The publication that did the most to advance Winckelmann’s European reputation before the Geschichte was highly atypical of his output, as the circumstances of its composition led him to flout the strictures on autopsy he pronounced elsewhere. Despite these limitations, international interest in the excavations at Pompeii, Stabiae, and Herculaneum was so high that Winckelmann’s reports of the antiquities discovered there were seized upon eagerly by the world of letters. Winckelmann made a total of four trips to the Naples area during his years in Italy. Two of these—from February to May 1758 and from January to February 1762—were undertaken before the publication of the Geschichte. In addition to furnishing material for this work and 88 89 90

Haskell and Penny 1981: 314. I have a separate study of the Abhandlung in preparation. See e.g. the notably cool review by Christian Adolph Klotz in GGA 1764: 188–90.

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for the aforementioned works on architecture, these visits resulted in his Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen: an account of the ongoing excavations and major finds contained in an open letter to his travelling companion on the 1762 trip, the young Heinrich von Brühl.91 It was to be followed in 1764 by his Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen, the fruit of his third visit to the sites in February–March that year. Despite their detailed descriptions of such important monuments as the theatre at Herculaneum, the Herculaneum Gate, and the Street of the Tombs in Pompeii, the Nachrichten made less of an impact, and were not translated into any foreign language during Winckelmann’s lifetime.92 It was the Sendschreiben that rivalled the Gedancken in terms of the sensation it made. The volcanic geology and mythical resonances of the Bay of Naples had long made it a focus of interest for European travellers.93 In the mid-eighteenth century its Bourbon rulers were also determined to place their newly independent kingdom on the map as a city of art and culture. As the son of Philip V of Spain and Elisabetta Farnese of Parma, Charles Bourbon, who ruled Naples from 1734 until 1759, had a strong sense of the majesty and pomp that befitted a royal capital. Together with his wife, the Saxon princess Maria Amalia, he pursued a series of grand cultural projects in emulation of her grandfather, August II: constructing imposing public buildings such as the San Carlo opera house; commissioning important architects and artists such as Antonio Canevari, Luigi Vanvitelli, and Anton Raphael Mengs; establishing an ironworks and a porcelain factory to rival that of Meissen; and commencing the transfer to Naples of the fantastic Farnese collection of art, books, and manuscripts inherited through his mother. He also embarked upon the construction of a series of imposing royal residences. Of Caserta, the greatest of these, which was still being built at the time of his first visit, Winckelmann commented that ‘Versailles will be cast into shadow’.94 Another, more modest new palace was built at Portici, the site where the duc d’Elbeuf ’s excavations in the early 1700s had brought to light the 91

The son of the Saxon minister encountered in Chapter 2. Mattusch 2011: 23. Except where I indicate otherwise, I quote Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben from Mattusch’s translation. Page references are to the German edition of 1762, which are also given in Mattusch’s text. 93 Oresko 1997; Cocco 2007. 94 Winckelmann to Bünau, Naples, 26 Apr. 1758 (Rehm I 210: 351). 92

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Herculanean ‘Vestals’ seen by Winckelmann in Dresden and described in the Gedancken.95 In 1738, the year building work for the palace began, Charles instructed the excavations to be reopened, and the stream of remarkable finds that followed prompted further investigations at Cività (Pompeii) and Stabia.96 Europe’s érudits had long been primed to expect much from these sites, and d’Elbeuf ’s discoveries had been publicized as early as 1711.97 A letter of one William Hammond, written from Naples in the early 1730s and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1739–41, describes how At Resina, about four Miles from Naples, under the Mountain, within half a Mile of the Seaside, there is a Well in a poor Man’s Yard, down which about 30 Yards there is a Hole, which some People have the Curiosity to creep into, and may afterwards creep a good way under-ground, and with Lights find Foundations of Houses and Streets, which, by some it is said, was in the Time of the Romans a City called Aretina, others say Port Hercules, where the Romans usually embarked from for Africa.98

Once excavations restarted, however, the Bourbon administration’s initial policy was to restrict both access to and knowledge about the finds. One concern was theft, which appears to have been a fairly frequent occurrence: a generation after Winckelmann, Goethe wrote of being shown candelabra and other treasures in Sir William Hamilton’s residence that had ‘somehow strayed here from the cellars of Pompeii’.99 Yet ‘archaeological espionage’ was also a worry. Alden R. Gorden seeks to explain the restrictions as a ‘component of Neapolitan statecraft’: ‘The discovery of entire buried ancient cities represented a unique and jealously protected endowment of the Kingdom of Naples. To secure the full prestige of the discoveries, Charles VII and his advisers decided that Naples must retain exclusive rights to the possession, knowledge and publication of the finds.’100 The result was frustration for travellers: early visitors to the museum

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On the history of these statues and their reception, see now Daehner 2007. The history of the early excavations is reconstructed in meticulous detail by Parslow 1995. Shorter discussions are given in Gordon 2007 and Wallace-Hadrill 2011. 97 Parslow 1995: 19. 98 Sloane, Hammond, and Green 1739–41. 99 Goethe 1970: 315. 100 Gordon 2007: 38. 96

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hastily set up at Portici frequently complained of restrictions upon making drawings and notes, and criticized the lackadaisical methods of the early excavators working under the military engineer Joaquin Rocco Alcubierre. One of the earliest reports, by the Roman artist Camillo Paderni, combined enthusiastic descriptions of newly found paintings with dire warnings of the losses that would result if excavation and conservation methods were not improved: In a word, perceiving all those who are called Superintendants of this Affair, wholly ignorant of what they are about, I began to suffer in a very sensible manner . . . However, as I could do nothing more, and having a great Concern for those fine Things in a perishing Condition, I left them a Paper of Directions how to manage. If they do not observe them, the greater Misfortune will be ours, to hear that what Time, Earthquakes, and the Ravages of the Volcano have spared, are now destroyed by those who pretend to have the Care of them.101

Despite the authorities’ best efforts, a string of unauthorized descriptions and commentaries, sometimes incorporating plans and drawings, appeared from the 1740s onwards in books and periodicals published in Italy, France, and England.102 The appearance of Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben was thus only the latest, and one of the most outrageous, in a series of provocations. The Sendschreiben was first published by Walther in Dresden in 1762. A French translation by Michel Huber (who was later to produce the ‘authorized’ French translation of the Geschichte) appeared in 1764, and an English translation, done from the French, in 1771. It is clear from Winckelmann’s letters, however, that he had in mind to write on the Herculanean antiquities at least as early as 101

Paderni 1739–41: 488–9. Nicolò Marcello Venuti’s, Descrizione delle prime scoperte dell’ antica città d’Ercolano was published in Rome in 1748, and in English translation in 1750. Antonio Gori’s Admiranda antiquitatum Herculanensium descripta et illustrata (a compendium of prior accounts published in periodicals and other collections) and Charles de Brosses’s Lettres sur l’etat actuel de la ville souterraine d’Herculée, et sur les cases de son ensevelissement sous les ruines de Vesuve followed in 1750. A particularly damaging publication, in the eyes of the court, was Jerôme-Charles Bellicard and Charles-Nicolas Cochin’s Observations upon the Antiquities of the town of Herculaneum, discovered near Vesuvius (London 1753), which included forty-two plates depicting various of the paintings and plans of the sites. In terms of the level of detail they included, all outstripped Ottavio Bayardi’s Prodromo delle antichità di Ercolano (5 vols., 1752), the first officially sanctioned publication of the sites. See the discussions by Gordon 2007 and Lyons and Reed 2007. 102

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June 1756.103 In the Sendschreiben’s Preface he emphasizes the importance of the 1758 trip, boasting that the two months he had spent then at Portici had given him ‘more opportunity than any other, whether foreigner or native’, to view its ‘treasures of antiquity’.104 Many of the observations contained in the Sendschreiben do indeed appear to have been made during Winckelmann’s first visit, when he spent the longest period at Portici (five weeks) and was unencumbered by travelling companions.105 If Winckelmann had amassed sufficient material in 1758 and the intention to write had been present from even earlier, why then did he delay publication of an essay on the Vesuvian cities until 1762? One factor seems to have been Winckelmann’s relations with the Saxon court. He had embarked on his first visit equipped with letters of introduction from Friedrich Christian to Maria Amalia, his sister, and Winckelmann was expected to report back on the discoveries to the Electoral Prince.106 Winckelmann may have felt unable to publish this material without the permission of his Saxon sponsors; irritated comments in a letter to Walther in September 1758 suggest that he was being kept waiting longer than he had expected for a reply to his letters.107 When Bianconi finally responded to the reports Winckelmann had sent, he offered to undertake a translation of the letters (originally composed in Italian) for publication in an unnamed Leipzig journal.108 These plans came to nothing; meanwhile, Winckelmann’s work for Muzell-Stosch, his duties for Albani, and his work on the Geschichte kept him occupied until well into 1762.109 103 Winckelmann to Francke, 1 June 1756 (Rehm I 144: 225). The plan may have pre-dated Winckelmann’s arrival in Italy, for he had seen the early volumes of Bayardi’s Prodromo, the first official publications from the site, and been seriously unimpressed, before leaving Dresden (see Rehm I: 105: to Berendis, 19 Dec. 1754). 104 Winckelmann 2011: 4. 105 Winckelmann to Bünau, 26 Apr. 1758 (Rehm I 210: 350). Many of the observations in the Sendschreiben replicate the long archaeological reports sent to Bianconi over the course of that summer. See Rehm I 212, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225a and 231; 2.467, 475, 482, 547, 561, with Rehm’s notes ad loc. 106 Winckelmann to Berendis, 5 Feb. 1758 (Rehm I 202: 329). 107 Rehm I 236 (to Walther, 26 Sept. 1758). 108 Rehm IV 40, see too Rehm’s notes on I 212. The journal in question may well have been BSW. 109 A projected publication on the Herculaneum paintings, which Winckelmann appears to have intended for the Augsburger Akademie der Kunst, also never saw the light of day. A ‘Nachricht von den alten herculanischen Schriften’ did, however, appear in Das neueste aus der anmutigen Gelehrsamkeit, 8 (1758), 325–42. See Rehm’s notes at I 584–5.

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Winckelmann may also have been slow to abandon his initial hopes of attracting Neapolitan patronage. He had travelled to Naples with high ambitions, boasting to friends that he was sure to be entertained in the noblest houses and hoping to be received with some fanfare into the world of Neapolitan letters. In stark contrast to the negative judgements expressed in the Sendschreiben, letters dating from immediately before Winckelmann’s first visit describe Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi, the senior Greek scholar at Naples, as ‘the most accomplished man of Greek learning now alive’. In the same letters, Winckelmann discloses his hopes that he will be elected to the Real Accademia Ercolanese, the learned society established in 1755 in order to oversee publication of the finds.110 He was swiftly disabused of these aspirations: in April 1758 he declared to Bünau that his good reputation as an antiquarian ‘has brought me more disadvantage than advantage’, and complained angrily about having to sneak around Portici like a thief.111 Yet even if Winckelmann had fallen foul of the jealous and secretive Academicians during his first visit, he had also found a warm reception in the houses of well-connected men such as Berardo Galiani and Count Firmian, and on his return to Rome he continued to receive intelligence on new discoveries from Camillo Paderni (by then installed as curator of the Museum Herculanense and presiding over the continued destruction of a wealth of wall paintings and other decorative features considered insignificant).112 Winckelmann also continued to cultivate the acquaintance of the powerful Neapolitan prime minister Bernardo Tanucci, sending him a presentation copy of the Description des pierres gravées in 1760 and receiving in turn Volume 2 of the Antichità di Ercolano esposte. It seems to have been only in the course of his second visit that Winckelmann gave up all serious hope of advancement from Neapolitan quarters, opting instead to publish and incur the predictable ire of the Bourbon court.113 Certainly he realized

110 Winckelmann to Francke, 9 Mar. 1757 (Rehm I 171), 4 Feb. 1758 (Rehm I 201), to Berendis, 5 Feb. 1758 (Rehm I 202). For the Accademia Ercolanese see Gordon 2007: 48–50; Parslow 1995: 82–4. 111 Winckelmann to Bünau, 26 Apr. 1758 (Rehm I 210); to Bianconi, 13 May 1758 (Rehm I 211); to Berendis, 15 May 1758 (Rehm I 217); to Bianconi, 15 July 1758 (Rehm I 221). See Parslow 1995: 215–17. 112 Rehm II 392: 124 (to Usteri, 24 Feb. 1761); see Parslow 1995: 220. 113 See esp. his letter to Usteri, 17 Dec. 1762 (Rehm I 528: 278), disclosing his new enmity with Tanucci.

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afterwards that the decision to publish ‘has henceforth barred my entrance to that museum’.114 Finally, there was an upsurge of interest in things Herculanean between 1758 and 1762. The trickle of reports from the sites had grown into a stream, and the long-awaited appearance of the initial volumes of Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte, the official publication of the finds by the Real Accademia, was adding to the excitement.115 Although a limited, luxury edition, which—at least initially—was not for public sale, the Antichità’s beautiful (in some cases, artfully touched up) grisaille plates fuelled interest in the ancient paintings, sculptures, and other objects that had been brought to light. The impending publication of the Geschichte also made it a good moment for Winckelmann to seek publicity by contributing to a topic of such great contemporary interest and excitement.116 Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben has been remembered chiefly for its unremitting scorn heaped upon the Bourbon excavators, as well for its defence of the excavation methods pursued by the embattled superintendent, Karl Jakob Weber.117 My discussion will highlight two other important aspects of the essay. The first is that it is a piece of antiquarian showboating: a highly successful attempt at exposing the deficiencies of those scholars, such as Mazzocchi, Ottavio Bayardi, and Giacomo Martorelli, who had been charged with official publication of the finds. Winckelmann’s attempt to outdo the Neapolitan antiquarians is particularly apparent in those sections of the letter that concern the Herculaneum papyri. Winckelmann was, notoriously, disappointed by the papyri’s Philodeman contents, commenting that ‘an indictment of music that is both hypochondriac and chopped to pieces is of little concern to us’.118 But in addition to his scandalized account of Mazzocchi’s ‘ludicrous’ and failed attempts to unroll and decipher the scrolls, Winckelmann took on the Neapolitan scholars’ arguments about their contents, denying their claims to have found works written in Sabine or Oscan, conducting a step-by-step refutation of Martorelli’s ‘extremely 114

Winckelmann to Riedesel, 22 Feb. 1765 (Rehm I 693: 83). On the Antichità, the first three volumes of which appeared in 1757, 1760, and 1762, see Lyons and Reed 2007: 137–8; Najlbjerg 2007; and Valladares 2007. 116 Winckelmann refers several times in the Sendschreiben to the forthcoming Geschichte, as well as to other of his works. See e.g. Winckelmann 2011: 26, 38, 53, 58. 117 For Weber, see above all Parslow 1995. 118 Winckelmann 2011: 90; see Porter 2007. 115

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odd and paradoxical opinion’ that the Greeks of the classical period used codices, and citing in support of his arguments a plethora of material sources (gems, reliefs, and figurines) as well as literary testimonia from Aeschines, Ulpian, and Diogenes Laertius. The seven pages taken up with arguing against Martorelli are a tour de force of philological and antiquarian polemic, and would be all the more impressive to a reader who took seriously Winckelmann’s claim at the Sendschreiben’s close that he had composed it without the aid of scholarly literature.119 Winckelmann almost certainly gained his detailed knowledge of the papyri and of the history of unsuccessful attempts to read their contents from Antonio Piaggio, the cleric with whom he lodged during his first visit and who had been charged with their unrolling and transcription. Piaggio carried out his activities in one of the smaller offices of the Museum Herculanense at Portici, and it is notable that (unlike in the Nachrichten, where Winckelmann declares that he was shown around Herculaneum’s theatre by Galiani) the majority of the Sendschreiben consists not of descriptions of the sites under excavation, but of the various artefacts taken from there to the Museum. In his opening paragraph Winckelmann casts the Sendschreiben as intended to instruct other travellers, the brevity of whose visits may mean that they are unable to give every object full attention; his comments on the futility of exposing large areas of Herculaneum to the eye suggest that, unlike many visitors then and now, it was the artistic treasures to be discovered rather than the subterranean cities themselves that held his attention.120 In those sections of the letter that concern works of art Winckelmann follows the same policy as in his Description des pierres gravées, singling out those that are most beautiful and most remarkable for lengthier discussion. All of the paintings Winckelmann discusses in the Sendschreiben are also discussed at greater length in the final section of Part I, Chapter 4 of the Geschichte (‘Painting of the Ancient Greeks’).121 There, Winckelmann acknowledges the centrality of the Herculanean

119

Winckelmann 2011: 94. Winckelmann 2011: 4, 21–22; Parslow 1995: 221–4. Mattusch (2011: 41) suggests that Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben ‘brazenly provided a tour of the Royal Museum, as if he [expected] that visitors would take along his booklet as their guide’. 121 Winckelmann 2006: 251–64. 120

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antiquities to his research, as it is the discovery of ‘many hundreds of paintings in ancient Herculaneum’ that has rendered ancient painting ‘a subject on which we can now speak and pass judgement with greater knowledge and learning than previously possible’.122 His introduction to this section nevertheless strikes an elegiac note: ‘All in all, leaving aside the written accounts, we must constantly infer what constituted the most beautiful works from what are, to all appearances, no more than mediocre productions and consider ourselves fortunate, as after suffering a shipwreck, to collect individual planks.’123 These comments give what was also Winckelmann’s overall verdict in the Sendschreiben: that almost all the paintings discovered in Naples date from the period of art’s decline. Winckelmann makes exceptions only for four wall-paintings which he says were found at Stabia (actually at Herculaneum) in 1761, and for a work of doubtful provenance which, to his great embarrassment and anger, was later revealed to be a forgery perpetrated by Giovanni Battista Casanova and Anton Raphael Mengs.124 It is true that Winckelmann expresses eloquent praise of certain individual pieces, perhaps the most memorable of which is his famous comment that fresco vignettes of dancers and centaurs are ‘fleeting as a thought and beautiful as if they were drawn by the Graces’.125 In both works, however, Winckelmann’s prose is shot through with expressions of his unfulfilled and unfulfillable wish to see those paintings that must have existed in the highest periods of art.126 Almost the opposite is true of Winckelmann’s discussion of sculpture, where he claims to have found among the Portici treasures some of ‘the most perfect works in the entire world’. As the most ‘beautiful’ and ‘remarkable’ of these he picks out monuments that may be authentically Greek, such as the life-size marble Athene Promachos in archaizing style (Museo Nazionale di Napoli, inv. 6007) and the series of bronze portrait busts from the Villa dei Papiri, some

122

123 Ibid. 251. Ibid. Winckelmann 2011: 30–1; 2006: 254–8. See Pelzen 1972; Kunze 2006. 125 Winckelmann 2011: 30. 126 ‘If such exceptional works existed on the walls of houses in a town like Herculaneum, how perfect the works of the great and celebrated Greek painters of the best periods must have been!’ (ibid. 30). See too Winckelmann 2006: 254: ‘It is to be wished that four drawings at Herculaneum on marble . . . were by the hand of a great master’; ‘In every case, one wishes to find more elaborate pieces, as these were done with great facility, as if by a single brushstroke’. 124

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of which Winckelmann likewise attributes to the ‘oldest style of art’.127 Winckelmann’s enthusiasm over these works informs his hypothesis that these statues are ‘not made locally’, and perhaps were transported to Herculaneum from Greece. This shows how he sought to accommodate the Herculaneum treasures to his hypothesis, gleaned from ancient literary sources and worked out more fully in the course of the Geschichte, that the arts of southern Italy declined in the time of the Roman emperors, and that many of the most beautiful works to be found there had been transported from Greece to Rome.128 Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben was epitomized and warmly reviewed in major periodicals in France, Germany, and England. The BSW reviewer praised his ‘understanding, scholarship, and taste’, and expressed the hope that ‘his long-awaited Geschichte der Kunst’ would soon be available to ‘all friends of art’ in his homeland.129 Similar sentiments were expressed in the summary which appeared in Edmund Burke’s Annual Register for 1765.130 In the Literaturbriefe, Johann Georg Sulzer was more critical, noting those points on which Winckelmann’s discussion conflicted with prior antiquarian accounts published by Venuti, Cochin, and Bellicard, and taking him to task for failing to consider their writings in his work.131 Sulzer perceptively notes that in both Winckelmann’s Stosch description and the Herculanean letters, ‘He has kept one eye continuously on his Geschichte der Kunst’, and that it is possible to see ‘very clear traces’ of Winckelmann’s greater undertaking in both of these writings.132 But Sulzer’s review is also notable for what it omits. His summary of Winckelmann’s discussion of the Herculanean paintings is extremely short, and he passes over Winckelmann’s remarks on sculpture in their entirety, to report ‘an important observation on the grace of ancient household implements’, which merits dissemination because of its ‘great interest to the public’.133 Sulzer quotes verbatim the conclusion to the Sendschreiben’s discussion of the utensils found in the Vesuvian cities—an eloquent passage which returns us to the themes of the superiority of the ancients, of beautiful simplicity, and above all of grace:

127

Winckelmann 2011: 36. Harloe 2010: 186–92. Winckelmann’s arguments are a development of hypotheses advanced by Caylus, who also distinguished two artistic traditions (a Greek and a Roman) at work in Italy under the high Roman Empire. See Potts 1978: 67–8. 129 [Anon.] 1763: 91, 107. 130 [Anon.] 1766: 182–9. The epitome was preceded by Füssli’s translation of Winckelmann’s Torso description. 131 132 133 Sulzer 1763: 164–5, 178. Ibid. 159–60. Ibid. 179. 128

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Consideration of these utensils and especially the vessels should focus on their elegance, which all our modern artists cannot match. Their forms are basically built upon the principles of good taste and resemble a beautiful young man who develops grace in his bearing effortlessly and unconsciously. This grace in the vessels reaches even to its handles. The imitation of that grace could usher in an entirely different taste, one that could lead us away from artifice and toward nature, wherein real art can then be exhibited. The beauty of these vessels comes through in the softly curving lines of their forms, which, just as in beautiful young bodies, are emerging rather than fullgrown. Thus the eye does not simply end its glance in perfectly semi-circular contours, or remain fixed in corners or at angles. The sweet sensation to our eyes before such forms is like the feel of delicate, soft skin, and our comprehension grows light and easy, as if from this association. What is easy pleases us for its intelligibility, in contrast to the contrived, which, like exaggerated praise, offends us because we believe that we cannot live up to it. Since nature illuminates our way, in view of the costs (usually the natural is cheaper than the artificial), sensation and reflection should guide us toward the beautiful simplicity of the ancients. But they adhered to what was once understood to be beautiful, for beauty is simply one thing, and like their clothing, it did not change. We, on the other hand, cannot or do not like to lay down rules about such things as beauty, so we make foolish imitations, at one moment building something, and, at the next, like children, tearing it down.134

This was also the only passage from the Sendschreiben quoted in the review that appeared in the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe in 1764.135 That this passage above all was singled out by successive reviewers indicates how deep a chord Winckelmann’s manifesto for the restoration of classical taste had struck in the areas of Europe he had left behind. It also shows the extent to which, even in the year the Geschichte was printed, Winckelmann’s approach to ancient art and cultures was still shaped by the aesthetic categories and vocabulary originally formulated in the Gedancken. Chapter 4 discusses how these categories were shaped into Winckelmann’s Lehrgebäude: the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums.

134

Winckelmann 2011: 62.

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[Anon.] 1764.

4 Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums and its earliest critical reception Ich nehme das Wort Geschichte in der weiteren Bedeutung, welche dasselbe in der griechischen Sprache hat, und meine Absicht ist, einen Versuch eines Lehrgebäudes zu liefern. (Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), ix)

Had Winckelmann stopped publishing after the Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen, his place in the annals of antiquarian scholarship would already have been assured. The Sendschreiben brought him recognition across Europe, and the honours he craved soon began to arrive in the form of elections to learned societies and engagements to guide princes and other notables around Rome. Winckelmann’s connoisseurial essays were also widely reviewed and translated into other European languages.1 Yet it seems unlikely that anyone would have lauded Winckelmann as a ‘new Columbus’, or remembered him as planting ‘the seed from which the latest research into antiquity has developed’, had it not been for the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. As we saw in Chapter 1, it was this work above all that nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical scholars praised as having, in Jahn’s words, ‘inaugurated’ a new approach to understanding ‘the whole of antiquity’.2 We will see in Parts II and III of this book that certain of Winckelmann’s eighteenthcentury readers recognized the broader potential and ambitions implicit in the Geschichte and were concerned to probe their possibilities. 1 See Rehm’s notes at III 485 for details of the translations of Winckelmann’s works made during his lifetime. 2 Jahn 1844: 28; quoted above in Chapter 1, pp. 9–10.

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Such readers were in a minority, however, and the earliest responses to the Geschichte, as set out in periodical reviews and other critical commentary, tended to remain within the narrower orbit of the connoisseurial expectations set up by his earlier work. The main purpose of this chapter is to round off this consideration of ‘Winckelmann in context’ by examining some of these very early responses. It is first necessary to say something about the Geschichte itself. In recent decades a great deal of productive scholarship has appeared upon the sources of Winckelmann’s magnum opus; much has, however, been concerned to defend or contest the earlier hagiographic traditions that dubbed him the ‘inventor’ of archaeology and of the history of art. On the one hand, admirers such as Edouard Pommier and Alex Potts credit Winckelmann with developing an entirely new approach to the study of ancient art, based on close observation of material objects rather than literary sources, and claim that in doing so he inaugurated the new discipline of art history. On the other, A. A. Donohue, and before her Leopold Ettlinger, have argued that Winckelmann’s approach was founded less upon the evidence of the eye than the uncritical acceptance of ancient literary testimonia. More recently, Kochs’s and Décultot’s studies have placed investigation of Winckelmann’s sources upon a new footing, and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has produced a series of important essays that comb the world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury antiquarian scholarship in order to identify a number of figures whose works anticipate aspects of Winckelmann’s approach.3 In the face of the traditional claims that Winckelmann ‘founded’ an entirely new approach to the study of antiquity, the overall stance of this book is a sceptical one. Nevertheless, criticisms which turn upon the existence of precedents for various aspects of Winckelmann’s method or for the particular judgements and conclusions advanced in the Geschichte mistake the particular character of his achievement in that work. Ancient literary sources, together with writings on art and antiquities from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, did indeed furnish the building-blocks and some of the ground-plans for

3 Kaufmann 1996: 540–1; see Potts 1994; Pommier 2003; Donohue 1995; Ettlinger 1981; Kaufmann 1995, 2001; Décultot 2000; Kochs 2005. For the broader context of early modern antiquarian scholarship, see Schnapp 1996; Haskell 1993; and the classic Momigliano 1950.

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what Winckelmann famously referred to as his ‘Lehrgebäude’.4 The Geschichte’s innovation lay not so much in the unprecedentedness of its individual elements, but rather in Winckelmann’s success at fashioning pre-existing ideas and approaches into an overarching framework. Thus, although Potts may go too far in suggesting that Winckelmann invented a ‘new paradigm’ for the aesthetic and historical interpretation of art, he is certainly correct to suggest that the Geschichte offered a ‘new synthesis’: Winckelmann’s originality . . . lay in fashioning a clearly structured picture of the stylistic development of ancient Greek art from commonplace speculations about cycles of rise and decline and the tendency of art to evolve from the austere grandeur of the archaic to classical perfection and then to the excessive elegance characterizing the late stages of a culture . . . [H]is schema proved so influential not just because it conformed to prevailing assumptions about the historical evolution of art and culture but also because it was seen to make sense of the wealth of disparate empirical evidence—both visual and verbal—relating to ancient Greek art and its history.5

For contemporary and subsequent generations of readers, the Geschichte’s challenge and its fascination lie in the way Winckelmann combined familiar and less familiar approaches and objects into a consistent whole: an apparently coherent and comprehensive account of ‘das Alterthum’ in its geographical, social, cultural, and political aspects. To understand the character of this ‘Gebäude’ it is necessary to begin with its building-blocks.

GROUND-PLANS AND BUILDING-BLOCKS 1: WINCKELMANN’S PREDECESSORS As the individual elements Winckelmann drew upon in formulating his system have been explored extensively by others, I will attempt only a brief overview here. Winckelmann’s ‘Gebäude’ was constructed by imitating and adapting the approaches of three groups of ancient and modern writers, some of which we have already 4 A literal translation might be ‘doctrinal structure/edifice’; prior usage, the glosses provided by early reviewers, and Winckelmann’s correspondence suggest that ‘system’ is an appropriate translation. For further discussion, see Harloe 2009. 5 Potts 2006: 21–2; see too Pommier 2003: 120.

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encountered in Chapters 2 and 3. In the first group are the broad, developmental schemas of artistic development handed down by Cicero, Quintilian, and Pliny, and passed on through the early modern art-historical and art-theoretical literature in which Winckelmann was well versed. Winckelmann’s reliance on these sources is only thinly disguised by the Geschichte’s famously bold opening statements: that he is attempting ‘no mere narrative of the chronology and alterations of art’, and is the first to have guided readers ‘into the essence or interior’ of the subject.6 Donohue, Potts, and others have discussed how Winckelmann’s overall narrative arc of the arts’ progression through ‘origin, growth, change, and fall’ or (alternatively from necessity, through beauty, to superfluity), and his distinction between the ‘more ancient’, ‘high’, and ‘beautiful’ styles on the basis of the qualities of hardness and grace derive from comments made by Cicero, Pliny, and Quintilian which had become staples in Renaissance and early modern discussions of art.7 Potts is moreover correct to highlight the particular precedent set by Vasari’s Vite.8 The Vite might at first seem an obvious candidate for the tradition of biographical treatments of artists and catalogues of their works that Winckelmann affected to despise; yet the more general and programmatic discussions Vasari gives in the prefaces to each part of that work add up to a broad account of the origins of sculpture and painting, their gradual progress under the Greeks and Romans, their decline under the Roman Empire, and their resurrection by Italian artists from the thirteenth century onwards.9 Vasari’s account of the history of ancient art was based on the same literary authorities Winckelmann used; moreover, as Alpers has argued, the overall view of historical development set out in his prefaces is not

6

Winckelmann 2006: 71. Ibid. 71, 111; see Donohue 1995; Potts 1978, 1982, 1994: 40–1; Pommier 2003. 8 Potts 1982: 380–4. 9 Vasari 1965: 1550, 1568. Winckelmann’s comments about Vasari in the Geschichte are few and disparaging (see e.g. Winckelmann 2006: 321). Pommier (2003: 117–49) recognizes the continuities between Vasari’s and Winckelmann’s approaches, and the ways in which the tradition of ‘lives’ inaugurated by Vasari at least intimated a progression from ‘biographical’ to ‘historical’ accounts. His excuse of Winckelmann’s dismissive attitude to Vasari on the basis of careless reading is probably too charitable; Décultot has convincingly demonstrated that Winckelmann often made extremely hostile comments about prior scholars in cases where he owed them the most. 7

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pursued in the detailed descriptions of individual works of art that fill the main body of his work.10 But even if Vasari did not develop ekphrasis into a means of conveying stylistic differences, his famous comments on the artistic decline exemplified in the Arch of Constantine show that comparative visual analysis formed part of his repertoire, and his assertions about the unity and developmental character of the liberal arts significantly prefigure Winckelmann, whose arguments in the Geschichte rely on similar assumptions about the unity and development of ancient cultures.11 Many of Vasari’s statements about his overall approach—for example, his rejection of the compilation of mere ‘list[s] of artists’ and his claim that he had tried ‘to imitate the methods of the great [i.e. ancient] historians’—prefigure Winckelmann’s methodological proclamations.12 Vasari declared that: I have endeavoured not only to record what the artists have done but also to distinguish between the good, the better, and the best, and to note with some care the methods, manners, styles, behaviour, and ideas of the painters and sculptures; I have tried as well as I know how to help people who cannot find out for themselves to understand the sources and origins of the various styles, and the reasons for the improvement or decline of the arts at various times and among different people.13

Yet he did not (nor was it his intention to) produce a continuous history of ancient art which might match his narrative of its renaissance in modern times. Such observations on the evidence of style as are to be found in his work were extended and applied to a large body of ancient artefacts by Caylus and Mariette, the French connoisseurantiquarians whose importance to Winckelmann’s early Roman writings was noted in Chapter 3. They were among the first to apply connoisseurship to a large corpus of ancient objects; more significantly still, they held out the possibility of using style analysis to establish chronologies founded upon the evidence of those objects, rather than upon the schematic and sometimes inconsistent accounts

10 Alpers 1960; see the discussion of Vasari’s and Winckelmann’s ekphrases above, Chapter 3. 11 Vasari 1965: 85–6; for a discussion of this important passage in relation to Vasari’s key ancient source (Cicero’s Brutus) see Gombrich 1960. 12 Vasari 1965: 83–4; compare Winckelmann 2006: 71. 13 Vasari 1965: 83–4.

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of ancient writers.14 To be sure, they (like Winckelmann) most often saw the results of visual analysis as confirming those accounts; moreover, neither Caylus’s Recueil nor Mariette’s Traité in fact presented ancient works of art in chronological series. It is nevertheless difficult to overestimate the importance for Winckelmann of Caylus’s promotion of a method which ‘consists in carefully studying the mind (esprit) and the hand of the artist, in penetrating into his perceptions (vûes) and in following him in their execution, in a word, in viewing the monuments as the proof and the expression of the taste which reigned in a particular epoch and place’.15 Winckelmann excerpted Caylus’s discourses to the Académie des inscriptions; his learned correspondence with Stosch and Bianconi includes numerous observations about Caylus’s commentary on particular objects.16 In one such letter, Winckelmann includes an early draft of the Geschichte’s chapter on Etruscan art: proof that close reading of Caylus’s Recueil accompanied his writing of that work.17 It is tempting to suppose that Caylus’s and Mariette’s failure to order their paper museums in accordance with their methodological prescriptions furnished a stimulus to their ever-emulous younger 14 The most extensive discussion is Potts 1978: 53–71; see too Potts 1994: 38–9; Kreuzer 1959; Schnapp 1996: 238–42; Schnapp 2002; Lissarague 2002: 79–80. Kaufmann (1996, 2001) has convincingly demonstrated that antecedents to Caylus’s and Mariette’s methods are to be found among the antiquarian literature of the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, and that Winckelmann was exposed to some of these approaches as early as his studies at Halle. His arguments are important; it should nevertheless be noted that it is the works of Caylus and Mariette, rather than those of their predecessors, which Winckelmann’s manuscripts and correspondence reveal him to have studied intensively during the formative decade of the 1750s. 15 Caylus 1752–67: 1 (1752), vi. 16 In addition to the Geschichte, Caylus is also cited in the Description des pierres gravées and the Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen. Many of Winckelmann’s comments on Caylus are mild criticisms of his interpretations of particular objects, coupled with the observation that he has been forced to rely upon misleading reproductions for his analyses. A mention in the Sendschreiben’s section on paintings must have galled the French antiquarian, for Winckelmann declares that one ‘ancient’ painting Caylus had purchased and illustrated in his Recueil was a modern forgery (Winckelmann 2011: 83–4). Caylus sponsored the 1764 French translation of the Sendschreiben; given its entirely foreseeable consequences (Winckelmann’s expulsion from the Neapolitan world of letters), it has been suggested that his motives may have been less than benevolent. 17 Rehm I 196 (Winckelmann to Stosch, 10 Dec. 1757); see too I 98 (Winckelmann to Wille, Dec. 1757); a section of ‘Annotazioni sopra la Raccolta d’Antichità del Sigre Conte Caylus’ also forms part of the archaeological reports Winckelmann sent to Bianconi in summer 1758 (Rehm I 222: 394–6).

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contemporary to undertake a similar classification of the far greater number of antiquities available to him. Caylus had presented the objects of his Recueil grouped ‘in certain general classes, relating to the countries that produced them’.18 The style or ‘goût’ of each nation is distinguished in terms that are both aesthetic and imply a chronological progression: thus Caylus declares that while the Egyptians had given the arts the character of ‘grandeur’, the Etruscans had somewhat compromised this quality in the interests of finesse and ‘détail’, and the Greeks united this technical skill with ‘la plus noble élégance’. In the ‘Avertissement’ to volume 1 of the Recueil, Caylus raised the possibility of going further, using visual comparison to follow the taste of a particular nation ‘in its progress, or in its alterations’. Yet he warned that such an ordering was ‘more difficult than the first’, and when it came down to discussions of particular objects his attributions were often highly tentative, attended with numerous qualifications, doubts, and scruples.19 Winckelmann’s division of Egyptian art into three, and Greek into four, historically successive period styles went beyond anything to which Caylus had been willing to commit, even as he replicated the aesthetic vocabulary by which Caylus had differentiated Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greek art.20 It would thus not be entirely unfair to characterize Winckelmann’s Geschichte as the fulfilment of a project hinted at by Vasari, by means of a set of methods developed by Caylus and Mariette. There was, however, a further way in which Winckelmann’s Geschichte represented a departure from these predecessors. Both Winckelmann and Caylus saw the antiquarian’s task as the location of objects within their originating historical contexts; but, as Alain Schnapp has argued, Caylus’s approach was object-immanent in a far stronger sense than Winckelmann’s.21 Schnapp diagnoses a strong, anti-systematic bias in Caylus’s thinking: the individual object forms the point of departure for interpretation and remains the focal point. This is reflected in the vocabulary Caylus uses to describe his approach: ‘Presented in this perspective, the monuments arrange themselves into a number of general classes according to the countries that have produced them; and within each class they take an

18 20

19 Caylus 1752–67: 1 (1752), ix. Ibid. viii–ix. 21 Potts 1978: 66–71. Schnapp 1996: 238–42; Schnapp 2002.

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order according to the period that witnessed their birth.’22 Objects here are described as presenting their temporal logic immediately to the eye, arranging themselves into classes under the trained gaze of the connoisseur-antiquarian.23 Consequently, although each chapter of the Recueil opens with ‘general reflections’ on the history and customs of the ancient people under discussion, this material (which is drawn from ancient literary sources and contemporary travellers’ reports) appears almost incidental to Caylus’s primary objective of elucidating the taste (‘goût’) of each nation by reference to the visual characteristics of extant antiquities. Winckelmann’s Geschichte reads very differently: extensive historiographic and ethnographic material on the climate, constitution, and customs of the Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans is woven throughout his discussion, and presented as essential to understanding variations in artistic style both between ancient peoples and among the same people over time. Potts and Décultot are right to connect these aspects of the Geschichte to another set of writers: the ‘philosophic’ historians of the French and English Enlightenments.24 Winckelmann’s engagement with the historiography of his own age can be traced back at least to his time in Saxony, and Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume are among the authors excerpted in his notebooks.25 Décultot, who discusses Winckelmann’s reading of French authors at length in her exploration of the Geschichte’s genesis, suggests that it was from Voltaire above all that Winckelmann acquired the aspiration to construct a form of history which charted the rise and fall of nations and the progress of the arts, rather than detailing political and military events. In his Siècle de Louis XIV and Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, Voltaire proposed a model for a form of history

22

Caylus 1752–67: 1 (1752), ix. Caylus 1752–67: 2 (1756), i: ‘Les Arts portent le caractère des Nations qui les ont cultivés; on démêle leurs commencemens, leur enfance, leur progrès et le point de perfection, où ils ont été conduits chez tous les Peuples . . . Un coup d’oeil jetté rapidement dans un de ces Cabinets, où ces trésors se trouvent rassemblés, embrasse en quelque sorte le Tableau de tous les siècles.’ 24 Potts 1994: 41–6; Décultot 2000: esp. 67–76, 149–68, 261–75. 25 Décultot 2000: 246–7; see Rehm I 37: 64 (Winckelmann to an unknown addressee, Hadmersleben, Aug. 1746). 23

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that went beyond mere chronicling of ‘facts’ in order to provide ‘a true picture of everything in the world that deserves to be known’: the ‘spirit’ of those who lived in past centuries, the progress of taste, and the perfection of the arts.26 The earliest and clearest indication of Winckelmann’s interest in history in the Voltairean mode is his uncompleted prospectus for a course of lectures on the ‘general history of modern times’, which remained unpublished during his lifetime and was passed down among Oeser’s papers.27 Rehm’s dating of this fragment to late 1754 or early 1755 must be correct, for the influence of the Essai sur les moeurs is perceptible in Winckelmann’s enthusiasm for a form of history which recounts ‘the great destinies of empires and states, their thriving, growth, flower and fall’, and treats their sources of wealth and prosperity, their discoveries in the arts and sciences, as no less important than the military victories of their princes.28 It is possible to see the beginnings of the Geschichte in this early attempt to envisage a general history of the rise and fall of nations, and echoes of Voltaire are perhaps still audible in Winckelmann’s famous programmatic statements at the beginning of the later work. It had been Voltaire (or rather Mme du Châtelet, his interlocutor and Muse) who had contrasted the ‘grands tableaux’ of Greek and Roman authors to the kind of modern history ‘that weighs down the mind without enlightening it’; Voltaire who characterized his own historical endeavours as ‘a building’ and ‘an edifice’.29 Potts has identified a further form of affinity between Winckelmann’s endeavour and the kind of Enlightenment historiography that came in the course of the eighteenth century to be termed

26 Voltaire 1754: 1, ‘Introduction’. The publication history of the Essai sur les moeurs is complex, and a full edition did not appear until 1756. Fragments had been published in the periodical Mercure de France as early as 1745, however, and Winckelmann may well have known the three-volume edition published by Walther in 1754 under the title Essai sur l’histoire universelle depuis Charlemagne (Voltaire 1754). Quotations from the Essai given below are taken from this edition. On Winckelmann’s reading of Voltaire see further Fontius 1968: 18; Décultot 2000: 272–5; Justi I: 208–10. 27 KS 17–25 (first published 1800). Rehm dates the draft to late 1754/early 1755. For further discussion see Pommier 2003: 159–60; Décultot 2000: 256–62, 272–5. 28 KS 17, 20, 21, 22–3. 29 Voltaire 1754: 1, ‘Introduction’.

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‘philosophic’.30 Winckelmann states at the beginning of the Geschichte that its systematic ambitions are largely fulfilled in Part 1 of the book, a section he dubs a ‘treatise on the art of ancient peoples’.31 Here Winckelmann presents successive chapters on the ‘reasons and causes’ (‘Gründe und Ursachen’) of the particular characteristics of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman art. They are preceded by a short chapter on ‘The Origin of Art, and the Causes of its Diversity among Peoples’, in which Winckelmann presents in programmatic and summary terms the major theses that will structure his account. The discussion of this chapter is organized around two poles, indicated by the key terms ‘Ursprung’ and ‘Ursachen’ in its title. On the one hand, it elucidates a general thesis about the origins and progress of art. This is Winckelmann’s claim that: ‘The arts deriving from drawing commenced, like all inventions, with necessity; next, beauty was sought; and lastly, superfluity ensued. These are the three principal stages of art.’ With this statement, which he identifies as the ‘general conception’ (allgemeiner Begriff ) and the ‘scheme (Absicht) of this treatise on the history of art’, Winckelmann makes the claim that the artistic development of all peoples follows a uniform course.32 It will be the task of the following chapters’ more detailed discussions of individual ancient peoples to demonstrate that their particular artistic histories conform, mutatis mutandis, to this overall pattern. Yet Winckelmann also sought to do justice to observable variations between the works of art produced among different nations. Chapter 1 therefore also includes a discussion of the ‘reasons’ (Gründe) and ‘causes’ (Ursachen) that account for these. Local variations are to be explained by the differential effects of ‘climate’ (regional location, topography, weather, and diet) and ‘external circumstances’ (education, constitution, and government) upon the character of art.33 Winckelmann thus seeks to uphold a naturalistic but universalistic explanation for the empirical variations observable when ancient monuments are compared, vindicating claims about ancient art’s 30

Potts 1994: 33–46; see too Potts 1982. Despite some disagreements (see below), my discussion in the remainder of this section and the next is deeply indebted to Potts’s arguments. Pocock (1999: 17–25) gives a highly illuminating discussion of the different connotations of the term ‘philosophic’ in the context of Enlightenment historiography. 31 Winckelmann 2006: 71. 32 Ibid. 111. 33 Ibid. 117–23.

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overall pattern of development by deriving it from the regular operation of uniform causes across different climactic and socio-political environments. Potts connects this aspiration to Winckelmann’s reading of Montesquieu, seeing in Winckelmann’s ‘attempt to devise a typology of different forms of art from first principles, which would then be used to explain the various forms taken by art in particular places and periods’, certain ‘definite parallels’ with the approach to the comparative analysis of forms of government taken by Montesquieu in L’Esprit des lois.34 Winckelmann’s reading of both L’Esprit (1748) and the earlier Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) is securely documented, and Potts’s important suggestion about the methodological affinities between Winckelmann and Montesquieu will be pursued further below.35 With regard to Winckelmann’s general doctrine of causes, it should, however, be noted that both his notebooks and his earlier published writings suggest that he drew eclectically upon a series of debates over the relative influence of ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ causes which had occupied European intellectuals since the ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’, and that his views on their relative importance could shift from work to work.36 The prominence given to climate in the Gedancken reflects the strong influence upon Winckelmann during his Dresden years of the Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture of Jean-Baptiste Dubos.37 In the Geschichte, ‘moral’ as well as ‘physical’ causes are allowed explanatory force, and ‘moral causes’ come to the fore in Part 2, where Winckelmann advances his famous thesis that ‘it was through freedom that art [among the Greeks] advanced’.38 This suggests that it is a mistake to seek to align Winckelmann’s doctrine of causes too closely to any particular source. As was so often the case, he read liberally across all sides of the debate and combined what he found into his own synthesis.39 34

Potts 1994: 33; see too Carrithers 1986. See Décultot 2000: 153–5, 256–63 (who suggests that the Considérations were a more important influence upon Winckelmann than the Esprit); Lepenies 1986: 229–31. 36 Fink 1985. 37 See Baumecker 1933; Fontius 1968. 38 Winckelmann 2006: 299. 39 It may also be that Winckelmann changed his mind about the relative importance of ‘moral’ versus ‘physical’ causes during his years in Italy. His judgements about the mediocrity of the paintings excavated at Herculaneum—even those signed by Greek artists—may have prompted him to seek out political and social causes for the 35

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However the question of Winckelmann’s sources is resolved, it seems clear that it was his attempt to explain the development of ancient art by reference to the operation of universal causes that Winckelmann had in mind when he claimed that, by contrast to the ‘mere narrative[s] of the chronology and alterations of art’ provided by others, he had produced something systematic. The general presentation of the artistic styles of different peoples contained in Part 1 of the Geschichte did not, however, exhaust its contents. It was completed by a far shorter second part, in which Winckelmann addressed ‘history of art in a narrower sense, that is, with regard to its external circumstances, and indeed only for Greece and Rome’.40 What was the point of this section, and how did it relate to the more ‘systematic’ first part? Although there is some evidence that Winckelmann lengthened the Geschichte in response to hints dropped by his publisher, Part 2 certainly cannot be considered an afterthought.41 The précis published in BSW in 1757 (quoted at the start of Chapter 3, above) shows that Winckelmann envisaged a bipartite structure even then; in a letter to Walther of January 1759, he refers to ‘the second and stronger part’ as ‘finished, apart from the preface’.42 Throughout the Geschichte, Winckelmann insists that both Part 1 and Part 2 are concerned with ‘the essence of art’ (das Wesen der Kunst). It is, moreover, in Part 2 that many of Winckelmann’s most distinctive theses are developed: his claims about the link between Greek art and Greek freedom and the show-piece ekphrases of the Laocoön, Torso, Apollo, Borghese Warrior, and Antinous.43 Overall, Part 2 reads as an

deterioration of taste. Relevant too is a 1758 letter to Bianconi in which he remarks on his dismay at the ‘ugly and African blood’ observable in the physiognomies of Naples residents, conceding that this observation ‘somewhat undermines my System’ (Rehm I 211: 356, to Bianconi, 13 May 1758). Dubos had argued that the influence of climate was so dominant that immigrants to a particular region would become indistinguishable from autochthons within a couple of generations. 40 Winckelmann 2006: 71. 41 For a reconstruction of the Geschichte’s complicated composition history and of Winckelmann’s negotiations with Walther, see Décultot 2000: 43–4, 77–8. 42 Winckelmann to Walther, 13 Jan. 1759 (Rehm III 263). 43 Winckelmann 2006: 71, 186, 227.

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elaboration, in far greater depth and detail, of the third section of Part 1, chapter 4, where Winckelmann defines the four period styles of Greek art. Why does the Geschichte exhibit this recursive structure, in which one segment of the overall history of ancient art is discussed not once, but twice? To answer this, we must return to Winckelmann’s methodological discussion in the Preface and to further affinities with Enlightenment historiography identified by Potts. As we have seen, Winckelmann’s decision to organize the first part of the Geschichte around discussion of the ‘origins and causes’ of progress and variation in the art of ancient peoples reveals his aspiration to demonstrate that the diverse and particular practices of different nations result from the operation of uniform causes in history, and can be shown to conform to a universal pattern. This ambition was shared by the philosophic historians, yet Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume all recognized that the process of detecting such patterns in history was a complex and difficult one. Hume, for example, began his essay ‘On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ by warning that ‘there is nothing which requires greater nicety, in our enquiries concerning human affairs, than to distinguish exactly what is owing to chance, and what proceeds from causes; nor is there any subject, in which an author is more apt to deceive himself, by false subtilities and refinements.’ Consider, too, Montesquieu’s careful statements on the matter at the outset of L’Esprit des lois: I began by examining men, and I believed that, amidst the infinite diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies alone. I have set down the principles, and I have seen particular cases conform to them as if by themselves, the histories of all nations being but their consequences, and each particular law connecting with another law or dependent on a more general one. When I turned to antiquity, I sought to capture its spirit in order not to consider as similar those cases with real differences or to overlook differences in those that appear similar. I did not draw my principles from my prejudices but from the nature of things. Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only when one sees the chain connecting them with others. The more one reflects on the details, the more one will feel the certainty of the principles. As for the

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details, I have not given them all, for who could say everything without being tedious? 44

Montesquieu says that he has ‘set down’ or hypothesized (‘posé’) principles, yet also reassures his readers that they are drawn ‘de la nature des choses’, suggesting that they have been arrived at through consideration of the particular data of (historical) research and experience. Nevertheless, his claim that ‘bien des vérités ne se feront sentir qu’après qu’on aura vu la chaîne qui les lie à d’autres’ suggests the ‘certitude’ he claims for his principles cannot be definitively demonstrated. Rather, it is a form of conviction or ‘moral certainty’ achieved by the individual reader who follows Montesquieu’s investigation, moving back and forth between ‘principes’ and ‘détails’ again and again.45 Bridging the gap between observable ‘details’ and universally applicable ‘principles’ or ‘causes’ was recognized to be particularly problematic when historians turned to deal with periods and places

44 Montesquieu 1989: xliii–xliv; see too Hume 1758. Winckelmann’s manuscripts include a page of notes (BnF ALL 57, fol. 15r) from the fourth edition of Hume’s Essays (1753), comprising extracts from Hume’s essay ‘Of National Characters’. There is no evidence that Winckelmann was aware of the more powerful critique of the epistemology of causation put forward in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. On Hume’s essays as examples of Enlightened historiography see Pocock 1999: 163–257. 45 I therefore follow Durkheim’s (2009) interpretation, according to which it was primarily by comparison and induction that Montesquieu sought to secure epistemic warrant for his principles. My arguments about the character of the affinities between Winckelmann’s, Montesquieu’s, and Rousseau’s work differ slightly from those of Potts (1994), to whose important discussion they are, however, greatly indebted. In my opinion, Potts places too much emphasis upon what he terms the ‘deductive’ aspects of Winckelmann’s and Montesquieu’s thought (although deduction certainly plays an important role within both their systems—see again Durkheim (2009) on the case of Montesquieu). While I agree with Potts that the system presented in Part 1 of the Geschichte ‘is composed of hypothetical constructs devised so as to make sense of the empirical material’, I disagree with his characterization of these constructs as ‘axiomatic’ (Potts 1994: 41). Winckelmann would not have understood the general causes he identified as ‘axiomatic’ in a classical sense, because he by no means held them to be self-evident. Nor, however, does he see them as unsupported by the arguments put forward in the Geschichte: as will be argued below, the prime task of Part 2 of the Geschichte is to support Winckelmann’s claim that they are derived inductively from historical data. Along a similar vein, I cannot agree with Potts that ‘it is with Rousseau that Winckelmann shares a certain radical scepticism about the essentially conjectural nature of history’ (ibid. 43), for I take Winckelmann’s scepticism (such as it is) not to extend to historical narratives in general, but rather to the challenge of constructing a historical narrative in cases where evidence is scarce, fragmentary, or otherwise incomplete.

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for which evidence was scarce, fragmentary, or otherwise incomplete. Here, one weapon within the historian’s arsenal was conjecture, defined in a standard work of Winckelmann’s day as ‘a probable opinion, which derives from and rests upon known circumstances’.46 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of conjecture recommended its use in cases where firmer evidence (such as testimony) was lacking, or where more certain forms of reasoning (such as logic or mathematics) could not be pursued. It was accepted that the probative value of such reasoning was relatively weak: resort to conjecture was acceptable where other means of arriving at the truth were unavailable, but generated conclusions that remained provisional. The epistemic fragility of conjectural reasoning is paraded in what is perhaps the most famous work of the period to use it to construct a picture of past times. Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes was published eight years before the Geschichte, in 1755. Unlike Montesquieu, Rousseau is not among the writers excerpted in Winckelmann’s surviving commonplace books. The similarities between some of their methodological statements are nevertheless so striking as to make it hard to believe that Winckelmann was unaware of Rousseau’s work.47 Rousseau’s resort to conjecture in the Discours is necessitated by his decision to exclude Scriptural witness from his consideration of the origins of human society. In default of such testimony, conjecture presents the only way in which the state of nature can be investigated. Throughout the Discours Rousseau draws attention to the ‘hypothetical and conditional’ status of his arguments, emphasizing ‘the impossibility . . . of rejecting certain hypotheses without . . . being in a position to attach to them the certainty of facts’: 46 ‘eine wahrscheinliche Meynung, so aus gewissen Umständen entstehet und herrühret’ (Zedler 1731–54: s.v. ‘Conjectura’). See too the explanation in the early seventeenth-century Lexicon philosophicum of Rudolph Goclenius: ‘Coniectamus ea, quorum rationes certas ignoramus’ (Goclenius 1613: s.v. ‘coniectura’). The use of conjecture to reconstruct periods of history for which documentary evidence was lacking was, of course, expanded greatly in the decade after Winckelmann’s death by the ‘conjectural historians’ of Enlightened Scotland (Höpfl 1978; Emerson 1984). With the exception of some of Hume’s essays, these works came too late to have influenced the Geschichte; but it is noteworthy that the longer tradition of conjectural history Emerson reconstructs includes figures such as George Turnbull and Thomas Blackwell, whose works Winckelmann did know and use. For discussion of the broader early modern background to these questions of historical methodology, see Shapiro 1983; Serjeantson 2006; Grafton 2007. 47 Potts 1994: 43–5.

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I admit that since the events I have to describe could have occurred in several ways, I can choose between them only on the basis of conjectures; but not only do such conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable that can be derived from the nature of things and the only means available to discover the truth, it does not follow that the consequences I want to deduce from mine will therefore be conjectural since, on the principles I have just established, no other system could be formed that would not give me the same results and from which I could not draw the same conclusions.48

Winckelmann appears to echo Rousseau in an important passage that occurs towards the end of the Geschichte’s Preface: I have ventured some thoughts that may not appear to be adequately proven, yet perhaps they can encourage others who wish to investigate ancient art to proceed yet further, and how often a conjecture has become a truth as a result of a later discovery. Conjectures, or at least those that are attached by a thread to something firm, are no more to be banished from a work of this kind than are hypotheses from natural science. Like the framing of a building (wie das Gerüst zu einem Gebäude), they are indispensable—if, owing to the gaps in our knowledge of ancient art, we do not want to have to keep having to make huge leaps over the many empty areas. If some of the explanations that I put forward, when taken individually, are not as clear as the light of day and are only probabilities, they will, when taken together and connected with each other, constitute a proof.49

With his claim that conjectures are indispensable where we face ‘gaps in our knowledge of ancient art’, Winckelmann (like Rousseau) connects its use to the problem of constructing a historical narrative where the evidence is scarce. Examination of the Geschichte shows that such ‘empty areas’ extend well beyond chapter 1’s reconstruction of the ‘origins’ of art. The following example comes from chapter 3’s account of the development—or rather, the lack of development—of Etruscan art. Winckelmann’s decision to devote a chapter of the Geschichte to ‘the Art of the Etruscans and of their Neighbours’ is fully in accord with his contemporaries’ tastes. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a crescendo of interest in Etruscan antiquities, fuelled by such erudite works as Thomas Dempster’s De Etruria regali (1723–4) and the efforts of Italian scholars such as Scipione Maffei and Antonio Gori. It was common for antiquarians to lament the

48

Rousseau 1997: 132, 159.

49

Winckelmann 2006: 78.

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paucity of ancient testimony as to Etruscan cultural and social practices, which rendered interpretation of their material remains more tentative than that of the Egyptians, Romans, or Greeks. Here, for example, is Caylus’s variation upon this theme in the chapter on Etruscan antiquities from Volume 1 of the Recueil: I would begin this second part of my work with investigations into the origin of the Etruscans, if antiquity had provided me with the necessary aids. But none of their historians has come down to us; and the majority of their inscriptions—those that time has preserved—are incomprehensible, or can at most give us an imperfect idea of their spoken language, and teach us nothing of their particular manners. Certain features which recur in those authors that we do have show that this was a brave people, that it was powerful and that it maintained a maritime empire for some time. In the following period, luxury considerably weakened and enervated it, and gradually prepared it for the yoke of the Gauls and Romans. It was superstitious to excess, always concerned with deriving omens from birds or deriving the will of the gods from the entrails of sacrificial victims. It was enthusiastic for games and spectacles, which played a part in its religion. Nevertheless it loved the arts, and cultivated them with success . . .50

Caylus assembles what evidence he can find in ancient authors (Diodorus Siculus, Athenaeus, Livy, Tertullian, Pliny) to show that the Etruscans were a ‘brave’ and ‘powerful’ people. He notes their ancient reputation for superstition and delight in bloody spectacle, and briefly considers Buonarotti’s conjecture that they descended from the ancient Egyptians, before proceeding to discuss particular artefacts chosen to illustrate their ‘goût’. Using a similar range of sources, Winckelmann attempts a different kind of account: This first segment [of the discussion of Etruscan art] begins with the circumstances favorable to art among this people and then seeks to give a probable cause for the nature of their art. Concerning the circumstances in which art found itself among the Etruscans, because the constitution and government exerted a great influence on art in every land, it is thus certain that in the freedom that the Etruscans enjoyed under their rulers, their art as well as their artists were able to gain eminence and make great advances. . . . But as art among this people did not attain the heights of Greek art and as exaggeration ruled their works in the best period, the reason for this must be sought in the aptitude of this people. One possibility is that the disposition of 50

Caylus 1752–67: 1, 77–8.

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the Etruscans was more tinged with melancholy than was the case with the Greeks, as we can infer from their religion and their customs. Such a temperament (of which the greatest individuals, as Aristotle said, had their share) is suited to profound investigations, but it gives rise to violent emotions, and the senses are not touched with that gentle agitation that renders the mind fully susceptible to beauty. This conjecture is based in the first place on their soothsaying, which was first practiced in the West by this people. Thus, Etruria is proclaimed the mother and parturient of superstition [Arnob., Contr. gent., 7], and their divinatory writings filled those seeking advice with fear and terror—so frightful were the images and words in which they were couched [Cic. De divinat. 1.12]. We can gain an idea of their priests from those who, in the 399th year of the city of Rome, armed with flaming torches and snakes, led the Tarquinii against the Romans [Liv., 7.17]. We can further infer such a temperament from the bloody fights held at funerals and in public arenas, which were first established among them [Dempster, De Etruria Regali, 1.3.42] and also later introduced by the Romans; such contests were a horror to the civilized Greeks [Pl. Rep., 439e–440a]. In recent times, self-flagellation was first practiced in Tuscany. On Etruscan funeral urns, we often see representations of bloody fights over the deceased, which never happened among the Greeks. By contrast, Roman funeral urns, because they were for the most part made by the Greeks, have pleasant pictures . . .51

Winckelmann’s discussion begins with a consideration of the ‘external circumstances’ of climate, education, constitution, and government which, as he had explained in chapter 1, have an influence upon the art of all peoples. On most of these the Etruscans score highly, but even with ‘external circumstances’ as favourable as those of the Greeks, the Etruscans failed to equal the latter’s artistic excellence. Winckelmann therefore hazards a conjectural explanation of why the expected further development did not take place: his suggestion (later taken up by Nietzsche) that the Etruscan temperament was ‘more tinged with melancholy’ than that of Greeks. The result is hardly a very rich or detailed picture of Etruscan culture. What is noteworthy is the language Winckelmann uses to present his conclusions about Etruscan temperament. While he says it is ‘certain’ (‘gewiß’ ) that the Etruscans’ climate, constitution, and government afforded them maximal opportunity for artistic development, his judgement that their temperament was the cause of the arrested development of their art is introduced as ‘one possibility’ (‘einige Wahrscheinlichkeit’), and

51

Winckelmann 2006: 160.

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then dubbed a ‘conjecture’ (‘Mutmaßung’) to be inferred from their religious and social customs. It is not that there is no evidence to suggest that the Etruscans were melancholy: Winckelmann cites both literary sources (Livy, Cicero, Arnobius) and archaeological finds. But his explanation of the characteristics of their art in terms of that temperament goes beyond what is entailed by those sources: it exceeds what can be ‘read off ’ in any straightforward sense from the available evidence. What does the ancient historian have to go on when forming conjectures in this manner? Or, to put it another way: if conjectures are to be used precisely in cases where the evidence falls short in some way, how do they gain that degree of authority necessary in order to command acceptance? Here, Winckelmann seems to offer two somewhat different answers. The first is touched upon in a passage that occurs towards the end of the Geschichte’s Preface: In this history of art, I have tried to discover the truth, and because I have had every opportunity for leisurely study of the works of ancient art, and because I have spared nothing to acquire the necessary knowledge, I believed myself prepared to compose this treatise. Since my youth, the love of art has been my greatest passion, and though education and circumstances led me on a very different track, my inner calling has always made itself felt. All that I have cited as evidence—paintings, statues, gems and coins—I have myself seen and examined repeatedly. However, to aid the reader’s understanding, I have nonetheless cited from books both gems and coins that are tolerably engraved.52

This passage—a variation on the historian’s traditional claim to bona fides—might seem a fairly typical statement of credentials in a work of early modern scholarship. It may also perhaps be read as another restatement of Winckelmann’s well-known insistence on the authority of the eye: the necessity of residing in Rome and studying the antiquities at first hand in order to arrive at an authoritative analysis of ancient art. It is nevertheless worth pausing over one element: the love that has led Winckelmann, through all the many twists and turns of life, to pursue the study of ancient art. We might think Winckelmann’s profession to love art is not so significant: merely a flowery way of indicating long hours spent in libraries and statue courts. This is belied when Winckelmann returns explicitly to the theme of love of antiquity (and of its art) in the conclusion to the Geschichte: 52

Ibid. 76.

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I have in this history of art already gone beyond its set bounds, and although contemplating the collapse of art has driven me nearly to despair, still, like someone who, in writing the history of his native land, must touch upon the destruction that he himself has witnessed, I could not keep myself from gazing after the fate of works of art as far as my eye could see. Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tearful eyes her departing sweetheart, with no hope of seeing him again, and believes she can glimpse even in the distant sail the image of her lover—so we, like the beloved, have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining. But this arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost, and we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals. In this, we often are like individuals who wish to converse with spirits and believe they can see something where nothing exists. The word antiquity has become a prejudice, but even this bias is not without its uses. One always imagines that there is so much to find, so one searches much to catch sight of something. Had the ancients been poorer, they would have written better about art: compared to them, we are like badly portioned heirs; but we turn over every stone, and by drawing inferences from many tiny details, we at least arrive at a probable assertion that can be more instructive than the accounts left by the ancients, which, except for a few moments of insight, are merely historical. One must not hesitate to seek the truth, even to the detriment of one’s reputation; a few must err, so that many may find the right way.53

This is the final paragraph of the Geschichte: an allusive and confusing passage in which Winckelmann likens himself as an ancient historian to Ariadne, the deserted but still-adoring woman who helplessly watches her perfidious lover sail off into the distance.54 The second half of the passage reveals that the comparison is offered as a defence of the conjectures by which Winckelmann has built up his Lehrgebäude. As regards evidence for ancient art, lovers of antiquity are in the position of ‘badly portioned heirs’, but by drawing inferences from tiny details they can arrive at a ‘probable assertion’—a conjecture—that will be ‘instructive’. The conclusion to the Geschichte therefore echoes the defences of conjectural reasoning to be found in its Preface. What distinguishes this passage from those earlier discussions is its foregrounding of the role of love and imaginative desire in the historian’s activity. According to Winckelmann, desire or love is an absolutely vital attitude on the part of the historian who ventures into territories 53 54

Ibid. 351, translation modified. See Davis 1994; Potts 1994: 47–50; Harloe 2010; Güthenke 2010.

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where the evidence is scarce, and thus takes as an object of study something that, like antiquity, cannot be recovered in its entirety. Desire is necessary to motivate her to persist in her painstaking collection and examination of all the evidence that remains. As Winckelmann puts it, ‘we turn over every stone’, but we do so only because we are searching for the image of a lover who is only just—or perhaps not even—in sight. But Winckelmann accords a second, equally fundamental role to desire when he says that the word ‘antiquity’ has become a prejudice, but that this is not without its uses. Again, this recalls a passage earlier in the Geschichte, when Winckelmann offers ‘youthful beginners and travelers’ what he claims is their ‘first and most important lesson on viewing Greek figures’: ‘Some err . . . out of caution, when they wish to set aside all prejudices in favor of the ancient works while contemplating them. Rather, they should approach them with a much more positive bias, for in the conviction that beauty is to be found, they will seek it, and some of it will reveal itself to them.’55 Seek, and ye shall find: such favourable convictions are absolutely necessary not only to the historian’s collection of evidence, but to her interpretation of them. Without convictions structured by desire, she will be unable to judge what is significant in her objects of study. Winckelmann is, of course, aware that such convictions can lead the historian astray. In our desire to recover antiquity, ‘we often are like individuals who wish to converse with spirits and believe they can see something where nothing exists’. But without this imaginative desire—without this fantasy—the historian will be unable to detect what is there to be detected in her sources: she will be unable to formulate conjectures and hypotheses that are plausible and authoritative. Love, desire, and imagination are thus fundamental, on Winckelmann’s view, to the role of the historian. Yet it is also here, perhaps, that Winckelmann saw Part 2 of the Geschichte having an important role to play. Although most eighteenth-century antiquarians would have agreed that lack of ancient testimony leaves interpretations of Etruscan art and culture provisional, these problems did not appear to apply to the same extent in the case of Greek and Roman art. Part 2 of the Geschichte relates the periods of the overall history of ancient art for which more ample historical evidence survives: Greece from the time of Perikles onwards, and Rome from the second

55

Winckelmann 2006: 214.

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century bce. It is for these periods and places that Winckelmann could amass the kind of testimony that enabled him to present the artefacts in conjunction with a fuller discussion of those ‘external circumstances’, in a manner that supported his conjectures as to the overall causes of art’s development. The conjectural and analogical reasoning of Part 1 is notably absent from Part 2 of the Geschichte, where ‘Mutmaßungen’ and ‘Wahrscheinlichkeiten’ are replaced by confident indicatives. It was only for the latter periods of the overall historical progression sketched out in Part 1 of the Geschichte that Winckelmann was able to put flesh on the bones of his system by turning to ‘the history of art in a narrower sense’: a relatively detailed analysis of artefacts in the context of the cultural, social, and political circumstances that obtained in their historical contexts of production. Yet by vindicating one part of the system, showing the close fit between conjecture and reality in the case of the rise and decline of Greek art, it might bring a higher degree of plausibility to the whole. We can now begin to see why Wilamowitz located Winckelmann at the root of a new conception of classical studies, which sought out antiquity ‘in its essence and in every facet of its existence’. The Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums encompassed far more than the history of ancient art. Winckelmann’s attempt to identify and reconstruct the historical contexts of the artefacts he discussed, and to investigate the ‘general’ historical causes of their variations in form, involved him in yoking the style analyses pioneered by Caylus to a broader cultural, social, and political history, which appeared to make good ancient writers’ summary accounts of the arts’ growth, alteration, and fall. By producing a continuous narrative account of art among the Greeks and Romans, Winckelmann went beyond anything achieved by Vasari and Caylus; and by his attempt to link the visual evidence of style to wider considerations of the operation of ‘causes’, he also opened out the Geschichte from the relatively narrow orbit of connoisseurial concerns towards something more ambitious. Winckelmann’s endeavour to understand the rise and decline of classical art in ‘philosophical’ terms involved him setting it, as a cultural practice, within ‘the totality of ways of living’ that characterized societies in the ancient world.56 In this respect, Décultot’s claim that Winckelmann differs from I take the term ‘totality of ways of living’ from Pocock 1999: 72, who uses it in the context of Voltairean historiography. 56

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Voltaire by virtue of making art the ‘heros eponyme’ of his history must be qualified by one of her earlier statements: ‘More than a strictly artistic history of antiquity, this work purports to be a history of the political, climactic, sociological and historical conditions that accompanied the development of art in the ancient world. In short, the Geschichte der Kunst purports to be the history of a culture.’57 It was for his endeavour to unite archaeological and literary evidence into a comprehensive picture of ancient culture that Winckelmann was praised by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical scholars surveyed in Chapter 1. Yet the Geschichte is also fascinating for Winckelmann’s admission of the epistemic fragility of his historical edifice. By emphasizing his reliance upon conjecture, and professing the importance of imagination and desire in the construction of his Lehrgebäude, Winckelmann paraded and dramatized the openness and uncertainties inherent in the process of investigating and reconstructing antiquity. It is far from clear that the full scope of the resulting historical model was apparent even to Winckelmann himself. It was certainly not reflected in the earliest periodical reviews, which tended to emphasize those aspects of Winckelmann’s magnum opus that were most continuous with his earlier, connoisseurial works.58

‘DIE LIEBHABER HABEN DIESEM WERKE SCHON LANGE MIT UNGEDULD ENTGEGEN GESEHEN’: THE EARLIEST CRITICAL RECEPTIONS OF THE GESCHICHTE 5 9 The longest review of the first edition of the Geschichte was also one of the earliest: a forty-five-page-long notice that appeared in BSW in 1764. Weisse, who took upon himself the task of commenting on the work of one of his most eminent contributors, began by pointing out 57

Décultot 2000: 261. What follows is merely a selection from some periodical reviews and other responses to the Geschichte produced during Winckelmann’s lifetime. For fuller surveys see Hatfield 1943 and Potts 1978. 59 Weisse 1764: 41. 58

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the honour that redounded on Germany for having produced ‘the first man who has provided something systematic in the area of art’, but went on to express reservations about the details of this system.60 Noting that Winckelmann attributed the differences in art among ancient peoples to three main causes—climate, education, and way of thinking—he rejected Winckelmann’s appeal to climate on the basis that it appeared to deprive the ‘northern nations’ of the hope of producing ‘great men of every kind’.61 Most of Weisse’s review is taken up with excerpting Winckelmann’s comments on the Kennzeichen of Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greek art; he also lists the principal works Winckelmann cites as examples of each, and notes cases where he diverges from the published opinions of other antiquarians. He has no specific comments to make about the freedom thesis advanced in Part 2; indeed, on his view the principal merits of the Geschichte’s second part consist in its presentation of ‘many new observations, and its chronological ordering . . . and also that he imparts these things to us in his particular, pleasing prose style, and intersperses them with remarks for Art and for her friends’.62 This epitomizes Weisse’s approach to the Geschichte: as a compendium, analogous to the seventeenth-century Catalogus of Franciscus Junius, of useful observations for connoisseurs and amateurs.63 Weisse suggested that in addition to interesting Liebhaber, the Geschichte contained matters of note for ‘the scholar and the artist’.64 The scholar’s perspective is given somewhat more attention in the write-up that appeared in Nova acta eruditorum (the successor to the famous Leipzig journal Acta eruditorum) in early summer 1765. Whereas more than half of Weisse’s review had been taken up with recapitulating Winckelmann’s discussion of Greek art in Part 1, chapter 4 of the Geschichte, the Acta reviewer was content to recommend the careful study of this section to ‘whoever possesses the desire for a profounder understanding of the art of the Greeks’. Compared with Weisse, the Acta reviewer gives more space to the qualities of Winckelmann’s work as a ‘systema’ (a term glossed within the review as a ‘complexum disputationum et praeceptorum de natura, generibus et adminiculis artium’).65 Winckelmann’s account of the general causes of artistic variation and the overall scheme of its development 60 63 64

61 62 Ibid. 41–2. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 268. For Winckelmann’s use of Junius see Harloe 2007. 65 Weisse 1764: 41. [Anon.] 1765: 354, 342.

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is accordingly rehearsed at greater length, and relatively more space is devoted to summarizing the criticisms of prior antiquarians and connoisseurs made in his Preface. The Acta reviewer also notes the Geschichte’s ‘exceedingly sad conclusion (tristior exitus)’, interpreting Winckelmann’s final words interestingly as an exhortation to artists to continue to imitate the Greek ideal. Perhaps the most perceptive early reviewer of the Geschichte was, however, Christian Adolph Klotz, who published a highly enthusiastic notice in the first issue of his new journal, Acta litteraria.66 Klotz praises the Geschichte as innovatory in two respects: in its exposition of the origins, growth, change, and fall of the arts, and in its demonstration of the diverse styles of art of different peoples and periods by reference to surviving monuments.67 Klotz also recognizes that Part 2 contains not only narrative but argument, characterizing Winckelmann’s aim in that section as the demonstration that knowledge and practice of the arts varies over time, but that they are particularly nourished by ‘plenty, prosperity, and often also competition (abundantia, copia, saepe etiam ambitione)’.68 Klotz thus recognizes the continuity in purpose between Parts 1 and 2 of the Geschichte.69 Like Weisse, however, and consistent with his own intellectual interests, Klotz sees the overall value of the Geschichte as lying in its identification of stylistic Kennzeichen and its provision of precepts for connoisseurs and artists.70 That the dominant frame of reading for Winckelmann remained an aesthetic or connoisseurial one is also confirmed by the most influential critical discussion of Winckelmann’s work to appear during his lifetime: Lessing’s Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoön, or the Limits of Painting and Poetry) of 1766. Laokoon was first published almost two-and-a-half years after the Geschichte, and assessment of its relation to that work is complicated by Lessing’s fiction that he had not yet had the opportunity 66 [Klotz] 1764. It is probable that Klotz also authored the review that appeared in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen in 1765; see Chapter 6 below. 67 [Klotz] 1764: 338–9. 68 [Klotz] 1764: 351, translating Winckelmann’s own words at the beginning of Part 2 (Winckelmann 2006: 299). 69 So too Winckelmann’s friend from Nöthnitz, Johann Michael Francke, in his review for the Erlangische Gelehrte Anmerkungen und Nachrichten in May 1764 (Rehm IV 234: 395–8). 70 [Klotz] 1764: 349.

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to study the latter in depth.71 This protestation should not be taken at face value; it is nevertheless true that Lessing confines direct commentary upon the Geschichte to his four closing sections (xxvi–xxix), and that this takes the form of a series of arguments against Winckelmann on individual points of erudition, which appear unrelated to the rich set of musings on aesthetic theory developed in sections i–xxv. As we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6, Christian Gottlob Heyne was to develop some of these observations into a far-reaching critique of Winckelmann; but it was the Gedancken, and particularly its idealizing description of the Laocoön group, that provided both the pretext and the starting-point for Lessing’s work. This focus is consistent with the responses of other early readers: it appears to have been among Liebhaber and connoisseurs that the work had its earliest impact. Such may, however, have been Winckelmann’s intention all along. His disdain for erudite scholarship and ‘Universitäts-Gelehrsamkeit’ is well known, and although his major works of the mid-1760s (the Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst of 1766 and Monumenti antichi inediti of 1767) contained much that might be of interest to the antiquarian, they were nonetheless presented as works written primarily in the service of artists’ education. Just how far Winckelmann was from self-consciously writing for a new scholarly discipline is revealed by a comment (typical among many) made to Walther, within twelve months of the Geschichte’s appearance: ‘For one must first of all consider that I am writing in Rome and not in Göttingen, of things that conduce to the enlightenment of our nation and to good taste, not of matters that concern erudition alone.’72

71 Lessing 1766: 189 (section xxvi); for a detailed discussion of the work’s genesis, with some comments on its relation to Winckelmann, see Nisbet 2008: 400–5. Numerous drafts of Laokoon survive, with the earliest very likely dating to the beginning of 1763. It appears that Lessing’s plan of writing on the differences between poetry and the visual arts predated his decision to focus upon Winckelmann; the earliest drafts concentrate upon criticisms of Caylus and Spence, such as appear in sections vii–xiv of the published version. 72 Winckelmann to Walther, 23 October 1764 (Rehm III 682: 62–3).

Part II On the Contours of Das Altertum and the Possibility of its Recovery: Heyne versus Wolf

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Introduction to Part II In 1805 a fat, edited volume was published in Tübingen as a contribution to German letters. Entitled Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert in Briefen und Aufsätzen (Winckelmann and his Century in Letters and Essays), it combined an edition of twenty-seven letters Winckelmann had sent from Dresden and Italy to his childhood friend Berendis with a series of appreciations of his life and work. The edition was not a success, and attracted few periodical reviews. This must have been displeasing to its contributors, who included some important figures in German intellectual and cultural life. The editor was none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the collection was the occasion of the first appearance in print of his celebrated essay on Winckelmann. In addition it contained an account of art in the eighteenth century by Johann Heinrich Meyer (with further remarks by the art theorist and critic Karl Ludwig Fernow), a discussion of Winckelmann as an art historian (also by Meyer), and an essay on his education by Friedrich August Wolf, Professor of Philology and Pedagogy at the University of Halle and a high-profile figure in German literary life since the publication, ten years before, of his iconoclastic Prolegomena ad Homerum. Today it is only for Goethe’s essay that the book is remembered. Yet it is worth considering it as a whole, for it reflects some of the trends and traditions that had begun grow up around Winckelmann in the three-and-a-half decades since his untimely death. This was the fifth collection of Winckelmann’s letters to have appeared since the 1770s, joining two volumes of his correspondence with scholars and notables (Bünau, Francke, Heyne, and Johann Hermann von Riedesel) edited by the Saxon Royal Librarian, Karl Wilhelm Daßdorf; one of his letters to ‘Swiss friends’ (Salomon Geßner, Johann Caspar and

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Heinrich Füssli, and Paul and Leonhard Usteri); two volumes of his friendly and, at times, risqué Briefwechsel with Wilhelm MuzellStosch; and one slim volume of letters sent to Reinhold von Berg.1 The prominence accorded to the letters is underlined at the end of Goethe’s volume, where he appends an index of all the previously published letters of Winckelmann in chronological order and recommends their leisurely perusal to everyone who wishes to observe his character in ‘unmediated’ fashion.2 Goethe’s suggestion is prescriptive rather than descriptive; his presentation nevertheless indicates the growing fascination with Winckelmann in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the increasing importance of his correspondence in shaping understandings of his life and work. The character sketches which accompany the letters appear at first sight to be an attempt to fulfil a long-standing desideratum in the world of German letters by supplying a definitive biography of Winckelmann. In the years after 1768 it seemed as if this need would be met by Johann Michael Francke, under whom Winckelmann had worked in Bünau’s library and with whom he had maintained a correspondence throughout his years in Rome. Francke’s own death in 1775 left his life of Winckelmann unwritten, and readers had to make do with the summary narrative which prefaced the 1776 Vienna edition of the Geschichte.3 The desire for a more extensive history of Winckelmann’s life had been voiced frequently thereafter, but Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert was far from providing such an account. In this respect Goethe’s preface strikes something of a defensive note, making mention of unspecified ‘obstacles’ which, he confesses, have forced the friends to produce a work that comprises ‘only half of the whole that was planned’. Nevertheless, Goethe continues, ‘in the present case, the half should perhaps be valued more than the whole, as by consideration of the three

1

Daßdorf 1777–80; Usteri 1778; Anon. 1781; Voigt 1784. ‘einen solchen Charakter unmittelbar anzuschauen’ (Goethe 1805: 471). 3 [Riedel] 1776: 2. xxii–lxxii. For Francke’s death and the unfinished project of a biography of Winckelmann, see Daßdorf 1777–80: 1 ‘Vorbericht’ (unnumbered part). The Vienna edition, published without individual attribution but edited by Friedrich Justus Riedel, purported to be based upon a manuscript copy of the annotated exemplar of the Geschichte found among Winckelmann’s belongings at his death. For some observations on this second, highly problematic, edition, see Potts 2006: 14–15. The new, critical edition of the Geschichte edited by Borbein, Kunze, et al. (Winckelmann 2002–7) allows readers to compare the first and second editions. 2

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individual views of the same subject contained herein the reader may be all the more stimulated and provoked to his own reproduction of this significant life and character’. And he concluded that it was very much in the spirit of Winckelmann ‘to offer up in kindly fashion something that is just ready, even if it is not entirely finished, so that it may in its own way play a timely role in the great circuit of life and education’.4 It has sometimes been suggested that Wolf was the principal cause of Goethe’s trouble.5 Wolf had agreed to write for the book as early as spring 1804, but—despite chivvying from Goethe in letters—he did not produce his essay until March 1805, long after the other contributions were complete. The letter he sent with his submission suggests he had difficulty coming up with the goods: Wolf apologizes that the piece he is sending is shorter than he had envisaged, complains (with genteel false modesty) that he is unaccustomed to writing in German, and suggests that he is still making changes: Even now I cross out the title: some words on [Winckelmann] as a scholar. For it is in no way satisfactory. The fault lies not with me alone, but also with the material. Palmariae emendationes, as my people say, or indeed the explications of individual passages that reveal the true philologist, are to be found rarely in Winckelmann, and in historical criticism he is insufficiently shrewd and diligent . . . Anyway, it is entirely up to you what you want to do with these pages; they are utterly unripe for the press.6

Perhaps the more intriguing questions, however, concern why Wolf was involved in the first place. Both Meyer and Fernow were longstanding friends and collaborators of Goethe, resident in Weimar and Jena and close to the inner circle of Weimar classicism.7 Wolf wrote from further away, in Halle, and had made his name with a work which appeared to exemplify the very opposite of the Weimarer 4

Goethe 1969: 208–9. Holtzhauer 1969: 9. 6 Wolf to Goethe, 18 Mar. 1805 (Mandelkow 1982: 1 426, emphasis in original). 7 Meyer, who was a draughtsman and engraver as well as a writer, had first met Goethe in Italy in 1786, lived in Weimar from the early 1790s onwards (lodging for a time in Goethe’s house), and had worked closely with Goethe and Schiller on their short-lived classicizing journal Die Propyläen. Fernow too was closely linked to Goethe and Schiller’s circle, and had obtained the posts of Extraordinary Professor of Aesthetics at Jena and Ducal Librarian at Weimar at Goethe’s recommendation. Both were involved in the production of the first edition of Winckelmann’s collected writings (Fernow, Meyer, and Schulze 1808–20). 5

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Kunstfreunde’s aestheticizing and classicizing interests. For Wolf ’s Prolegomena had deprived the classical tradition of one of its greatest heroes: destroying the image of godlike Homer, prince of poets, and replacing it with the prospect of an irrecoverable tradition and a set of Alexandrian editors. It was Wolf ’s work which, over the course of the following century, was to be canonized as ‘the manifesto of the German historical spirit, the charter of classical scholarship as an independent discipline, the model for historical investigations in other fields from medieval German to theology’.8 It sits oddly with the received image of its author to have been involved in a project such as Goethe’s. Perhaps this was one reason for Wolf ’s discomfort: we shall nevertheless see that this is far from the only time that the ‘founder’ of scientific Altertumswissenschaft has been associated with Winckelmann. The second part of this book seeks to explore their connection, and we must begin in 1795: the year of the Prolegomena’s publication.

8

Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985: 29.

5 Homeric questions: a late eighteenth-century priority dispute In dem litterarischen Freystaat muss es jedem frey stehen, sein Recht zu behaupten; und einen Wald, den man mit eigner Hand gepflanzt hat, lässt man sich nicht so geradezu umhauen. Heyne, Gött. Anzz. 1792. S.197. (Cited in Wolf, Briefe an Heyne, as epigraph)

One November day in 1795 Christian Gottlob Heyne, Professor of Eloquence and Poetry at the University of Göttingen and Court Councillor to the Hanoverian administration, received an unexpected letter. Its contents—a request to review a recently published work in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen—were probably no surprise to the eminent philologist, who had edited the scholarly review journal since 1770 and must have received such appeals on a weekly, if not a daily, basis. The sender of this particular letter, however, was Friedrich August Wolf, a young philologist who had studied with Heyne almost two decades before. It had been upon Heyne’s recommendation that Wolf had obtained his first teaching position, as master in the Pädagogium (Upper School) at Ilfeld.1 Since 1783 he had been installed as Professor of Philology and Pedagogy at the University of Halle, where he had begun to make something of a name for himself as a teacher, as well as with a series of well-received publications in classical studies: editions of Plato’s Symposium (1782), Hesiod (1782), a school text of Homer (1784–5) and a groundbreaking study of Demosthenes’ Against Leptines (1789). In the early 1780s the two had maintained a respectful, if somewhat formal, 1

Grafton 1999: 15.

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correspondence; but this had died out more than a decade earlier, since when—if the rumours were to be believed—Wolf had taken to criticizing Heyne in a manner bordering on mockery, both in private conversation and in lectures. Heyne had nevertheless received a presentation copy of Wolf ’s latest work, the Prolegomena to his revised edition of the Homeric poems, direct from Halle upon its publication the preceding spring.2 Wolf began his letter by alluding to that gift and apologizing for his tardiness in informing Heyne about the recent progress of his Homeric researches. He had remained silent, as he explained, out of modesty: despite his publisher’s exhortations, Wolf wished neither to harry periodical editors into commissioning reviews of his work, nor to influence whatever opinions of it they might publish by appeal to pre-existing acquaintance. The unbiased and free judgement of ‘three men of insight’ would be far more welcome to him than a dozen less expert voices raised in acclaim.3 And Wolf was at pains to emphasize that he was now asking Heyne to review the Prolegomena not as a result of dissatisfaction at the lack of attention his work had so far received, but rather because of one prominent and unwelcome piece of attention it had attracted.4

HERDER’S ESSAY AND WOLF ’S (UN)RELUCTANT DEBUT IN THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS This was Herder’s essay on Homer as foster-child or ‘favourite’ of Time (‘Homer—ein Günstling der Zeit’), which had appeared anonymously in Die Horen, the polemical literary and cultural journal edited by Schiller, in September that year. Over thirty-five pages of characteristically intricate and meandering prose, Herder had enthusiastically celebrated the latest Homeric researches as confirming three fundamental ideas about Homer which he claimed to have held since his youth, and to have found confirmed by repeated reading of the poems. Constructing his discussion in ‘the temporal order . . . in which these suppositions grew within me’, Herder claimed that even

2 3

Wolf to Heyne, 18 Nov. 1795, in Wolf 1797: 3. 4 Ibid. 3–4. Ibid. 11.

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in childhood, when he had ‘read Homer almost entirely as a fairytale’, he had ‘naively’ (unbefangen) asked whether or not the Iliad and the Odyssey were works by the same poet.5 Longinus’ famous statement that the former was the product of Homer’s youth, the latter of his old age, had contented him only insofar as he interpreted it ‘in my own manner’, understanding Longinus’ simile of the rising and setting sun in such a way that ‘I henceforth considered the world of the Iliad to be that of the Orient, the Odyssey’s that of the Occident’.6 A second reading, undertaken with a conscious effort to forget all previously inculcated poetic theories and rules, produced a strong sense of wonder ‘over its wealth and order in the presentation of forms, over the marvellous sense of the whole in even its smallest parts’. Herder now realized why the Greeks had thought of Homer as divine, and why they had treated his works as ‘an encyclopedia of all human knowledge—for truly a world of characters and insights about heaven and earth are contained right there’.7 Yet this insight only prompted Herder to doubt the received view of the poems’ authorship more strongly, for: ‘How could one singer possess such an allencompassing, precisely ordering mind?’8 Reading the path-breaking researches of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood only piqued his curiosity further. Eventually Herder undertook a third reading, during which he paid close attention to the poet’s mode of song (Gesangsweise). The structure of the hexameter— the alternating, ever-advancing march of his images and sounds . . . the oftrepeated words and epithets, the recurring lines and half-lines, the easy connection of thoughts by means of a host of particles which appear superfluous to us but which impart structure and movement to living speech, finally the whole run of easy periods, in which everything makes its entrance

—convinced him that Homer’s poetry was composed to be sung and heard, rather than to be read.9 Here Herder drew on his earlier investigations into folk poetry in order to provide a vivid account of the Greek singer’s art:

5 8

6 [Herder] 1795: 54. Ibid. 55. 9 Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59.

7

Ibid. 56.

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He could never, must never stop and pause, the song drew him ever onwards. But those easy and uniform verse-endings effortlessly summoned up the continuation of the image or the narrative; a series of repeating expressions and verses gave the singer time to think ahead while they filled the ear of his audience with constant pleasure. Passages could be transplanted, countless small motifs reused, so that anyone who had sung a few lays of the Iliad could sing the entire Trojan War in the same fashion. The singer swam and moved freely in his element.10

But this insight in turn had led Herder to realize that the received view of the poems’ authorship had to be wrong. For, if the Iliad and Odyssey stemmed from a popular tradition of rhapsody, in which each poet could ‘sing while inventing and invent while singing’, surely they would have undergone innumerable transformations over the generations. Given the inevitabilities of linguistic and cultural change, together with the effect of the universal human drive ‘to add something of one’s own to whatever one has learned’, it is inconceivable that the work of a single poet, however renowned, would have been preserved uncorrupted through the generations. Herder thus announced that the scholarly search for a purified or ‘original’ text of the Iliad and Odyssey was misguided: ‘Whoever puts his faith in an Urtext of Homer, in the form in which it flowed from his mouth, possesses a great deal of faith indeed.’11 And he concluded that the figure of ‘Homer’ provided an example of the deep and universal human need to come up with founder-figures—inventors—for customs and institutions that are, in reality, the product of Time. By the time he approached Heyne, Wolf had already issued his own critical response in the 24 October Intelligenzblatt of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. In this scathing attack, which Wolf is said to have referred to in private as ‘Herder’s Nemesis’, he gave vent to his frustration at what he saw as the presentation of his own painstaking and original investigations as mere confirmation of another’s views. Wolf poured scorn on Herder’s claims to have formed his ideas simply by reading the two poems, and mocked his lengthy account of how he had found confirmation of his developmental view of Greek epic by examining ancient works of art in Rome. Musing that ‘Someone of a suspicious nature might perhaps call this essay itself a “child of time”’, Wolf challenged its as-yet-unidentified author to

10

Ibid. 60.

11

Ibid. 62.

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produce evidence that would establish just how young his supposedly ‘youthful reflections’ really were.12 Although Wolf refrained from a direct accusation of plagiarism, the insinuation was there. But Wolf did not content himself with impugning Herder’s good name. He also attacked the contents of his essay, casting it as a caricature and travesty of his own ideas and methods. Herder had, Wolf complained, dealt with the Prolegomena’s meticulously constructed ‘series of historical doubts’ (Reihe historischer Zweifel) ‘in the manner of a philosopher who rushes a priori to his goal’. He had replaced Wolf ’s carefully reconstructed textual history with an extremely broad-brush treatment, which followed ancient tradition uncritically in according figures such as Lycurgus and Solon responsibility for the poems’ transmission and dispensed with all Wolf ’s detailed argumentation in favour of a highly speculative view of the development of epic, constructed by means of outdated analogies between painting and poetry and cod-Winckelmannian assumptions about the progress of the arts.13 Wolf also scoffed at what he saw as the needless obscurantism of Herder’s style, commenting that ‘with the exception of three or four passages which are written in comprehensible human speech and do not run aground upon each other, the points upon which everything depends spin around in a magic lantern of images and flashing ideas, out of which one is left to find whatever path one dares. Let no one henceforth vaunt the precision of the German language at the expense of despised old Latin!’14 And he complained that this entire train of argument, in the course of which the author ‘tumbles the old and the new together’ and ‘defers every determinate point of view’, was used only to support the rather uninformative (in Wolf ’s eyes, utterly trivial) thesis that the Homeric poems were not the productions of a single genius but, rather, of ‘time’.15 It is worth pointing out that Wolf ’s construal of Herder’s essay is somewhat singular. Herder mentions the Prolegomena only once in the course of his discussion: a short footnote on page 63 directs the reader to Wolf ’s ‘striking and stimulating history of Homer’s transmission’, and says that those who read it will ‘there find important intimations eminently worthy of further investigation’.16 Wolf had anticipated the main theme of Herder’s essay in chapter 14 of the 12 15

Wolf 1869a: 726. Ibid. 724–5.

13

16

Ibid. 724–5. [Herder] 1795: 63.

14

Ibid. 726–7.

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On the Contours of Das Altertum

Prolegomena, when he deplored what he called ‘the reprehensible desire of the Greeks always to trace each of its notable institutions back to the earliest times, and to attribute virtually every useful component of later culture to the discoveries of its own heroes’.17 Herder’s imaginative reconstruction of the character of rhapsodic song, and his inference from this to the impossibility of reconstructing an ‘original’ text, also seem distinctively Wolfian. But even if Herder was indebted to Wolf for specific aspects of his understanding of the Homeric Question, his essay contained much else besides: philosophical meditations on the deepest needs of humanity, putatively autobiographical reminiscences, quasi-allegorical interpretations of ancient traditions about the authorship of the two epics and their status as an encyclopedia of knowledge, historical and philosophical observations on the progress of the visual arts and the parallel between painting and poetry, as well as critical judgements on various eighteenth-century Homeric commentators, from Wood and Blackwell onwards, amongst whom if any recent scholar received pride of place it was not Wolf but Villoison, the French scholar whose 1788 publication of the Venice scholia had also formed an important stimulus to Wolf ’s own work.18 It is rather a stretch to read this wide-ranging material as Wolf did, as entirely or even primarily a commentary on the Prolegomena. Readers ‘of a suspicious nature’ may therefore feel inclined to doubt Wolf ’s claims—trumpeted at the beginning of his ALZ article as well as in the letter to Heyne—that he had not hoped for a wider reception for his work. If one hoped to win the attention of the late eighteenth-century Gelehrtenrepublik, what better way than to engineer a dispute in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, which by the mid-1790s was the widest-circulating literary periodical in the German lands? Wolf ’s professed odium for the profanum vulgus should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt, and it is also interesting to note that in his letter to Heyne Wolf gave an account of the development of his own ideas in autobiographical terms not dissimilar to Herder’s. Reminding Heyne that, ‘In the year 1779 you were the first person to whom I presented my unorthodox thoughts on Homer’, Wolf explained that, ‘after I first got over the pain of [your] dismissal’, Heyne’s opposition to his ideas had prompted

17

Wolf 1985: 38 (1795: 51).

18

Wolf 1797: 6–11.

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him only to become ‘more cautious in my claims and more attentive to the hidden difficulties of the matter’.19 Henceforth he had kept his unusual theories to himself, yet over time his doubts only increased in strength. In addition to his increasing sense of the importance of ‘the late appearance of the writing of books and rhapsody’, matters which seemed to him to pertain to ‘the philosophy of the history of human nature in Greece’, it was his ‘frequent rereadings of Homer’ which led him ‘nearer to the difficulties I had suspected and to their solution by simultaneously distancing me all the more from traditional notions’.20 Like Herder, then, Wolf characterized the development of his views upon Homer as a process of mounting conviction over accumulated years of intensive study in the poems, which was finally confirmed (rather than inspired) by Villoison’s work. Yet these hidden parallels between Wolf ’s ‘scholarly’ and Herder’s unscholarly approach seem only to have made Wolf all the keener to draw a strict distinction between them. Wolf ’s attack on Herder is the action of a specialist attempting to protect his sphere of professional expertise against the encroachments of an amateur. This is particularly apparent at the opening of the article, where he protests his reluctance at entering into print: When I published my Prolegomena to Homer last Easter, I gave voice . . . to a sequence of historical doubts about the original form of the Iliad and Odyssey, the age of writing among the Greeks, about rhapsody or ancient Greek modes of song, about the conjectured different authors of the two works, etc., on some points more concisely, on others with more extensive discussion. I did this only in order to invite those who are experts in antiquity to an investigation, the results of which may be of the greatest note for the study of classical literature, but which seem not to have been recognized in antiquity. My challenge was aimed at experts, I say: once the results had been examined by those, they could at length find whatever way they might into the public attention.21

Wolf ’s repeated insistence that the target audience of the Prolegomena was not the greater public but those expert in antiquity (‘die Kenner des Alterthums’), allowed him to denigrate Herder while providing him with an excuse for his own intervention. The same sentiment recurs in Wolf ’s letter to Heyne: although Wolf as a scholar was indifferent as to the breadth of readership his Prolegomena might attract, once such 19

Wolf 1985: 232 (1797: 6).

20

Ibid. 232–3.

21

Wolf 1869a: 724.

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On the Contours of Das Altertum

a public and damaging distortion of his own arguments had occurred he felt compelled, albeit reluctantly, to issue a public correction. It is thus clear that, as well as being the first move in a priority dispute, Wolf ’s response to Herder was an exercise in dissociation: his attempt to extricate his own name from Herder’s arguments. It was for this that Wolf hoped to enlist Heyne’s aid. Seeing as the Prolegomena had now entered the public eye, he entreated Heyne to act as a kind of expert witness: vindicating their methods, restoring credit for their conclusions to Wolf, and publicly and authoritatively demonstrating the difference between his careful, scholarly approach and Herder’s wild speculations.

‘THE MATTER SEEMED QUITE SIMPLE’: HEYNE’S TENDENTIOUS(?) REVIEW Wolf had to wait until February 1796 for a reply to his letter. Heyne’s review of the Prolegomena was, however, already in hand, and appeared in the GGA on 21 November.22 Wolf ’s hopes that it would establish the Prolegomena’s importance as a work of scholarship were to be disappointed; for the overall opinion of the book expressed in Heyne’s review can be described as at best lukewarm. Heyne greeted Wolf ’s work as ‘the first fruit of the exemplary efforts of Monsieur d’Ansse de Villoison’, repeating Herder’s subordination of Wolf ’s discoveries to those of the earlier scholar. He rebuked Wolf for failing to inform him about the nature of his Homeric researches, declaring that it was a matter of common knowledge that he had himself been working upon a Homer edition and commentary for some twenty years. But what must have been most frustrating for Wolf was Heyne’s rather casual summary of the Prolegomena’s main arguments: Prof. W[olf]. complains that there is so much material which he is working on everywhere according to his own method: nevertheless he inserts a long justification of criticism upon Homer. Upon this follows an even longer digression and treatise . . . upon the first invention and introduction of writing in Greece. After everything that has been written on this subject,

22

[Heyne] 1795a, reprinted in Wolf 1797: 24–33.

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there was nothing new to say; but for the question whether the Iliad was composed in writing exactly as we have it, the one remark was helpful, that the use of writing was much later than its invention; and that this is so for the quite simple reason that the spread of its use depended upon more convenient writing materials than were known at first. When doubt is expressed— and indeed it has been—whether Homer composed the Iliad in writing, the reason for the doubt could not be whether the letters of the alphabet were known to the Ionians at that time or could have been, but instead whether the use of writing at that time had already progressed to the point that large works like an Iliad were written down. Historical evidence is entirely lacking, and cannot even be expected from those times; hence the question can only be decided by probabilities. But there are more arguments of probability for the negative side, so that it can now be considered practically the general opinion that Homer did not compose his poems in writing—especially as Mr Merian has just now worked out this hypothesis. Prof. W. now provides this hypothesis with support in a careful investigation which is full of scholarship, erudition, and acuity. He makes a number of good observations in passing . . . Hence the songs were preserved sufficiently at first in the memory of the poets. But one will reply at once to this that it is still not at all probable that one ancient bard could have taken so many songs as the Iliad and Odyssey contain, which he had conceived in memory alone, and turned them into one such whole as the two poems make up: for this, recording in writing was necessary. To the author, the expression of this consideration seems new and daring; he demonstrates the improbability that Homer might already have composed a unified epic . . . in a long-winded, but learned and acute manner. To the reviewer the matter seemed quite simple, and he has always so presented it in lectures.23

This is Heyne’s critical summary of those chapters of the Prolegomena (chapters 12–31), in which Wolf presents his reconstruction of the earliest stages in the transmission history of the Homeric poems. These chapters are central to Wolf ’s book, not only in the sense that they come towards the middle of it, but also because they provide the hinge upon which the other sections of his argument rest. In chapters 12–25 Wolf engages in a broad-ranging historical discussion in order to argue for what we may call the Proto-Analyst thesis: the view that a pre-literate society such as Greece could not have produced continuous poems as long, and apparently unified, as the Iliad

23

Wolf 1985: 237–8 ([Heyne] 1795a: 1860–2).

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and the Odyssey.24 His arguments fall into three main sections: first, a set of considerations on the late introduction of writing into Greece which depend largely on discrediting ancient testimony as to the antiquity of letters, such as Herodotus 5.58 on Cadmus; second, a discussion of the ‘silence’ of the Homeric poems upon the practice of writing; finally, a reconstruction of the art of the rhapsodes. These arguments are crucial in order to motivate the Proto-Analyst thesis, Wolf ’s first explicit statement of which follows, with much fanfare, in chapter 26. It is then developed in chapters 26–31 by means of a series of supporting observations—drawn in part from Wolf ’s own reading in the text, in part from the testimony of ancient authors—about breaks and inconsistencies in the ‘internal’ structure of the poems. Chapters 12–31 also form a major contribution to the greater project—announced in chapter 7 of the Prolegomena but never carried out—of an overall textual history of the poems from antiquity to the present day.25 These arguments—‘the original form of the Iliad and Odyssey, the age of writing among the Greeks, about rhapsody or ancient Greek modes of song, about the conjectured different authors of the two works’—were also those Wolf emphasized when characterizing the Prolegomena at the opening of his response to Herder. Clearly, Wolf felt it was here that his main contribution to scholarship lay. What did Heyne make of these central portions of Wolf ’s argument? Far from celebrating them as radical and new, he treated them as merely recapitulating tired old debates. He criticized Wolf ’s long discussion of the question of when writing came to Greece by saying that, ‘After everything that has been written on this subject, there was nothing new to say’. He dismissed the inferences Wolf had drawn from the silence of the Homeric poems upon writing with the 24 This thesis should be distinguished from the more famous Analyst thesis: the claim that the Iliad and Odyssey are each a series of formerly separate poems (‘rhapsodies’) by different authors, edited together into a continuous sequence at a later date, which is also associated with Wolf ’s name. Wolf does indeed countenance the Analyst thesis in the Prolegomena: in passages such as the one from chapter 11 quoted below (p. 157) he dangles it before his readers as a further conclusion to be drawn from his researches. But he maintains that its proof would require a full analysis of the ‘internal’ (i.e. linguistic, stylistic, and literary-critical) evidence of discontinuities and joins within the two poems, which he defers to a later date. His argument in the Prolegomena is limited to proving the lesser, Proto-Analyst thesis, which he insists is all that can be shown on ‘external’, i.e. historical, grounds. 25 Wolf 1985: 57–8; 1795: 22–4.

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comment that they ‘can now be considered practically the general opinion’, and implied that Wolf ’s arguments followed the recent work by another scholar.26 Most damningly of all, Heyne implied that he had anticipated Wolf ’s Proto-Analyst thesis in his own undergraduate lectures. His words were very far from the vindication and celebration of the ground-breaking character of his research that Wolf had wanted.

THE FALL-OUT Wolf ’s initial reaction to the review appears to have been more bewildered than angry. In two letters composed to Heyne, on 10 and 14 December, he tried hard to interpret the other man’s comments in a charitable light. While regretting that Heyne had failed to provide the Prolegomena with the level of critical commentary he had anticipated, Wolf said he was nonetheless pleased that such a great expert had hurried into press with comments that were so well intended.27 He explained, patiently and at length, the points upon which he felt that Heyne had misconstrued his arguments. And he optimistically interpreted Heyne’s assimilation of his arguments to existing scholarship and ancient tradition as a deliberate strategy, chosen in order to aid the Prolegomena’s reception among an audience so attached to the old view of Homer as a sublime genius that they might recoil from his unusual conclusions.28 Very different in tone was his furious letter of 9 January 1796. By now, further developments had suggested a rather less charitable interpretation of Heyne’s motives. On 19 December 1795 there appeared in the GGA the summary of Heyne’s lecture ‘On Investigating, Judging, and Reconstituting the Text of Homer’, delivered to the Royal Göttingen Society of the Sciences in August that year, in which he had given an update of his views with regard to the Homeric Question and its implications for the textual scholarship of the Iliad and Odyssey. Here again, Heyne declared that he was merely providing a more explicit statement of a matter ‘about which he already had a certain way of thought thirty years ago’:

26

Merian 1793.

27

Wolf 1797: 35.

28

Ibid. 38–9.

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The common opinion concerning a single Homer and his epic has always been subject to serious doubts, and it is easy to doubt once one is directed to test common opinions (if only it were as easy to put something certain in their place!) Hence the Privy Councillor never believed that his own divergent opinion could cause a sensation; and he sees himself further confirmed by the fact that this opinion agrees in many respects with what Professor Wolf has presented at length in his Prolegomena reviewed above.29

Heyne went on to give an account of what little he thought could be concluded relatively securely about the Homeric poems. Starting from a statement of the need to separate out the question of the original unity of the Iliad and Odyssey from those of the identity of their author and the authenticity of every part, in relation to the first and broadest of these questions (which, as we have seen, was also Wolf ’s main theme) Heyne complained that ‘history affords us no adequate grounds for determination . . . for everything may only be judged on grounds of probability’. Nevertheless, such considerations as could be brought to bear on the question made the traditional opinion of the poems’ authorship highly improbable. For the works of Hesiod and the Cyclic epics, which by general agreement are considered later than Homer, do not manifest the marvellous unity found in his poetry, and: ‘How improbable it is that art should come into being before simplicity!’30 Then again, unprejudiced consideration of the Homeric poems suggests that they do not display the profound unity claimed by critics, from Aristotle onwards. The fact that the proem of the Iliad announces its subject only as the anger of Achilles, and fails to anticipate events from Book 19 onwards, indicates either that an originally smaller theme was expanded upon at a later date, or—as the pertinent contemporary example of Ossian suggests—that several originally separate rhapsodies were later combined into a whole. There are many other such signs of original disunity, and the epics’ linguistic and stylistic continuities may be attributable to the continuity in conventions of ‘the ancient Ionian epic poetic register’, rather than to their origin in a single author. All of this adds credence to those ancient legends which suggest that ‘the rhapsodies were first disseminated individually’ and that ‘that great poem, the Iliad, first grew into being later out of individual songs’.31

29 30

[Heyne] 1795b: 2026 (tr. Wolf 1985: 241). 31 Ibid. 2028. Ibid. 2029–30.

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In the summary of his August 1795 lecture Heyne thus portrayed himself as having arrived at a conclusion upon the Homeric Question that was strikingly similar to Wolf ’s own. Picking up on this account, as well as Heyne’s earlier comment that he had expressed similar opinions upon numerous occasions ‘in lectures, writings, and in these Anzeigen as well’, Wolf now challenged Heyne outright to state whether he had set out to create the impression that Wolf had stolen his ideas from him? There followed a torrent of details about the two men’s past relations, including the claim that Heyne had been resistant to Wolf ’s ideas when he had presented them as a student at Göttingen, that Wolf had given up attending his Iliad lectures as he had found them uncongenial, and that Heyne had excluded Wolf from his Pindar seminar there. On top of this Wolf made a counteraccusation of plagiarism, going through Heyne’s published works with a fine-toothed comb to amass evidence that he had always and consistently inclined to the traditional view of Homer, and had changed his mind only in the wake of the Prolegomena’s publication. And he accused Heyne of a thoroughly devious insincerity, of issuing a form of insincere and deadly ‘narcotic praise’ in his earlier review in order to dull Wolf ’s senses and prevent him from noticing his thefts.32 As Wolf was later to make clear, only the first of his letters was ever sent to Heyne in person.33 Heyne was left to experience the remainder of Wolf ’s rebuke at the same time as the rest of the German reading public, upon their publication the following spring in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s short-lived patriotic, cultural, and political journal, Deutschland. The end of the story between the two men is not long to relate. Heyne refused to reply to Wolf ’s very public tirades, and Wolf wrote one more letter in March 1797, repeating and deepening his criticisms of Heyne’s writings and stating that, in the light of his adversary’s continued silence, he saw no option but to publish his side of the correspondence in order to vindicate his reputation. Wolf ’s letters, together with Heyne’s two offending Anzeigen, duly appeared in 1797 in a book which bore the unassuming title Briefe an Herrn Hofrath Heyne von Professor Wolf. Eine Beilage zu den neuesten Untersuchungen über den Homer (Letters to Councillor Heyne from Professor Wolf: A Supplement to the Latest Investigations on Homer).

32

Wolf 1797: 89.

33

Vorwort (‘An das Publikum’), in Wolf 1797: vii.

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Wolf also urged various friends and former students, from Böttiger to Johann Heinrich Voss and Immanuel Bekker, to go into print lauding Wolf ’s great discoveries and criticizing Heyne’s lack of expert understanding. From here stemmed the enduring caricature of Heyne as both philistine and dilettante, propounded in large part by allies and students of Wolf in order to cast their scientific hero into sharper and all-the-more-glorious relief.34 The quarrel between Heyne and Wolf was thus a fateful one for classicists’ understandings of the history of their discipline. Numerous factors render it particularly hard to evaluate. One problem is that Heyne’s refusal to reply to Wolf ’s polemics has left us overly reliant upon accounts by the latter and his supporters for our understanding of the affair. Apart from Wolf ’s own comments in the introduction to his Briefe an Heyne, the quarrel receives attention in the hagiographic 1833 biography of the philologist by his son-in-law and literary executor Wilhelm Körte. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Körte’s view of Heyne’s conduct in the quarrel is straightforwardly condemnatory.35 In support of his point of view he prints a letter Wolf had received from Heyne in February 1795, in which Heyne had made declarations which appear to be at variance with those of his GGA review. In particular, Heyne had sought to reassure Wolf that their contemporaneous Homeric researches should cause no competition between them, declaring that criticism was not his métier and suggesting that he would take Wolf ’s new text as the basis for his own edition.36 Körte is correct that such assurances stand at odds with Heyne’s later complaint that Wolf had encroached upon his own territory, and that scholarly and gentlemanly conventions required Wolf to have informed him of that fact. Nevertheless, his interpretation neglects the point that Heyne’s comments are most easily understood as pertaining to Wolf ’s critical work on the Homeric text, rather than to the cultural and literary history that makes up the bulk of the Prolegomena. As Körte himself admits, the latter followed a somewhat haphazard course of gestation, and the announcement of Wolf ’s Homer edition published in the 22 February Intelligenzblatt of the ALZ—which would have provided most of the information 34

Volkmann 1874: 97–140. ‘So gränzte Heyne’s Verfahren wirklich an litterarische Grausamkeit.’ Körte 1833: 292. 36 Heyne to Wolf, 1 Feb. 1795, in ibid. 290. 35

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Heyne had to go on in early 1795—gives no clear indication of its scope or contents. Given his familial connection to Wolf, it is understandable that Körte would view the quarrel very much in the same terms as him, and indeed much of his discussion of the episode is conducted as a series of paraphrases of Wolf ’s own words in his letters to Heyne and his ALZ response to Herder. Clearly, then, Körte does not constitute an independent witness. The quarrel also appears to have been over-determined in various ways. Some of its principal actors were leading players—or quickly became so—in the larger disputes that characterized the German literary scene of the 1790s. In this regard, Wolf ’s choice of Deutschland for the publication of his open correspondence with Heyne is interesting. Reichardt—the former Royal Kapellmeister to Frederick the Great, whose open sympathies for the French Revolution had led to his dismissal in 1794 by Friedrich Wilhelm II—had established this periodical as a more patriotic and politically focused rival to Die Horen, the journal founded by Schiller in 1795 as a mouthpiece for his own classicizing views, and in which, as we have seen, Herder’s essay on Homer had first appeared. Large portions of Deutschland’s first three issues were devoted to an extended review of the entire output of Die Horen the previous year—a project carried out under the guise of a ‘Notiz von deutschen Journalen’, but which, it has been suggested, was ‘simply an excuse for a cutting criticism’ of Schiller’s ideas and work.37 Wolf ’s first letter to Heyne appeared in issue 2, the same issue in which Herder’s essay on Homer received critical discussion.38 In later issues, Reichardt was to enlist the young Friedrich Schlegel as a contributor to his ongoing polemic with Schiller, a move that was to lead to both men becoming targets of Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien of 1796–7. By throwing his lot in with Reichardt against the supposedly allgemein-menschlich classicism of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, Wolf was taking up a position on one side of a battle-line that was to define German literary culture for some years to come. Pre-existing and personal ill-feeling between the main protagonists of this quarrel is also not hard to document. As early as the February 1795 letter, Heyne talks of the ‘strange and concealed suspicions 37

Capen 1903: 30. The reviews of Die Horen run through Deutschland I (1796) 55–90; II. 241–57; III. 375–82. The criticism of Herder’s Homer essay occurs at II. 248–51. 38

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against me’ that (so he had heard) Wolf was entertaining, ‘as if I were scheming to obstruct your works, your reputation, your efforts’.39 Wolf ’s correspondence with his friend Karl August Böttiger from late spring 1795 reveals his concern that some of the ideas being propounded by Goethe, Schiller, and Herder in Weimar were dangerously close to his own, and that Herder in particular was threatening to steal his glory.40 His suspicions were confirmed to his own satisfaction during a visit to Weimar in late May, when Herder’s refusal to take supper with him at Goethe’s and Böttiger’s houses contrasted starkly with the welcome accorded him by those men and by Wieland.41 Herder’s essay appeared a few months later, and once Heyne had ventured into print with an opinion that tended—albeit indirectly—to back up his long-standing friend’s views, Wolf was quick to assume that collusion had taken place.42 Personal rancour, professional jealousies, and the involvement of third parties with other vendettas to pursue thus all played their role in making this quarrel so bitter. Considering the matter methodologically rather than biographically, however, the most important question to ask is: what was this quarrel about?

THE ORIGINALITY OF THE PROLEGOMENA: CONCLUSIONS OR METHOD? Within the already existing historiography on this quarrel, this question has been obscured behind the more immediate one of whether Heyne’s denigration of Wolf ’s claim to originality was justified. Here, nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators have tended to disagree. In his seminal 1874 study of Wolf ’s arguments and their early reception, Richard Volkmann criticized Wolf ’s conduct in the dispute, but concluded that his accusation of Heyne had a stronger basis than his earlier charges against Herder. Heyne’s lecture was 39

Körte 1833: 289. See Wolf to Böttiger, 15 May 1795 (Peters 1890: 17). Peters 1890: 47–8; see too Peters 1890: 24–6 (Wolf to Böttiger, 16 Oct. 1795); see too Volkmann 1874: 87–8; Körte 1833: 283–6. 42 Peters 1890: 29–30 (Wolf to Böttiger, 29 Jan. 1796): ‘Daß er [Herder] in steter Correspondenz über den Handel mit H[eyne]. steht, u. gestanden hat, davon halt ich mich so gewiß, wie von etwas in der Welt.’ 40 41

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‘unmistakably written under the influence of Wolf ’s Prolegomena, which he had recently read’; yet even if the aged Heyne had deceived himself over how far Wolf ’s arguments had influenced his views, Wolf ’s savage polemic ill befitted the gratitude owed by a student to his former teacher.43 In the second half of the twentieth century two historians of scholarship reversed Volkmann’s judgement. In 1979 Giuseppe Broccia claimed (in the course of an overall hostile assessment of Wolf) that: ‘It seems that in Wolf ’s theory there was neither an argument nor a conclusion of any significance that had not been proposed by his predecessors, and moreover by figures of whom (with the possible exception of Vico) he had direct knowledge.’44 More recently still, Anthony Grafton has drawn attention to notes taken by Wilhelm von Humboldt during Heyne’s 1789 Homer lectures in order to show that Heyne was indeed justified in his claims: Humboldt’s copy proves conclusively that Heyne anticipated many of Wolf ’s results: ‘Homer’s chief works: Iliad, Odyssey. Never written down by Homer, for writing was still too little advanced to be used for anything other than public inscriptions . . . In addition it was still the custom of that time to teach by speaking and to learn by hearing . . . Homer’s poems were first collected and recorded at a later date, by whom is unknown.’ The supposed founder of the new Altertumswissenschaft clearly suffered from a strong Oedipus Complex.45

Such observations are valid so far as they go, but they fail to capture the full dimensions of the disagreement. We have already seen that, in 1795, both Heyne and Herder expressed views of Homer in print that were strikingly similar to those contained in the Prolegomena. Private correspondence between the two men during the same period confirms that they felt Wolf ’s conclusions were far from original. In a letter dated 13 May 1795, which must therefore have been composed very shortly after his first reading of Wolf ’s work, Herder complained to Heyne that: ‘It seems to me that everyone would concede to him his chief and fundamental points; indeed, since Blackwell and Wood almost no-one has doubted them. The statements of the ancients are far too unambiguous, the history of the bards too well known, for him

43

44 Volkmann 1874: 91. Broccia 1979: 24–5. Grafton 1999: 20–1. Grafton states that Humboldt’s notes were made in 1792, but both Mattson (1990: 582) and Leitzmann (1907: 550–3) date the manuscript to 1789. 45

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to set out all this material here in this striking manner, as a nullo dictum ore prius.’46 Taken as a comment upon the Prolegomena’s principal conclusions, Herder’s observation is—as Grafton and Broccia have asserted—unobjectionable. Far from radical and new, the claims that Homer had not committed his songs to writing, and that the earliest, oral stage in their transmission had exposed the received text of the Iliad and Odyssey to numerous alterations, had been suggested by many before Wolf. In addition to Humboldt’s notes on Heyne’s lectures, similar assertions may be found in print in Villoison’s Prolegomena to his edition of the Iliad: These Scholia, never before published, shed much light on Homer’s poetry, illuminate obscure passages, explicate the rites, customs, mythology and geography of the ancients, establish the pure and genuine text, and examine the various readings of various codices and editions and the emendations of the critics. For it is clear that the Homeric text, which the Rhapsodes recited from memory and everyone used to sing aloud, was corrupt at an early date. For the different Rhapsodes of the different areas of Greece necessarily removed, added, and changed many things. Josephus asserts, at the outset of his first book Against Apion, that Homer did not leave his poems in written form. And an unpublished Scholiast to Dionysius Thrax seems to agree with this view when he relates that the poems of Homer, which were preserved only in men’s minds and memory and were not written, perished in the time of Pisistratus, and that he offered a reward to anyone who would bring him Homeric verses, and that many thereupon, being greedy for money, sold Pisistratus their verses as Homeric.47

Josephus, the ancient author Villoison cites, provides an even clearer precedent. His testimony about the Homeric Question comes as the culmination of a series of criticisms of Greek myths about the antiquity of their arts, in the course of which he claims both that writing was unknown among the Greeks until long after the Trojan War, and that during the earlier period Homer’s poetry ‘was preserved in songs which were put together afterward . . . and this is why so many variations are to be found in them’.48 For that matter, the claim that ‘Homer’ had not composed long and continuous poems had been advanced even by writers who—at least on the face of it—did not 46 47 48

Volkmann 1874: 81, emphasis in original. Villoison, Homeri Ilias, xxxiv, tr. Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985: 7. Josephus Ap. 1.12.

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seem to share Wolf ’s and Josephus’ views on the late advent of writing in Greece. In chapter 26 of the Prolegomena Wolf quotes Bentley’s famous suggestion that ‘Homer wrote a sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at Festivals and other days of Merriment; the Ilias he made for the Men, and the Odysseïs for the other Sex’, along with its less-often-cited conclusion: ‘These loose songs were not collected together in the Form of an Epic Poem, till Pisistratus’ time about 500 years later.’49 With so many precedents for the claim that the unified appearance presented by the Homeric poems was the result of later activity, it is hardly surprising to find Wolf himself advancing such views in print more than a decade before the appearance of the Prolegomena. In the notes to his Hesiod edition of 1783, Wolf sketches a similar picture of the history of early Greek epic, drawing pessimistic conclusions from this about modern editors’ ability to restore the genuine text: But in Hesiod, and no less in Homer, in addition to all these different kinds of interpolation there is a further, hidden source, which to date has been scarcely explored, and from which the infection of error can be seen to have spread very easily, if one considers what was the fate of these poems in the earliest times, the way in which they were at first gradually disseminated and then transmitted to posterity, before the use of letters had become widespread. Unless I am very much mistaken, careful consideration of this matter must lead us to despair of finding in them that degree of integrity possessed by later works, the authors of which commit them finally to paper which endures.50

Herder was, therefore, only exaggerating slightly when he said that ‘everyone would concede’ to Wolf his ‘chief and fundamental points’. Yet his very focus upon the novelty (or otherwise) of these individual points hints at what is so skewed about both his and Heyne’s reading of the Prolegomena. For—although the fanfares with which Wolf announces the Proto-Analyst thesis might lead an incautious reader to treat its formulation as the basis of his claim to novelty—at various points in his discussion Wolf had admitted that he was treading in the footsteps of earlier commentators. These scholars are even mentioned by name at various key points of the argument, as Wood, Merian, Casaubon, d’Aubignac, and Bentley all receive their due.51 Wolf ’s 49 51

50 Wolf 1795: 115 (1985: 118). Wolf 1783: 55. See chaps. 12, 14, 18, 19, 26, 39, 46, 49.

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references to those who had anticipated the Prolegomena’s conclusions make it implausible to suppose that he held the value of its work to consist entirely in the novelty of its conclusions. Rather—and more sensibly—he saw its importance as lying at least partly in the structure of the arguments by which he had arrived at them. For what the Prolegomena does present us with is a chain of reasoning that leads, step by step, to the all-important Proto-Analyst thesis. Wolf ’s argument that writing came late to Greece, first of all, is intended to support his interpretation of the Iliad’s and Odyssey’s silence about writing as evidence that there was no familiarity at all with script in the age of the poems’ composition. We are then left with a puzzle as to how ‘Homer’s’ poems could have been transmitted intact to the sixth century bce; and it is this gap that Wolf ’s account of the rhapsodes is intended—partially—to fill. The filling is only partial, though, because once we have accepted Wolf ’s reconstruction of the craft of the rhapsodes—in particular, once we have conceded that they were themselves poets, and have reflected upon the likely contexts for their performances—we will be ready to accept the conclusion that such long poems as the Iliad and Odyssey both would not, and indeed could not, have been composed within that tradition. As Wolf memorably puts it in chapter 26 of the Prolegomena: ‘This Homer could not have accomplished “with ten tongues, a voice of iron, and lungs of bronze”: here he needed pens and a writing tablet.’52 Once we have realized that this is how Wolf ’s arguments work, it is possible to see what is so tendentious in Heyne’s characterization of them. First, Heyne’s summary elides Wolf ’s reconstruction of the rhapsodes’ craft; but by bracketing the rhapsodes out in this manner, Heyne omits a crucial step in Wolf ’s reasoning. For it is Wolf ’s account of the possibilities, but also the limitations, of rhapsodic transmission that is intended to compel the conclusion that short songs, but not long ones, would result from this tradition. Heyne’s statement that ‘hence the songs were preserved sufficiently at first in the memory of the poets’, hardly does justice to Wolf ’s complex and finely balanced arguments. Without his account of the rhapsodes, Wolf ’s claims do indeed appear to reduce to the well-known and muchdebated points about the antiquity of writing in Greece and the ambiguity of references to writing within the poems themselves. Second,

52

Wolf 1795: 111–12 (1985: 116).

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Heyne reduces Wolf ’s more general claim that writing was not known at all in the ‘age of Homer’ to the simpler and far more traditional suggestion that the poet Homer (whoever he was) composed his poems without the aid of script. By compressing and distorting Wolf ’s arguments in this manner, Heyne’s review skated over the two points on which, above all else, the Prolegomena’s originality rested. The first of these is the inference Wolf drew from his reconstruction of the poems’ earliest existence to the impossibility of reconstructing any ‘original text’. This attitude, which between 1783 and 1795 appears to have hardened from pessimism to utter scepticism, required an imaginative leap beyond Villoison, who had viewed the rhapsodes’ activity as bringing about a form of textual ‘corruption’ and adjudged the main value of the scholia to lie in the possibility they held out of establishing the ‘pure and genuine text’. Contrast Wolf, according to whom the fact of rhapsodic ‘transmission’ casts doubt upon this entire project: But what if the suspicion of some scholars is probable—that these and the other poems of those times were not consigned to writing, but were first made by poets in their memories and made public in song, then made more widely available by the singing of the rhapsodes, whose peculiar art it was to learn them? And if, because of this, many changes were necessarily made in them, by accident or design, before they were fixed, so to speak, in written form? And if for this very reason, as soon as they began to be written out, they had many differences, and soon acquired new ones from the rash conjectures of those who rivaled one another in their efforts to polish them up, and to correct them by the best laws of the art of poetry and their own usage? And if, finally, it can be shown by probable arguments and reasons that this entire connected series of the two continuous poems is owed less to the genius of him to whom we have normally attributed it, than to the zeal of a more polite age and the collective efforts of many, and that therefore the very songs from which the Iliad and Odyssey were assembled do not all have one common author? If, I say, one must accept a view different from the common one about all these things—what, then, will it mean to restore these poems to their original luster and genuine beauty?53

The second point on which Wolf held that the Prolegomena differed from previous commentaries is the manner in which it had arrived at its conclusions. For, as we have seen, his case for the Proto-Analyst thesis relied not upon the uncritical acceptance of ancient testimony, 53

Ibid. 38–9 (Wolf 1985: 70).

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nor simply on aesthetic judgements about the poems’ wondrous unity. It was, rather, dependent upon his reconstruction of the earliest stages in the poems’ transmission history: a sequence of reasoning meticulously arranged so as to lead us step by step to the correct view. This is what Wolf pointed out in his explicatory letters to Heyne, emphasizing over and over again that his arguments rested on ‘external’ grounds, and begging Heyne to treat these separately from ‘internal’ questions of linguistic and stylistic unity.54 Even after he had lapsed into accusations of ‘malignity’, he continued to expound this view of the Prolegomena’s distinctive character: You say explicitly and directly: To the reviewer the matter seemed ever so— and straightaway you let my main conclusion follow, together with a small part of the route I took in order to arrive at it. New to you, quite naturally, appears neither the conclusion nor the proof of particular claims which Wood and others had advanced as conjectures . . . But in historical matters, just as in mathematics, it is entirely reasonable to distinguish between problems and claims that have been comprehended at most in dreams and their demonstration, which is sometimes far from easy.55

It is this claim of Wolf ’s—that he provided a demonstration of matters that had been insufficiently proven before—that Heyne appears either to have ignored or to have overlooked in his review. Far from the vindication of Wolf ’s methods that he had hoped for, Heyne paid little or no attention to them at all. But why?

CONCLUSION: A DIFFERENT KIND OF PRIORITY In his Briefe an Heyne Wolf offers two successive interpretations of the elder scholar’s behaviour: that he failed to understand these parts of the Prolegomena, or that he deliberately downplayed them in order to steal the credit for Wolf ’s ideas. The idea that Heyne deliberately belittled Wolf ’s arguments in order to steal his glory makes little sense, for why would one denigrate a set of ideas one wished to claim for oneself? Yet Heyne’s own 1795 writings also suggest that the first of Wolf ’s suggestions is implausible. As Wolf himself pointed out, his 54 55

Wolf 1797: 54, see too 16–17 (Wolf 1985: 234). Wolf 1797: 105, 107.

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August lecture showed a firm grasp of the issues at stake; indeed, for all its dismissiveness, the opening statement of the question Heyne gives there could be read as a fairly accurate synopsis of the Prolegomena’s contents: A few conclusions may be drawn from the internal evidence of the poems, a few others are produced by analogy and from the entire condition (aus dem ganzen Verhältniß) of the most ancient times; now the opinion that is commonly held stands in striking contrast to these conclusions. In a time when that art of writing was indeed known, but still used very little, when everything was stored simply in the memory, how could a poem as long as the Iliad or the Odyssey be composed in its entirety; and how could a single man have collected such a great series of events into one unified action, before the individual parts had been worked over? All this must have first taken place at a later date.56

Heyne’s own account of the implications of orality for the original form of the poems thus provides no grounding for the view that he was incapable of understanding Wolf ’s arguments. Yet a third explanation (not considered by Wolf ) of why Heyne was so dismissive will be developed in the next chapter. In brief, the suggestion is that Heyne’s disdainful response to Wolf ’s reconstruction of the history of the Homeric poems was prompted by his low estimation of the methods by which that history was constructed. His tendentious characterization of the contents of Wolf ’s book thus indicates a deeper disagreement between the two men on questions of method in historical scholarship. Upon closer examination, Heyne’s position on these issues will turn out to have been conditioned by his own intensive critical engagement with Winckelmann’s work.

56

[Heyne] 1795b: 2027–8.

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6 Heyne, Winckelmann, and Altertumswissenschaft Ich besitze weder Kräfte, noch Kenntnisse, noch Muße genug, um ein Ganzes, wovon mir zuweilen ein dunkeles Bild vor dem Auge schwebt, auszuarbeiten . . . (Heyne, Sammlung antiquarischer Aufsätze, Vol. I (1778), ix)

‘The labours and merits of Heyne being better known, and more justly appreciated in England, than those of almost any German, whether scholar, poet or philosopher, we cannot but believe that some notice of his life may be acceptable to most readers.’1 For most twenty-first-century readers, the sentence that opens Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Life of Heyne’ will come as a surprise. Carlyle’s essay (in fact, an extended review of a pious biography of the philologist published in 1813 by his son-in-law, Arnold Ludwig von Heeren) first appeared in the Foreign Review in 1828. Wolf had been dead for only four years and Goethe and the Schlegels were still active on the German literary scene; yet it was Heyne whom Carlyle crowned princeps of European Altertumskenner: By the general consent of the learned in all countries, he seems to be acknowledged as the first among recent scholars; his immense reading, his lynx-eyed skill in exposition and emendation are no longer anywhere controverted; among ourselves his taste in these matters has been praised by Gibbon, and by Parr pronounced to be ‘exquisite’. In his own country, Heyne is even regarded as the founder of a new epoch in classical study; as the first who with any decisiveness attempted to translate fairly beyond the letter of the classics; to read in the writings of the Ancients, not their language alone, 1

Carlyle 1860: 327.

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or even their detached opinions and records, but their spirit and character, their way of life and thought; how the World and Nature painted themselves to the mind in those old ages; how, in a word, the Greeks and the Romans were men, even as we are.2

To sum up the Göttingen professor’s achievements, Carlyle reached for an obvious parallel: ‘What Winkelmann, his great contemporary, did, or began to do, for ancient Plastic Art, the other, with equal success, began for ancient Literature. A high praise, surely; yet, as we must think, one not unfounded, and which, indeed, in all parts of Europe, is becoming more and more confirmed.’3 Carlyle’s assessment provides a better indication of Heyne’s stature at the turn of the nineteenth century than the standard histories of classical scholarship, in which he has, for the most part, been displaced by Wolf.4 During his long tenure (1763–1812) of the Chair of Eloquence and Poetry at Göttingen, more than 300 aspiring Altertumswissenschaftler enrolled in his Philological Seminar, going on to hold positions in German schools and universities, to obtain bureaucratic employment in Germany and abroad, and to found similar institutes at universities such as Erlangen, Helmstedt, Erfurt, and Berlin.5 His lectures were attended by poets, philosophers, and statesmen; through these, his writings on ancient literature and art, and his contributions to the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen he helped to form the opinions of the next generation of classical scholars. For the excitement his teachings generated in the 1770s there can be no better witness than Goethe’s Werther. In one of the earliest letters from his secluded idyll, the hero reports encountering ‘a certain young V., an honest youth with most pleasing features’, who ‘has but recently left the academies’: Since he had heard that I draw a good deal and know Greek (two outlandish things in these parts), he approached me and hauled forth a great deal of learning, from Batteux to Wood, from de Piles to Winckelmann, and assured 2

Ibid. 359. Ibid. 360. 4 Nor was Carlyle’s a lone voice in anglophone periodical literature of the early nineteenth century. In the same year a contributor to American Quarterly cited Heyne as the first of a string of examples of ‘German success in philological studies’; in 1837 the anonymous Gentleman’s Magazine reviewer of Dyce’s Works of Richard Bentley named Heyne, alongside Wolf and Christian Daniel Beck, as one of Germany’s ‘firstrate Grecians of past days’ (Bancroft 1828: 163–5; Anon. 1837: 393). 5 Leventhal 1994: 235–7. 3

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me that he had read the first part of Sulzer’s theory right through and possessed a manuscript by Heyne concerning the study of antiquity.6

Even after Wolf had displaced Heyne in the disciplinary self-perception of most classical scholars, a minority continued to insist on the elder Altertumswissenschaftler’s importance. Thus Wilamowitz declares that, as ‘the man who scattered the seed that bore such various fruit in the persons of Zoëga, Voss and Wolf, the brothers Humboldt and Schlegel’, Heyne ‘deserves to be called a Praeceptor Germaniae in a higher sense’, according Wolf the rather more modest honour of having proved ‘well qualified to describe the comprehensive science of antiquity that was due to be erected on the foundations laid by his master Heyne’; and Friedrich Leo held that: ‘In truth, it is from him rather than from Wolf that the current of inner development which flows into the heroic age of historical Altertumswissenschaft proceeds.’7 Their verdict has been supported by the newer institutional and disciplinary history of scholarship that has developed since the 1970s. Although Heyne is barely mentioned in Marchand’s influential study, he has received attention in contemporary work by, among others, Robert S. Leventhal, Sotera Fornaro, Marianne Heidenreich, William Clark, Michael Legaspi, and Martin Vohler.8 Clark, Leventhal, and Legaspi have emphasized the influential pedagogic model 6 Goethe 1989: 30. Goethe’s Nachlaß includes two sets of manuscript notes from Heyne’s archaeological lectures. Their attendees included Gottfried Hermann, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Karl Lachmann, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Thiersch, Johann Heinrich Voss, Friedrich August Wolf, Georg Zoëga, and Ludwig, Crown Prince of Bavaria. See Vohler 2002: 43, n. 25. 7 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 102, 108; Fuhrmann 1959: 189, n. 3. One may contrast Sandys (1908: 36–44), who devotes seven pages to Heyne and quotes liberally from Carlyle’s essay; his overall verdict, however, is that Heyne was ‘not an original genius’ and that he failed to reach the scientific understanding of Homer achieved by Wolf. Pfeiffer allots him only one paragraph. Lloyd-Jones comments that ‘Pattison in his essay on F. A. Wolf portrays Heyne most unfairly; Pfeiffer is disappointingly brief ’ (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 101). 8 Marchand 1996; Leventhal 1994, 1986; Legaspi 2008; Fornaro 2004; Heidenreich 2006; Clark 2006; Vohler 2002. All draw on foundational work on historical scholarship in eighteenth-century Göttingen by Butterfield 1955, Reill 1975, and Marino 1995. A brief but useful overview of Heyne’s academic activities is given in the collection of essays titled Der Vormann der Georgia Augusta (1980). On Heyne’s contribution to the study of classical art and antiquities in particular, see BräuningOktavio 1971; Preiss 1992; Graepler and Migl 2007. His impact on Humboldt and on Friedrich Schlegel is explored by Menze 1966 and Mettler 1955, his criticisms of Winckelmann by Hatfield 1943 and Bruer 1994: 29–42. Heyne also receives attention in a chapter devoted to classical scholarship in Carhart 2007. As can be seen from this

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represented by Heyne’s Philological Seminar. This institution had been founded in 1738 by his predecessor Gesner, but Heyne introduced innovations in subject-matter and teaching methods that have led Clark to describe it as the first university research seminar.9 Leventhal contends that these were underpinned by a new conception of classical studies: ‘a profound turn away from Altphilologie as a discipline of text criticism and restoration and the emergence of a genuinely hermeneutic, interpretive philology as a comprehensive discipline aiming at the disclosure of a historical, cultural totality’, an approach transmitted to those institutions where his students taught.10 Like Carlyle, these scholars paint Heyne as an early antecedent of the WolfianWilamowitzian disciplinary paradigm of Altertumswissenschaft as the study of Graeco-Roman civilization ‘in its essence and in every aspect of its existence’. From his very first year at Göttingen, Heyne also offered lectures on the study of ancient art and antiquities (Archäologie). In a letter of 1772 to the well-known Saxon connoisseur (and correspondent of Winckelmann’s) Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, he explains their object as the equipment of ‘young amateurs, especially persons of good birth and means, with the ability to judge the ancient works of art, both on the spot in Italy and elsewhere, with insight, understanding, and some degree of judgement and taste’.11 The surviving student notes from Heyne’s lectures have never been edited properly, but what can be reconstructed of their contents suggests that—at least in the early years—they had a strong Winckelmannian flavour.12 We may gain some idea of their format at the end of Heyne’s first decade at Göttingen from a précis published in 1772 under the title Einleitung in das Studium der Antike, oder Grundriß einer Anführung zur Kenntniß der alten Kunstwerke zum Gebrauche bey seinen Vorlesungen entworfen (Introduction to the Study of Antiquity,

list, the literature on Heyne continues to grow, and I regret that Polke 1999 came to my attention too late to be considered in this study. 9 Clark 2006: 158–82. For the origins of the seminar under Gesner see Legaspi 2008. 10 Leventhal 1986: 248; see further Leventhal 1994. 11 Heyne to Hagedorn, 3 Oct. 1772 (Baden 1797: 206). On Heyne’s archaeology lectures see now Döhl 2007: 30; Bräuning-Oktavio 1971. 12 The only extensive edition of the notes (Heyne 1822) is a compilation from various manuscripts, criticized by Döhl 2007: 33 as ‘ganz unbrauchbar’ for a reconstruction of Heyne’s activities. See too Bräuning-Oktavio 1971.

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or Outline Guide to the Knowledge of Ancient Works of Art Composed For Use with his Lectures). The summary suggests that the course was arranged in three parts: a systematic discussion of the nature of (ancient) art and the best way of studying it was followed by a brief account of the overall history of ancient art, and completed by a more detailed discussion of selected Greek and Roman works of art, grouped not according to style but to object type (statues, busts, reliefs, gems, paintings).13 Many aspects of the 1772 treatment, in particular of the ‘history of art’ which occupies its second part, are highly reminiscent of Winckelmann. It is clear that Heyne portrayed the history of ancient art as a narrative of progressively superior attempts to express beauty in sensible form, according to which the Greeks outstripped their Egyptian and Etruscan predecessors and improved art to its ‘highest perfection’. He also took over Winckelmann’s characterization of the history of Greek art in terms of four period styles, and proposed to investigate the ‘physical and moral causes’ of art’s development. Moreover, he endorsed Winckelmann’s claim that the ultimate goal of the study of ancient culture was the cultivation of good taste and the ennobling of the mind. Overall, the Einleitung suggests strongly that, at least during his early years at Göttingen, Heyne pursued a Winckelmannian pedagogic programme.14 This programme helps to explain why Heyne’s name was linked so frequently with that of Winckelmann in the nineteenth century, as well as in those twentieth-century histories of classical scholarship that stem from the grand tradition. For Wilamowitz, as we have seen, it was Heyne who ‘introduced the study of art and the historical approach of Winckelmann’ to German universities. Pfeiffer also states that ‘it was precisely the influence of Winckelmann that distinguished the scholarship of Heyne and his friends and pupils from that of other contemporary scholars’.15 Their opinions draw support from the verdicts of those who knew Heyne: his son-in-law Arnold von Heeren commented in an 1813 memoir that it was through reading Winckelmann’s works that Heyne was inspired to study the history of

13

Heyne 1772: 3. Ibid. 10, 13, 6–7, 9. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1921: 101; Pfeiffer 1976: 171; see too Sandys 1908: 42: ‘In the domain of art he followed the lines laid down by Winckelmann.’ 14 15

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art, and began to think of integrating it into an academic curriculum.16 The task of this chapter is to explore how Heyne’s engagement with Winckelmann conditioned his own understanding of the tasks and challenges inherent in what he was, perhaps, the first to dub the ‘Wissenschaft des Altertums’. It will be argued that, the Einleitung and Heeren’s comments notwithstanding, Heyne was one of Winckelmann’s most sceptical eighteenth-century critics, and that his methodological disagreements with Winckelmann conditioned both his view of the tasks and potential of Altertumswissenschaft and his later dismissal of Wolf.

EX HUMILI POTENS: HEYNE, WINCKELMANN, AND GÖTTINGEN The parallels contemporaries drew between Heyne and Winckelmann had their basis not only in perceived similarities of scholarly approach, but also in parallels between their lives and in the personal acquaintance that existed between the two men. Twelve years younger than Winckelmann and the child of an immigrant Silesian linen weaver, Heyne grew up in similarly straitened circumstances. Charity and income gained from work as a Pädagog enabled him to attend Leipzig University from 1748 to 1752, where he studied philology and antiquities with Johann Friedrich Christ and Johann August Ernesti, but graduated in jurisprudence under the guidance of Johann August Bach.17 From 1752 to 1757 he held the lowly post of under-secretary in the library of the Saxon Chancellor, Heinrich von Brühl; during these years he produced editions of Tibullus (1755) and Epictetus (1756), as well as making Winckelmann’s acquaintance shortly before the latter departed for Rome. After being reduced to indigence once more at the outbreak of the Seven Years War, Heyne was rescued in 1763 by his unexpected call to the Chair of Eloquence and Poetry at the University of Göttingen in Electoral Hanover. This position, which Heyne held until just before his death in 1812, propelled him to the centre of one of the most fashionable institutions 16 Heeren 1813: 522. See too Heyne’s comments at the start of his edition of Herder’s Kritische Wälder (Heyne 1829 [1806]), discussed in Chapter 7 below. 17 Döhl 2007: 30.

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of higher learning in northern Europe. Göttingen was a new university, founded in 1737 in direct competition with Halle in neighbouring Prussia. The university’s affairs were supervised closely by Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen, George II’s trusted prime minister, who pursued a policy of attracting ‘notables and foreigners’ (Vornehme und Ausländer) to its halls, and it quickly developed into the university of first choice for aristocrats and those upwardly mobile Bürger who aspired to positions in state service. A series of innovative measures were responsible for Göttingen’s success: an emphasis on liberty of thought combined with careful screening of appointments to avoid doctrinal controversy; the payment of higherthan-average salaries to professors; travel grants and leave of absence for the purposes of intellectual inquiry; the promotion of ‘modern’ and useful subjects such as history, statistics (study of the administration of states), and ancient and modern languages; and a lavishly funded library, which kept up to date with the most recent scholarly literature in Latin, English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Above all, professors were encouraged to publish as well as to teach, and to do all they could to promote the university’s reputation.18 During his first two decades at Göttingen Heyne produced wellregarded editions of Virgil (1767–75), Pindar (1773), and Apollodorus (1782–3) (to be followed by the Homer of 1802–3), and became equally well known for his activities as a teacher. Yet the greater part of his time was taken up with administrative affairs in the university and the Royal Göttingen Society of Sciences, the local learned academy formed in 1751 under the presidency of Albrecht von Haller. The Chair of Eloquence carried with it the duties of public orator, to which Heyne added the duties of Director of the Philological Seminar, University Librarian, contributor to and, from 1770 onwards, editor of the GGA.19 Heyne’s ‘archaeology’ course was clearly suited to Göttingen’s desired constituency of students, and Münchhausen provided funds to enable him to build up a significant teaching collection of engravings, gem impressions, and plaster casts. Indeed, his experience in 18

1975.

See McClelland 1976: 151–5; Clark 2006; Butterfield 1955: 32–61; and esp. Reill

19 Heidenreich 2006, in the course of a comprehensive survey of Heyne’s scholarly output, estimates that he wrote some 6,500 critical notices for the journal, in addition to his regular prolusiones on festive days of the university and commentationes for the Society of Sciences.

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matters antiquarian may have helped him to obtain his position: Heyne was appointed on David Ruhnken’s recommendation in recognition of his work on Tibullus and Epictetus, but he also had something of a track-record in glyptic studies, having collaborated with Lippert on the third volume of his Dactyliotheca universalis after the death of Christ. Heyne and his archaeology lectures furnish an important example within William Clark’s analysis of the ‘academic commodification’ of charisma which accompanied the rise of the modern research university. As Clark points out, Heyne receives ‘one of [the] longest and highest evaluations of an academic’ contained in one of his most important primary sources: the report on German universities produced for the Prussian king in 1789 by his minister, Friedrich Gedike: Court Councillor (Hofrath) Heyne, as is known, is one of the primary and most important pillars of the fame (Ruhm) of the university. He has thus enjoyed till now, among all professors, the greatest confidence from the Hanoverian government . . . The bustle and untiring activity with which Heyne works for the honor of the university is universally acknowledged. Humanistic studies have come extraordinarily to the fore in Göttingen thanks to him. At no university are such studies pursued with such enthusiasm as in Göttingen. No university has thus in recent times educated so many learned and tasteful philologists as Göttingen. Even the most refined and richest students attend Heyne’s classes. His Archaeology is, so to say, a class in vogue (Modekollegium) especially, even though (as quasi-private class) it costs three Louisdor.20

This picture of an eminent scholar at the height of his powers contrasts with the rather less confident image projected in a letter Heyne wrote to Winckelmann soon after his arrival at Göttingen in 1763. After reminding his addressee of their former acquaintance and recounting his many changes of fortune since they had last met, Heyne sought a commerce de lettres and asked permission to propose Winckelmann for election to the Göttingen academy. He emphasized the mutual benefits that might flow from this arrangement: My position now requires of me a more exacting study of antiquity (Studium der Antiquität), I also have charge of the Library and a seat in the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen. In respect of this last, I would very much like to see you made a corresponding member, should such a proposal please 20

Clark 2006: 389–90.

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you! As the way of thinking around here demands a certain celebritatem nominis for a professor who is Gesner’s successor, and in this manner I am deprived of my cherished bene vixit qui bene latuit, so I would be very much obliged if, either by virtue of my Tibullus and Epictetus, or in consideration of my love of the fine arts, you might facilitate my reception into the academies of Italy . . . Above all else, however, gift me the honour of your correspondence, allow me to experience as many as possible of your immortal works and concerns. Regard this university and the Royal Society as a channel through which your discoveries and ideas may be disseminated widely.21

Clearly, Heyne already had an acute sense of the expectations attendant upon his new role. Winckelmann was happy to oblige and, from the mid-1760s onwards, it was the GGA rather than the BSW which carried regular Nachrichten of his antiquarian endeavours.22 This rather public connection between Winckelmann and Göttingen was cemented when Winckelmann dedicated his 1766 Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst to the Society, and his correspondence with Heyne continued into the final months of his life.23 These multiple personal and professional points of contact between the two men help to explain why, in the years after Winckelmann’s death, Heyne was urged to take up and complete his friend’s projects.24 Any reader who had followed Winckelmann’s Göttingen connection through the pages of the GGA in the 1760s might be forgiven for assuming that the coincidence between their outlooks was far closer than was truly the case. In addition to the Nachrichten noted above, the GGA also carried reviews of Winckelmann’s early Roman works: the Anmerkungen über die Baukunst (1762), Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (1763), Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit zur Empfindung des Schönen (1764), and the Geschichte itself (1765). Heyne wrote regularly for the journal from 1763 onwards, and it has often been assumed that these notices, which were for the most part highly complimentary, all came from his pen. Copies kept in the archives at Göttingen suggest a different 21

Heyne to Winckelmann, July 1763 (Rehm IV 61: 95). Winckelmann 1766a, 1766b, 1767; see Heidenreich 2006: 266. Heyne was one of the few German scholars to whom Winckelmann gave advance notice of his ill-fated decision to travel to Germany in 1768. His final letter to Heyne, dated 30 March 1768 (Rehm III 947), discusses the possibility of visiting Göttingen during his tour. 24 See e.g. [Riedel] 1776: II. lxiv; Herder 1781: 210. 22 23

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story, however, as the attributions of authorship recorded against each entry indicate that the glowing reviews of the Sendschreiben and Geschichte were the work of the noted Altertumskenner (and Winckelmann enthusiast) Christian Adolph Klotz.25 It was only after Klotz left for Halle in 1765 that others began to review Winckelmann’s publications: Haller commented upon Versuch einer Allegorie (1766) and Heyne on the Monumenti antichi inediti (1768). Both reviewers present a far cooler assessment of Winckelmann’s work than that of their former colleague.

‘ICH GEDENKE NICHT DAS OHR ZU KITZELN’: HEYNE’S LOBSCHRIFT AUF WINCKELMANN Heyne’s most authoritative public statement on Winckelmann’s achievements was to come a decade later. In 1777 he entered a competition announced by the recently founded Kassel Society of Antiquities to produce an encomium of Winckelmann for publication in 1778, the tenth anniversary of his death.26 In the hotly contested field of two Heyne’s entry prevailed, and duly appeared the following year in French and German editions. Encomiastic obituary of a recently deceased scholar was an established genre with its own conventions: biography seasoned with lavish commendations of the subject’s ingenium (talent) and doctrina (learning). Heyne followed the traditional format, yet his Lobschrift auf Winckelmann is notable chiefly for being not much of an encomium at all. Although he had begun in the mode of panegyric, commenting that, ‘of all the advantages that nature, hard work, and fortune can provide, Winckelmann possessed a greater measure than perhaps any other

25 [Klotz] 1763, 1765; [Haller] 1766; for the authorship of these and other GGA reviews, see Schimpf 1982. The 1762 review of Anmerkungen über die Baukunst is attributed to Abraham Gotthelf Kästner. Klotz, who was something of a rival of Heyne’s during the latter’s early years in Göttingen, had been called to the university in 1762 as Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy, and was promoted to the rank of Ordinary Professor in 1763. He left in 1765 in order to take up a chair in Philosophy and Eloquence at Halle. For the ‘Zwistigkeiten’ between him and colleagues, including Heyne, see his ADB entry. Klotz also provided a rather cooler review of Winckelmann’s Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit in GGA 1764. 26 For the background to the competition and the title set see Schulz 1963.

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expert (Kenner) in antiquity’, Heyne went on to make disparaging comments about virtually every one of Winckelmann’s Roman works. He praised Winckelmann’s Description of the Stosch gem collection only as a footnote to Lippert’s and Caylus’ earlier efforts, and condemned the Monumenti as a bald attempt at self-publicity contaminated by ‘Italian’ standards of taste, which showed more erudition and ostentation than good judgement.27 Even the Geschichte, which Heyne named Winckelmann’s ‘Hauptwerk’, was criticized for lacking clarity and illumination and for containing errors that are so great as to vitiate the entire second part of the book.28 These and other damning comments work persistently to undermine the lofty but somewhat clichéd praise of Winckelmann’s genius in the essay’s opening and closing sections. Yet Heyne also made it clear from the outset that he did not intend to offer a simple exercise in praise. Encomiastic biographies might occasionally form a platform for broader critical reflections, and here there was recent precedent in the form of David Ruhnken’s justly famous panegyric of his teacher Tiberius Hemsterhuis, first published in 1768.29 In addition, the title set for the Kassel competition— ‘L’Éloge de Mr Winckelmann, dans lequel on fera entrer le point où il a trouvé la Science des Antiquités, et à quel point il l’a laissée’— allowed for a more ambitious plan. Heyne seized the chance, claiming from the outset of his essay that a sober assessment of ‘Winckelmann’s services to the study of antiquity and the influence he has thereby exercised upon his own age’ could be both ‘instructive’ and ‘very important’: ‘For we have still been too little concerned with what may be expected for the entire science of antiquity (Wissenschaft des Alterthums): how far we have advanced it up until now, and how far it is still to be advanced; what steps we have already taken, and what remain still to be taken.’30 It is worth pausing over this sentence, which to my knowledge is the first time the formulation ‘Wissenschaft des Altertums’ is used by a German scholar. It is clearly Heyne’s chosen rendering of the competition setters’ ‘Science des Antiquités’; yet his use of the term 27

Heyne 1963: 23. Ibid. 22, 24. 29 A copy of the first edition is held in the Göttingen Library. For the genre of scholarly biography in general (including those written for Heyne and for Ruhnken), see Espagne 2010. 30 Heyne 1963: 17. 28

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‘Altertum’, both here and throughout the essay, appears subtly out of step with that of his contemporaries. ‘Antiquités’ might more naturally be understood to mean ‘antiquities’ or the ‘Antiquität’ mentioned in Heyne’s 1763 letter to Winckelmann: the study of ancient monuments from an antiquarian perspective or from an aesthetic/connoisseurial one as works of art.31 In the Einleitung Heyne differentiated between these two approaches fairly strictly, terming the first ‘antiquarische Studium, Studium der Alterthümer, Archäologie’ and the second ‘Studium des schönen Alterthums, der Antike, der schönen Kunstwerke’.32 At times in the Lobschrift Heyne appears still to be operating with this distinction, but more often he casts the study of both ‘Alterthümer’ and of ‘alte Kunstwerke’ as parts of a broader endeavour, which he names both ‘the study’ (das Studium) and ‘the science’ (das Wissenschaft) of ‘antiquity’ (des Alterthums). It is in relation to this field that he declines to ‘adopt the élan of the panegyrist’, proposing ‘to present Winckelmann more as a scholarly researcher into antiquity (gelehrten Forscher des Alterthums) and an expert on ancient art (Kenner der alten Kunst) than to recount his life history’.33 Fulfilment of encomiastic expectations is subordinated to the more important objective of saying something in the service of Altertumswissenschaft, here presented as a distinctive branch of knowledge with its own identity, history, and hopes of future progress. This also helps to explain why Heyne devotes the first few pages of his essay to general discussion of what such a Wissenschaft requires. Like Ruhnken in his encomium for Hemsterhuis (and deploying a topos that goes back to Cicero), Heyne proceeds by sketching a portrait of the ideal scholar, detailing those qualities of ingenium (‘talent’) and doctrina or eruditio (‘learning’) desirable in a student of the ancient world. But while Ruhnken had from the outset identified Hemsterhuis with the ideal textual critic, using the topic of doctrina to provide an account of his teacher’s extraordinary education, Heyne’s sketch of the ideal Altertumswissenschaftler proceeds

31

Müri 1958: 18; compare the usage of Montfaucon, l’Antiquité expliquée (1719–20) and Klotz, Über das Studium des Alterthums (1766), where ‘Antiquité’ and ‘Alterthum’ denote visual monuments exclusively. 32 Heyne 1772: 7–8. 33 Heyne 1963: 17.

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independently of his evaluation of Winckelmann’s achievements. This is how he begins his sketch: The study of antiquity, and especially the part that is oriented towards ancient works of art, demands a range of knowledge and a measure of mental capacities, together with a fortunate allotment of external circumstances, which are not always to be found together. Just as the investigator into nature must have gained knowledge of particular bodies and surveyed them ordered into classes, as the literary expert must know the writings of every kind of literature to which he applies himself, so the expert in antiquity (Altertumskenner) must possess as complete a knowledge as possible of all the ancient remains according to their different degrees of value, together with the skill to interpret them and to determine the art, the age, the authenticity, and the worth of every piece. What wide-ranging scholarship this requires!34

It is plausible to link Heyne’s emphasis on the vast range of learning the ideal Altertumswissenschaftler must acquire to his own pedagogical activities in the Göttingen Philological Seminar. Upon assuming its directorship Heyne revised its procedures extensively, curtailing the medieval practice of Latin disputations on pre-published theses and setting his students instead to producing written discussions—essays— in the interpretation of particular texts and objects, which they took turns to read out and submit to criticism at weekly meetings. In short, Heyne developed the seminar in such a way as to train those linguistic and interpretative skills necessary for the historical exegesis of ancient texts and objects: the very form of disciplinary training called for in his encomium of Winckelmann. His list of the sub-disciplines the ideal Altertumskenner must have mastered—‘ancient history in general, the history of Greece and Rome in particular, a precise familiarity with the oldest periods, with the ideas and customs of the heroic age, and knowledge of mythology according to its various stages, then the history of art, artists, and works of art in its entire range, and . . . the study of coins and inscriptions’—is an early specification of the component disciplines of Altertumswissenschaft, and would become a familiar litany in the ‘Encyclopedias’ of philology of his nineteenthcentury successors.35 Heyne nevertheless concurs with tradition in claiming that mere learnedness isn’t enough: the ideal Altertumswissenschaftler must 34

Ibid.

35

Ibid. 18.

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also possess ‘a measure of mental capacities, together with a fortunate allotment of external circumstances’. As far as mental capacities are concerned: In the midst of this sea of learning his mind must have retained complete effectiveness in thinking, comparing, and making judgements; his sensibility for the beautiful, true, and great all the fine-tuning nature, refinement, and long exercise can provide. A true, sure gaze; a power of imagination that is fiery and easily kindled but accustomed to the rule of reason, a complete, much-encompassing memory, with the power to notice affinities and relations with ease and to discover every distinction; a sure and purified taste, which is faithful to what is true and beautiful in every genus, age, and style of nature: these are the characteristics of a mind Nature has destined to be an antiquarian.36

Finally, Heyne briefly details the external circumstances that must attend his paragon of talent and learning. Most importantly, he must be well travelled, as the most important antiquities are now spread about in collections all over Europe. This means that he must be a man of means, although Heyne does concede that if he has managed to inspect the ‘most outstanding’ ancient monuments at first hand, he can make up knowledge of the rest through the study of drawings, engravings, descriptions, and plaster casts.37 Learning, mental capacities, and the opportunity for first-hand inspection of ancient remains are thus the three characteristics Heyne requires of his ideal classical scholar. How did Winckelmann fare with regard to each? Enviably in terms of opportunities for inspection; for Winckelmann had been resident in Rome, with unrestricted access to the Apostolic collections: an ideal situation for any antiquarian. Nor indeed does Heyne convict him of insufficient learning, although he does take time to regret that the lack of good libraries in Rome meant that Winckelmann had to rely on old and inferior editions for his historical work.38 No, it was above all his mental capacities that let Winckelmann down, in particular his ‘lively and potent power of imagination’: In his final years the whole bent of his mind was set upon the interpretation of ancient works and pieces that had been found inexplicable by others, and it was for the most part just this kind of object that he wanted to find interpretations for. Exactly as if the air of Italy had this influence, the 36

Ibid.

37

Ibid. 19.

38

Ibid. 25.

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Monumenti inediti show that the sickness of omen-interpretation and prophecy gripped him; he began no longer to explicate but to guess; he became not an interpreter of antiquity but a seer. His faculty of judgement— which requires cold blood and calm reflection—no longer kept pace with his heated power of imagination, but over the course of time the latter grasped, memorized, and acquainted itself over and over again with a mass of objects with so much vividness that what Winckelmann had at first thought of as merely conjectural or possible appeared to him later as real, as things that had once actually been observed, to which he now connected other ideas that struck him, because they appeared to be similar. Thus he found resemblances others could not find, relations and beauties impossible for other eyes to discover.39

Winckelmann had most of the advantages that learning, talent, and situation could provide, but ultimately it was his ingenium, his heated power of imagination, that overstepped its bounds and turned him from a promising scholar of antiquity into a soothsayer. Heyne’s criticism in the passage above is directed primarily at Winckelmann’s Monumenti, but elsewhere in the Lobschrift he includes the Geschichte in his criticisms.40 This is confirmed by his Sammlung antiquarischer Aufsätze (Collected Antiquarian Essays), published contemporaneously with the Lobschrift in 1778–9. Like the Lobschrift, Heyne’s introduction to the Sammlung mixes conventional praise of Winckelmann with reservations. Commenting that ‘Winckelmann fell into antiquarian studies in a very adventitious manner’, he praised him for bringing ‘the humane learning of a German scholar’ into Italy, as well as for his ‘fiery enthusiasm’, which, during his final year in Saxony, ‘was inflamed by the sight of ancient and modern artworks and by the company of learned artists and connoisseurs’: with the Platonic ideas he had nurtured for so long in the loneliness and depths of his heart, and with the advice and instruction of his great friend, [Anton Raphael] Mengs, he started upon a path no Italian antiquarian had trodden before him . . . and in this manner he came, stage by stage, to the plan of his History of the Art of Antiquity, which placed antiquarian studies 39

Ibid. 19, 23–4. See e.g. ibid. 22: ‘eben daher vermihst man in jenem noch, in dem Plan und der Stellung der Theile und der Sachen, eine vollkommene Helle und Licht’; 24: ‘Nirgendwo offenbart sich der Mangel der erforderlichen Hülfsmittel mehr, als im historischen Theile seiner Geschichte der Kunst, welcher voller Fehler wider die Zeitrechnung, die Geschichtfolge und den wahren Verlauf der Geschichte ist.’ 40

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on the right track and guided us towards the study of ancient works of art as works of art. But in many cases his enthusiasm came into play where cool consideration, weighing, and testing were demanded. The historical part of his work shows all too clearly that, where he was living, he lacked those auxiliary materials necessary to obtain accurate historical knowledge, as well as historical criticism in order to prove or justify his hypotheses.

Heyne went on to offer a disadvantageous comparison between Winckelmann and Caylus: Count Caylus wrote nothing systematic, in antiquarian erudition he was far inferior to our compatriot, but when it came to actual knowledge of art, its techniques and practices, he was just as much superior to him; when Winckelmann only ever wants to explain what an ancient work depicts, even where this cannot be explained; when with his powerful imagination he overshoots his target and constructs the most baseless hypotheses as if they were a fortress of rock, the Count proceeds with enlightened, sober inquiries to penetrate into the idea of the artist as well as the mechanical aspects, and reveals to the eye a host of features that one would never have suspected at the first glance.41

The reasons for Heyne’s reservations are amply expatiated in the Sammlung. In the course of its nine essays, most of which engage directly with the Geschichte, Heyne calls into question Winckelmann’s understanding of the temporality of ancient art’s rise and decline, his datings of famous statues to the epochs of the ‘high’ and ‘beautiful’ styles, and the entire account of Greek and Roman history presented in Part 2. Refutations of Winckelmann upon particular points are accompanied with frequent exasperated comments about his ‘enthusiasm’ and his overactive ‘imagination’, which was such as to render his work ‘as good as useless’. At one point, Heyne goes so far as to claim that the Geschichte has formed a basis for ‘antiquarian lies’.42 Potts, who surveys the Sammlung in his 1978 doctoral thesis on Winckelmann, rightly characterizes it as ‘the most devastating critique of Winckelmann’s Geschichte published in the late eighteenth century’.43 He is correct to note that Heyne’s frustration with Winckelmann’s work was prompted by factors beyond his sense of its intrinsic failings. Heyne was clearly irritated by the

41 42

Heyne 1778b: vii–viii. Heyne 1778a: 166.

43

Potts 1978: 206.

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nascent hagiography of Winckelmann evident as early as the 1770s, and by the ways in which his writings were stimulating others to produce ever-more speculative retracings of the early history of Greek art and culture.44 Potts suggests, however, that Heyne’s scepticism about Winckelmann’s methods grew gradually over the course of the 1770s, and that he never fully abandoned a Winckelmannian framework for reconstructing the history of Greek art.45 I will argue below that the basic views that would lead Heyne to undermine Winckelmann’s Lehrgebäude were in place as early as 1771. More importantly, I will suggest that Heyne’s critique of Winckelmann was more radical than Potts implies, and that it was such as to affect his view of the possibilities of Altertumswissenschaft as represented in the work of others, including Wolf.

HEYNE AS CRI TIC OF WINCKELMANN: FROM THE BERICHTIGUNG TO THE SAMMLUNG The trail of Heyne’s criticisms of the Geschichte begins in 1771: the year his Berichtigung und Ergänzung der Winkelmannschen Geschichte der Kunst (Correction and Emendation of Winckelmann’s History of Art) appeared in the Göttingen Society of Sciences’ German-language proceedings. The title suggests that Heyne intended this short treatise as a supplement to Winckelmann’s work, and it is organized as a running commentary upon the early sections of Part 2 of the Geschichte, in which Winckelmann had used Pausanias and Pliny to construct a chronology of those artists who lived before the time of Phidias. Heyne proposed both to test the soundness of this narrative and to supplement it with further relevant information from other sources. This was an appropriately modest exercise for a scholar north of the Alps, who (as he was always keen to protest) neither possessed Winckelmann’s extraordinary genius nor enjoyed his opportunity to view large numbers of ancient works at first hand. Yet Heyne also suggested that his investigations had high stakes for the status of Winckelmann’s work:

44 45

Ibid. 212–16; see Heyne 1778b: viii–ix, 1778a: 167. Potts 1978: 207.

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To compose a History of the Art of Antiquity, to attempt to provide a Lehrgebäude, is a glittering thought, which was bound to dazzle a soul endowed with such a strong sense of the noble and beautiful as Winckelmann’s . . . But considered from more than one point of view, Winckelmann found himself in a most unfavourable situation. To name but one consideration: he composed his structure for the most part before the required materials were collected together and properly prepared. But materials that consist in historical, literary, and critical investigations, comparisons, and inquiries, cannot be replaced or substituted for by deliberation, subtlety, and wit.46

According to Heyne, Winckelmann had neglected a great deal of the groundwork that ought to have been carried out before he proceeded to erect his system. The implication is clear: without Heyne’s testing of the claims advanced in Part 2 of the Geschichte, Winckelmann’s Hauptwerk stands without foundations. Heyne organizes his discussion as a running commentary on Winckelmann’s text, re-examining Winckelmann’s account, correcting his interpretation of Pausanias and Pliny on specific points, and adding information gleaned from other sources. Many of his interventions might be seen as corrections of relatively venial errors, even where, as in his debate with Winckelmann (and Pliny) over the date of the death of Candaules, Heyne draws more general historiographic conclusions from his arguments.47 At other points, however, Heyne formulates arguments which have the potential to present a more serious challenge to Winckelmann’s account. Perhaps the most interesting of these comes when Heyne inserts into his commentary a discussion of Pausanias’ well-known report (5.17–19) of the dedication of the Chest of Cypselus at Olympia. Winckelmann had mentioned this object only briefly in Part 1 of the Geschichte, where its ‘strange images and images that would make a greater impression on those as yet uncivilized men’ formed a point of comparison with 46

Heyne 1771: 204–6. Pliny (NH 35.34.55) places Candaules’ death ‘duodevicensima olympiade . . . aut, ut quidam tradunt, eodem anno quo Romulus’, i.e. 708–705 or 717 bce; Winckelmann follows the former date. Heyne places the event in 719 bce, commenting of the later of Pliny’s possibilites that ‘Zeitrechnungen, die blos nach Parallelgeschichten angegeben sind, müssen billig den Datis weichen, die eine systematische Zeitrechnung an die Hande giebet’ (Heyne 1771: 218–19, n. y). The date is significant because for both Heyne and Winckelmann, Candaules’ reign marks the boundary between an era of art from which only legends survive and one amenable to historical investigation (ibid. 218; Winckelmann 1764: 316–17, 2006: 299). 47

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Etruscan images of the gods. By contrast, Heyne’s interest in Pausanias’ description was so great that he had made it the subject of a paper read before the Göttingen Society of Sciences in 1770.48 Then he had addressed the object’s iconography, dating, and style, relying on the Winckelmannian tenet that ‘[the most] ancient art still did not yet take regard of beauty’ to infer that its figures must have had a ‘strong’ and ‘violent’ expression.49 In the Berichtigung, Heyne eschews such considerations to focus upon a more prosaic line of historical reasoning. Pausanias reports that the chest still on view in his own day was the very one in which Cypselus had been hidden as an infant, and that it had been dedicated by his descendants in gratitude for his survival. Heyne points out that if this is true, the chest must date from the first half of the seventh century bce. Yet it was also possible that the chest was a family heirloom, and Pausanias’ attribution of the verses inscribed upon it to the poet Eumelus suggests that it could have been older still, by a century or more. Despite these clear indications of its antiquity, Heyne points out that the chest was ‘of no mean art’. He draws a general lesson from this for the history of ancient art: This example proves, like so many others, that epochs of art or literature only have reference to the general practice or spread of an art; individual artists, individual geniuses existing by themselves, are found in every period, in every era, and one may suppose that they would have produced just as—or perhaps even more—significant changes in the whole, if external circumstances had supported them.50

Heyne continues to phrase his account in the language of ‘epochs of art’ and ‘external circumstances’; his conclusion nevertheless hints at a serious challenge to Winckelmann. For, as we saw in Chapter 4, Winckelmann had identified the ‘general conception’ of his history as the story of the arts’ overall progress from necessity, through beauty, to superfluity.51 By adducing ancient testimony which suggested that refinement and adornment existed at an early period, Heyne was questioning the validity of this conception. Moreover, by admitting the possibility of exceptions to Winckelmann’s generalizations about the stylistic unity of artefacts produced in a particular country and

48 50

49 Winckelmann 2006: 161; Heyne 1770. Heyne 1770: 69. 51 Heyne 1771: 224. Winckelmann 2006: 111.

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age, Heyne complicated the operation of using such generalizations as guides for the attribution of particular artefacts to periods and places.52 This scepticism perhaps helps to explain why, in the remainder of the Berichtigung, Heyne favours alternative ways of establishing chronologies of artists and their works (for example, by dating the historical figures who form the subject-matter of statues and portrait busts).53 But the Berichtigung breaks off abruptly: for its continuation, Heyne’s readers had to wait until 1778 and the first volume of the Sammlung. In its third and final essay, which bears the rather unassuming title ‘Über die Künstlerepochen beym Plinius’ (‘On Pliny’s Epochs of Artists’), Heyne reprised his criticism of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. This time, he makes the serious, global consequences of his criticisms explicit. The beginning of Heyne’s account provides a good example of his starker impatience (which, as we have already seen, is manifest throughout the Sammlung) with Winckelmann’s work: That, although it is indeed a classic book, Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity lacks in historical accuracy, was not noticed during the initial period of intoxicated wonder that it provoked, and for some time afterwards I scarcely dared to venture forward with correction of a number of its errors. For a long time, reviewers and writers stretched their imaginations and, where this was lacking, their wit, to speak of ancient art in tones of 52 Heyne’s 1768 review of Winckelmann’s Monumenti antichi inediti provides further evidence that, from the early years of his engagement with Winckelmann’s work, he was attempting to formulate general or global objections to his friend’s methods. There, in addition to correcting what he termed ‘small omissions and imperfections’ in Winckelmann’s work, Heyne also formulated two more general criticisms of two hypotheses Winckelmann had presented as the core of his approach. The first of these was the assumption that all of the scenes depicted on ancient objects had some definite meaning known to their original viewers; the second, to assume that these subjects were taken from mythology, rather than from history or daily life. Heyne had argued that that there is no reason to suppose that many of the scenes Winckelmann interprets as mythological were not created to memorialize historical events which cannot now be recovered from the literary record. Moreover, Winckelmann has failed to countenance the possibility that ‘Auf andern . . . ist zu glauben, daß gar nichts Bestimmtes vorgestellt worden sey’. ([Heyne] 1768: 157.) For Heyne, the generic character of many of the titles given to ancient monuments in Pliny’s work and the likelihood that ‘inferior’ artists copied scenes and motifs from older works render many of Winckelmann’s interpretations strained. The Monumenti review shows him yet again bringing historical testimony to bear in order to undermine Winckelmann’s reliance upon generalizations that may not hold true for all cases. 53 Heyne 1771: 209.

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enthusiasm. Calm investigations and inquiry appeared tasks only for dull minds. Reliability and certainty in citation of authors, accuracy in reporting individual details, caution in assumption, distrust of general principles drawn from individual cases, specificity in discussion of times, persons, and local circumstances are generally qualities praised in German writers, which are perhaps dispensable in those few cases where little depends on exactitude and it may therefore be neglected. But in a history, in the case of reasoning, assumptions, and conclusions from what has taken place, how much does not depend on what has really happened! What use to us are all these new writings which, instead of the history that they promise, offer chains of reasoning (Raisonnements) about history, and base them not on what has really taken place but on their ideas of how it could have done so! In the case of Winckelmann’s book, it is not just that countless inaccuracies in matters both large and small have rendered the entire historical part as good as unusable. Even in the rest one may place little weight upon his principles of art, determinations of styles, epochs, and periods, and the judgements he draws from them about ancient works and their creators, without undertaking first a close examination of his claims.54

Heyne presents this essay as taking up where the Berichtigung left off, offering a thorough critique of Winckelmann in the hope that it might ‘lay the foundations, at least, for a more certain, historical structure’.55 The first step in this process would be the construction of a more adequate chronology of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art. To that end, he proposed to return to the chronologies of artists set down by Pliny and to test, yet again, their validity. As in the Berichtigung, Heyne focuses his attention upon those dense chapters in which Pliny lists the most notable painters and sculptures in marble and bronze, which had provided the basis for Winckelmann’s chronology in Part 2 of the Geschichte. Repeating objections first raised by Pierre Bayle, Heyne argued that Pliny’s frequently used ‘floruit’ formulation, which works to associate the names of famous artists with particular years or (more often) Olympiads, presented little firm basis for reconstructing their chronology. Men might take various lengths of time to become masters of their art; moreover, different artists might maintain the ‘highest peak of their renown’ for shorter or longer periods. The conclusion to be drawn is that for the most part, the floruit cannot but be ‘thoroughly

54

Heyne 1778a: 166.

55

Ibid. 167–8.

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unsatisfactory, ambiguous, and disputable’ as a means of arriving at a sound chronology of ancient art.56 Ηaving thus indicated the magnitude of the challenge, Heyne then turns to examine how Winckelmann interpreted Pliny’s use of the term. Here, he diagnoses a further uncertainty: although Winckelmann sometimes implies that Pliny’s ‘floruit’ indicates the period when an artist produced his most accomplished works, elsewhere and indeed more often he maintains that those Olympiads singled out by Pliny correlate with periods when the ‘external circumstances’ of Greece—in particular, peace and freedom—were most conducive to great art. Pliny’s ‘floruits’ thus provide the key that enables Winckelmann to connect his theses about general causes to the chronology laid down in the ancient sources. It is this link between Winckelmann’s general causes and the testimony of the ancients that Heyne sets out to demolish. He does so by advancing his own, alternative explanation of Pliny’s practice: that Pliny took his dates from chronicles, not of the history of art, but of general or political history. Pliny’s neat lists which group artists together in particular Olympiads reflect those points at which, after finishing an account of a particularly significant event, war, or political leader’s career, earlier authors found it convenient to include within their narratives a table of synchronous events. Such lists would, so Heyne argued, have included the notable works or anecdotes about the lives of famous artists, from which Pliny selected his notices. It was as products of this adventitious process, and not as finely tuned judgements about flourishing and decline in the history of the arts, that Heyne proposed to interpret Pliny’s epochs.57 Heyne then went through those chapters in which Pliny listed the ‘most famous artists’ in marble and bronze, arguing that in each case the Olympiad mentioned by Pliny corresponded with a significant political event, and that Winckelmann’s attempts to connect them with times of peace and prosperity were untenable. Sometimes his derision is palpable, as when he quotes, and then mocks, the absurdities into which Winckelmann’s efforts to calibrate times of peace with those of artistic greatness has sometimes led him. Heyne scoffed at such paradoxical formulations as Winckelmann’s claim that, ‘The most

56

Ibid. 169.

57

Ibid. 176–80.

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blissful times for art in Greece, and especially in Athens, were the forty years in which Pericles ruled, so to speak, the republic and during the dogged war which preceded the Peloponnesian War’.58 For Heyne, such formulations were not only crammed with ‘historical inaccuracies’; they were also horribly vague, and he did not refrain from pointing out that this was one point among many where Winckelmann had been forced to introduce qualifications to his freedom thesis. It was, indeed, the link Winckelmann proposed between liberty and artistic greatness that Heyne targeted above all throughout ‘Die Künstlerepochen’, delighting in demonstrating that the Olympiads Winckelmann had sought to portray as high points of Greek art corresponded with the breaking of a truce, the depths of war, or some other form of political or social disruption.59 Even in those few cases where it was more plausible that the ‘fortunate circumstances’ of peace and freedom were present, Heyne finds Winckelmann’s explanations imperspicuous. Freedom may foster attitudes, customs, and practices conducive to artists, but this is not necessarily the case: Freedom considered in and of itself may be an inactive, dull, stupid state, it may also be afflicted with such great unrest and physical, moral, and political pressure that art and science have little potential. The freedom of the Greeks is thus so indefinite, and in different times and places so various a thing, that anything one bases upon it is utterly insecure. Freedom meant very different things in Athens, in Sparta, and in Thebes, something else again in the peaceful lands of Phocis and Doris, of Elis and Arcadia, and in those areas art never advanced to any height. These and a hundred other considerations provoke dissatisfaction, when in relation to the flowering of ancient art one reads of ‘freedom’ without any further specification.60

58 Winckelmann 1764: 329 (2006: 305). Heyne’s verdict: ‘Die ganze Stelle (und dergleichen giebt es so viele im Winkelmann!) ist aus der Luft gegriffen; in der Geschichte hat sie nichts für sich’ (Heyne 1778a: 183–4). 59 Some examples of Heyne’s arguments concerning the ‘floruits’ listed by Pliny at HN 34.19.49–50: the 83rd Olympiad, which Winckelmann follows Pliny in designating Phidias’ floruit, corresponds to Athenian defeat at the Battle of Koroneia; the 87th Olympiad heralds the start of the Peloponnesian War; the 95th was a time of faction and disorder in Athens, which included the execution of Socrates; the 102nd saw the defeat of Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra. 60 Heyne 1778a: 171–2.

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Heyne argues that instead of freedom, it is prosperity and magnificence that contribute most to art’s flowering. These conditions are not, however, the unique endowment of freedom; they may obtain ‘in conditions of political freedom and under those of political slavery . . . amidst simplicity of manners and amidst refinement and luxury . . . as the possession of many or of only a few in the state’.61 Even where the magnificence and prosperity are present, they must be accompanied by other, particular causes in order to have that effect: in every case, something else is always required in order to direct men’s desire for glory towards architecture, painting, and sculpture rather than theatre or other amusements, to summon forth their effort, stimulate artists, excite their genius, give occasion and encouragement to competition: and that is neither freedom, nor climate, nor anything of the sort. It is always something adventitious: a court, a prince, a mistress, an official, a demagogue.62

Pace Winckelmann, then, there is no set of political or social arrangements that uniquely and universally favours great art. Here we reach the heart of Heyne’s objections in the Sammlung, which proceed along similar lines as in the Berichtigung. In both commentaries, Heyne favours explanations in terms of particular historical contexts and causes above Winckelmann’s strikingly formulated generalizations. Instead of undertaking the hard labour of establishing these, Winckelmann and his followers had constructed shimmering Raisonnements, attractive-sounding arguments whose plausibility collapsed at the first critique. Elsewhere in the Sammlung Heyne was to wield similar weapons of antiquarian scepsis to overturn Winckelmann’s conclusions about the dating of those statues that had furnished his paradigms of the high and beautiful styles of art. The Niobe group is reassigned from the period of the ‘high’ style to the late fourth century, and—albeit with some reservations—Heyne follows Lessing in attributing Laocoön to the early Imperial period.63 His formulations, as below, when he pours cold water over Winckelmann’s attribution of Laocoön ‘in all probability, to the epoch of Lysippus and Alexander’, echo his censures in ‘Die Künstlerepochen’:

61

Ibid. 172–3.

62

Ibid. 173.

63

Ibid. 230–5; Heyne 1779b.

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Winckelmann could hardly have grounded this ‘probability’ on anything beyond the style and the quality of the work itself; he based his claims upon such a foundation in many cases. And yet I confess that this kind of claim is the sort I consider to be the least reliable. Considered by themselves, judgements about period style are so easily deceptive, the more so because we have so few pieces which we can be confident come from the most beautiful periods, with which to formulate comparisons. Imagination and enthusiasm too often play a part, and in the end every age has its geniuses, who educate themselves by the pattern and perfection set by the best ages; on the other hand, there are others whose work remains behind their times.64

Heyne’s dismissal of Winckelmann’s ‘imagination’ and ‘enthusiasm’ returns us to the terms of his criticisms in the Lobschrift. Indeed, once we look through the polite veneer of that essay and of the Berichtigung, the terms of Heyne’s critique of Winckelmann throughout the 1770s remained remarkably constant. In the Berichtigung, as in the Sammlung, Heyne condemned Winckelmann for having sought ‘to establish boundaries between epochs before even the periods had been settled . . . to bring individual works, deeds, and circumstances into connection when they were still inadequately determined, their interrelations unknown and unexamined’.65 And in all three, Heyne’s proposed solution is the same: ‘cool consideration, weighing, and testing’ of the ancient sources in order to arrive at a firmer foundation.66 Yet Winckelmann had, after a fashion, anticipated Heyne’s arguments. We saw that the gap between his Raisonnements and what could securely be concluded from the extant sources was 64 Heyne 1779b: 32. See too his criticism of Winckelmann’s dating of the Toro Farnese (Heyne 1779a: 186): ‘Daß wir nicht wenigstens finden, zu welcher Zeit die Künstler gelebt haben, ist das Unangenehmste. Winkelmann setzte sie gleich nach Alexanders Zeiten; aber ohne weitern Grund, als weil es ein schön Werk ist: aber das ist so gut als kein Grund.’ 65 Heyne 1771: 207; compare 1778a: 166. 66 Heyne 1778b: vii; compare 1771: 205–6. Further evidence from Heyne’s archaeology lectures supports my interpretation. Hermann Bräuning-Oktavio quotes commentary on Winckelmann from a set of student notes which he dates to the early 1770s, showing that Heyne was already calling Winckelmann’s freedom thesis into question. In the face of Winckelmann’s work, Heyne also claims that: ‘Wir haben noch keine Geschichte der Kunst, und sie ist auch nicht möglich. Sie setzt die genaueste Specialgeschichte voraus und hängt sehr genau von der genaueren innern Kenntnis des Staates ab. Wie will man sonst die Ursachen entwickeln, warum die Kunst bald zu Athen, bald zu Corinth, bald auf Rhodos, bald in Ionien, bald auf den Inseln blühte? Winkelmanns Geschichte selbst wird mehr durch die eingestreuten Anmerkungen als durch die eigentliche Geschichte schätzbar’ (Bräuning-Oktavio 1971: 19–20, 51).

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acknowledged—indeed, to some extent paraded—in the Geschichte. Yet Winckelmann had also claimed that the fragmentary and unsatisfactory condition of the ancient record had left ‘many empty areas’ in our knowledge of ancient art. To bridge these, and to gain a picture of the whole, required reliance upon an uncertain and fallible process of imaginatively informed conjecture. Heyne certainly does accord a role to imagination in the work of the historian. In a sense, we may read him as convicting Winckelmann of insufficient imaginative sensitivity both to the considerations that had guided Pliny’s selections from his sources and to the particular, local circumstances that had attended the development of Greek art. The Lobschrift in fact contains an early formulation of what was to become a familiar nineteenth-century claim about the imaginative powers required to study the ancient past: The first rule of the interpretation of antiquity should be as follows: every ancient work of art must be considered and judged with the concepts and in the spirit in which the ancient artist made it. One must therefore transplant oneself into the artist’s age, among his contemporaries; seek to attain those forms of knowledge and conceptions from which he proceeded, rediscover the intention of his works so far as is possible, and also regard a private work (for example) with different eyes than a public one, an imitation or later work differently from an original, one that is early, or comes from the beautiful periods of art.67

Nevertheless, Heyne’s discussion of the ideal antiquarian shows him setting firm limits to the use of imagination in historical scholarship. For he goes on to state explicitly that the antiquarian cannot rely upon imagination in cases where the evidence seems inadequate or ambiguous. If a scholar who is seeking to interpret a particular ancient object can, with all his learning, find ‘nothing that approaches the idea of the ancient artist’, Heyne says that he must ‘refrain from useless babble, or briefly indicate why an interpretation cannot be given’.68 This shows why Heyne was so critical of Winckelmann: he was suspicious not only of particular claims Winckelmann made in the course of his work, but also of the entire method of relying upon the ‘heated power of imagination’ to construct a historical narrative. Confronted with gaps in our knowledge of ancient art, Heyne’s view is that the historian should not seek to build overarching structures. The limits of interpretation have been reached: to attempt to breach them is fantasy. 67

Heyne 1963: 20.

68

Ibid. 20–1.

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Yet we must also ask what kind of a history Winckelmann would have succeeded in constructing if he had followed Heyne’s methods. Here, Heyne himself can perhaps be our guide. His writings on ancient art are strewn with professions of his desire to place the study of antiquity upon a more secure, historical and wissenschaftlich footing, yet what he succeeded in producing was in the end, like the work of Caylus, a ‘collection’ rather than an interconnected and systematic narrative of the kind to which Winckelmann had aspired.69 Heyne appears to have been keenly conscious of this: Since Winckelmann’s History of Art was written, most new works that I have seen (with only a few exceptions) provide an overly attractive repetition of what he said, without any further examination; and often accompanied by an affected enthusiasm. Neither is particularly enlightening. In this collection of essays I intend to restrict myself to the arts of criticism, to a cold-blooded, impartial examination of what others have said about ancient art, its works and history, to the correction of many inaccurate, half-true, or entirely baseless claims, and to a few additional remarks. I possess neither the capacity, nor knowledge, nor time enough to map out that whole, a dim image of which sometimes floats before my eyes.70

Heyne had confessed his ever-hardening ‘antiquarian scepticism’ to Hagedorn as early as 1772; he was constant in eschewing Winckelmann’s ‘Begeisterung’.71 As the possibility of establishing a ‘certain, historical structure’ receded ever further into the distance, it is nevertheless occasionally possible to catch in his words faint echoes of Winckelmann’s language of desire and loss.

CONCLUSION: FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF AND THE PREHISTORY OF THE HOMERIC POEMS This chapter has so far examined the connection between Heyne’s vision of a ‘science of antiquity’ and his criticisms of Winckelmann’s 69

See e.g. Heyne 1778a: 166, 167–8. Heyne 1778b: ix. 71 ‘Täglich befestige ich mich mich in meinem antiquarischen Scepticismus immer mehr und mehr, finde der gegründeten Behauptungen immer weniger und weniger, ohne doch so gleich das Schild eines Reformators auszuhängen’, Heyne to Hagedorn, 3 Oct. 1772, quoted in Bräuning-Oktavio 1971: 45. 70

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work. It has shown that Heeren’s suggestion that ‘Heyne war durch Winkelmanns Werk für das Studium der Kunstgeschichte begeistert worden’ should not be interpreted as implying that Heyne was an uncritical follower of his old friend. Rather, from his earliest engagement with the Geschichte Heyne emphasized that it was only when ‘antiquarian learning’ was treated ‘critically and methodically’ that the study of antiquity might be raised to ‘one of the most distinguished branches of science’.72 In particular, it was necessary for the Altertumswissenschaftler to refrain from the kind of unrestrained imaginative speculation that had marred a great deal of Winckelmann’s mature work. Heyne and Winckelmann thus had very different ideas about the limits of permissible interpretation in the project of reconstructing antiquity as a whole. How might this relate to the dismissive attitude Heyne adopted towards Wolf ’s Prolegomena? Wolf ’s Prolegomena appears initially to be a paradigm of the methodological self-restraint we saw Heyne call for in his essay on Winckelmann. The overall message is, after all, a sceptical one: that one cannot hope to restore Homer’s text to the form it had even in fourth-century Greece, and that the best modern scholars can hope for is to reconstruct the poems as they were read by a ‘Plutarch, Longinus, or Proclus’.73 This conservatism is expressed in a famous passage in which Wolf reworks a well-known philological commonplace—the comparison of the textual critic to the judge: Anyone who would undertake a historical investigation, must emulate the prudent custom of a good judge, who slowly examines the testimony of the witnesses and gathers all the evidence for their truthfulness, before he ventures to put forward his own conjecture about the case. And indeed, it is impossible that one who relies on a few codices of the common sort and practices conjecture, however cleverly, can often arrive at the genuine text. In resolving questions of law, no amount of talent can make up for wills and documents . . . Even genius badly needs to have as many codices as possible, so that its judgment about the true reading may rely on their testimony and its divination may find aids of many kinds.74

This is partly a statement about the importance of carrying out an adequate recension when editing a text, but the claim that ‘in 72 74

[Heyne] 1768: 147. Ibid. 5 (1985: 44–5).

73

Wolf 1795: 7 (1985: 46).

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resolving questions of law, no amount of talent can make up for wills and documents’ also represents a conservative position on the use of conjecture in historical scholarship. So far we have little reason to think that Wolf would not endorse Heyne’s veto on using conjecture to ‘make leaps’ over areas of history empty of evidence. This conservatism of Wolf the textual critic is not, however, matched by a similar conservatism on the part of Wolf the cultural historian. The Prolegomena is far from restrained or sceptical in this respect. Rather, it is a bold attempt to retrace the history of the Iliad and the Odyssey back to the middle of the tenth century bce, by Wolf ’s own lights well before the advent of writing in Greece. Although Wolf claims, then, that it is hopeless to try to reconstruct the earliest written text of the Homeric poems, he doesn’t think it is impossible to reconstruct the history of a text to a point far further back than our earliest written sources. That is precisely what his accounts of the pre-literate culture of early Greece and the customs and practises of rhapsodes, which fill chapters 11–26 of the Prolegomena, aim to do. The tools Wolf uses for this investigation are, firstly, whatever testimony he can gather from (primarily) literary and inscriptional sources, but also a conjectural method that frequently recalls Winckelmann’s: ‘Many things now entangled in vulgar errors must be restored to the truth; others, obscured by the loss of so many books, must be illuminated by historical conjectures drawn from afar; and everything must be confirmed by examples chosen in accordance with the common understanding.’75 The Prolegomena sets out to sketch the outline of ‘the internal critical history’ of the Homeric poems in its entirety, from their tenth-century ‘origins’ to Wolf ’s own day.76 Although its field is more restricted than Winckelmann’s Geschichte, then, the book makes a similar claim to narrative continuity and completeness. But what is particularly reminiscent of Winckelmann is Wolf ’s reliance on conjecture for ‘obscure’ cases and times: in other words, those for which he can find little ancient evidence to support his narrative. The account of the spread of writing among the Greeks presented in chapters 13–17 provides a good example of this. One of the most valuable aspects of Wolf ’s discussion is his assertion that the advent of writing in Greece must not be confounded with its widespread

75

Ibid. 21–2 (1985: 57).

76

Ibid. 22–4 (1985: 57–8).

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employment and his emphasis upon ‘the changes and degrees by which an invention of this kind had to be developed from its initial state’.77 This insight, which Wolf claims to base upon the evidence of cross-cultural comparison, leads him to discount as unreliable the reports of Herodotus (among others) about the introduction of the alphabet by Cadmus. These chapters of the Prolegomena therefore function as a demonstration of the necessity of Wolfian historical criticism; in place of myth-historical testimony, Wolf admits only those ‘reliable witnesses’ that attest to the standardization and formal adoption of the Ionic alphabet in the later archaic and classical periods. Nevertheless, he warns that ‘we must . . . take care not to believe that the use of writing was so late or that it was established in all of Greece at the same time’.78 The ‘refined culture’ of the Ionians, together with the ready supply of papyrus from Egypt, license the conjecture that the use of writing spread westwards from Ionia earlier in the archaic period: To give this conjecture historical credibility, Herodotus would have needed so few words, if he had not written for Greeks alone! Now the obscurity of two centuries, the eighth and the seventh before Christ, is especially irksome. During them the nation blew into a fine blaze the sparks of that most refined humanity which it had previously received, and made wonderful progress toward complete excellence in the arts. The seeds of a good many practices were sown in those obscure times. And we can make a responsible conjecture and infer from some of the historical evidence that it was in those centuries just after the Lacedaimonian Lycurgus that the art of writing first found significant use in public and spread beyond inscriptions, with the result that we may more easily forego explicit testimonies.79

Ingenious though this argument is, we have not yet reached the limit of Wolf ’s use of conjecture in the Prolegomena. For he traces the history of the poems back further, through an imaginative reconstruction of lives of the rhapsodes responsible for the poems’ oral transmission (chapters 22–5). Again, this relies on a combination of ‘clear historical evidence’ and hypothetical or conjectural reasoning.80 But Wolf ’s most daring use of conjecture comes in chapter 26, when he finally ventures the Proto-Analyst thesis: ‘that works which are so large and are drawn out in an unbroken sequence could neither have

77 79

Ibid. 48 (1985: 76). Ibid. 65–6 (1985: 87).

78

Ibid. 62–6 (1985: 86–7). Ibid. 99–104 (1985: 107–11).

80

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been conceived mentally nor worked out by any poet without an artificial memory.’81 This claim, which famously rests (at least in part) on an argument from silence, is explicitly marked as conjectural. It is also accompanied by an extraordinary footnote (by far the longest in the entire work): The die is cast: I have certainly not come to it unprepared. Two men of high scholarship who are still alive (and may they long remain so!) will perhaps remember my discussions with them about this matter in the years 1780 and 1781, both in conversations and letters. But from that time on I was diverted into other concerns and rarely allowed myself to utter a word among friends by which I might disturb the silence and established opinion of scholars. In my lectures, too, I imitated for many years the interpreters of Scripture, who, deterred by their dread of the law, teach not what they really think but instead what has been prescribed as acceptable to the Church since earlier times; nor did I publish anything concerning those doubts. Furthermore, I repeatedly set aside and destroyed whatever I had noted down for myself about these doubts, in case, once they had slipped from my memory and mind, further reflection, at a later stage, might remove these scruples . . . 82

There is, of course, a heavy dose of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement in Wolf ’s commentary. As Grafton has pointed out, Wolf ’s comparison of himself to Caesar and the elevation of his arguments to heresies serve to accentuate the originality of his hypothesis in his readers’ eyes.83 Yet, however we evaluate the sincerity or otherwise of Wolf ’s histrionics, this footnote provides a dramatization of the processes of conviction-formation that is every bit as vivid as Winckelmann’s. Moreover, Wolf ’s staging of the processes of scruple and counter-resolution fulfils the very same function, within his argument, as Winckelmann’s statements of credentials: to compel acceptance of conjectural hypotheses that exceed the evidence on which they are based. When soliciting support for his Lehrgebäude, professions to love the truth and assertions of careful labour were an integral part of Wolf ’s strategy: And so, having striven in various ways to meet the historical difficulties, I was soon harassed by them again, and forced to yield. I am conscious that I have in no way indulged either vanity of ambition or novelty of opinion, and that I have strained all my sinews to avoid the snares of error. As witnesses to this

81 83

82 Ibid. 109 (1985: 114). Ibid. 113–16 (1985: 116–17), n. 84. Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985: 33–5.

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I have many of my close friends, with whom I have shared this labour of mine through these last years, inciting them to seek the truth and to gather together carefully everything in the poems themselves that seemed to oppose me, and to collect it all within a single purview. And even now I am not discussing these matters in order to persuade anyone who is not persuaded by the thing itself, but rather, in case I have erred in anything or have distorted it into falsity, in order that I might be convicted of my error by those who are more sharp-witted than I am.84

84

Wolf 1795: 114–15 (1985: 117), n. 84.

Conclusion: the problem of Wolf’s Hellenism The last and greatest of Winckelmann’s followers was Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), and it was he who wrote Winckelmann’s biography, as well as one of Bentley. (Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (1976), 173) quae omnes omnium auctoritates frangit, ratio (Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum, 79)

For those accustomed to a certain way of thinking about the history of classical scholarship, the name ‘Friedrich August Wolf ’ carries definite associations. His work is held to mark a sharp caesura in that history: the foundation of a new and ‘scientific’ conception of the study of antiquity, constituted by a newly ambitious conception of the goal of classical studies and their institutionalization in an innovative set of scholarly and pedagogical practices. With such notions Wolf is said to have turned philology onto a new path, along which it would develop into the comprehensive and multidisciplinary study of ancient culture pursued by such nineteenth-century greats as Boeckh and Niebuhr. This view of Wolf is encapsulated above all in the famous story about the precocious eighteen-year-old setting out in spring 1777 to matriculate at Göttingen, and upon arrival insisting on being registered in a not-yet-existent faculty. Here is Mark Pattison’s account of the episode in his widely read essay on Wolf, first published in the North British Review of 1865: He had already been to Göttingen, trudging to Nordhausen on foot, in March of the previous year, to secure a lodging and make the necessary arrangements. The second journey he had the luxury of an Einspänner [driver and wagon] to carry his clothes and books, and might himself mount on the top when tired.

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Though they left Nordhausen at dawn, it was dark before they reached the last village, where they had to put up for the night. Wolf ’s first act on entering Göttingen was to recruit himself with a good sleep, after which he set out to be matriculated. Wolf insisted on being inscribed in the matriculation-book as a ‘Student of Philology.’ The prorector, Baldinger, an M.D. of some celebrity, laughed at the absurdity, and informed him there was no such faculty. Medicine, Law, Arts, and Theology were the four faculties; if he wanted (God forbid he should!) to become a schoolmaster, the way was to enter as a student of theology. Wolf, with his habitual obstinacy, refused to see the force of this. He meant to study philology, and did not intend to study theology; why should he be called what he was not? The prorector gave up the point, and Wolf was actually inscribed as a ‘Student of Philology,’ the first instance, not only at Göttingen, but at any university. The matriculation was an epoch in German education.1

Pattison’s essay is testament to how quickly this idea of Wolf found its way into English understandings of classical scholarship’s past. The anecdote was retold at length by Sandys and—despite the fact that even by his day it was known that Wolf ’s matriculation was not, in fact, an unprecedented event—it has continued to serve as shorthand to express the Halle professor’s revolutionary impact.2 Lloyd-Jones repeats it in his introduction to Wilamowitz’s Geschichte, and more recently still Ingo Gildenhard writes only half tongue-in-cheek when he suggests that ‘on or about 8 April 1777, the nature of the classics changed—first in Germany, then everywhere else’.3 Yet the German commentary upon Wolf has always been more mixed in its verdict. For every voice willing, like Barthold Niebuhr, to acclaim Wolf as the ‘eponymous hero of the race of German philologists’, or to join Christian Garve in naming him ‘the Kant of philology’, others have appeared less convinced either of his originality or his impact.4 These have included such heavyweights as Friedrich Meinecke and Friedrich Leo, as well as Wilamowitz himself, whose 1

Pattison 1889: 343. Sandys 1908: 51–2; in n. 1, p. 52 he concedes that ‘There had been isolated entries of philologiae studiosi at Erlangen in 1749–74’. For the evidence, see Schröder 1913; Kenney 1974: 98, n. 1; Clark 2006: 169–71. 3 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: ix (like Sandys, Lloyd-Jones concedes in a footnote: ‘I know that Wolf was not the first . . . but his action is significant’); Gildenhard 2003: 161. 4 A sample of differing views in the German-language scholarship, from which my citation of Niebuhr derives, is collected by Fuhrmann 1959: 187–92. Garve is cited by Horstmann 1978: 62, n. 7. 2

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assessment of Wolf in the Geschichte der Philologie is decidedly muted in tone: F. A. Wolf, as the friend of Goethe and Humboldt, was well qualified to describe the comprehensive science of antiquity that was due to be erected on the foundations laid by his master Heyne. Wolf founded a classical journal, written in German, which he dedicated to Goethe. This was a truly epochmaking event, and Wolf ’s gross overvaluation of antiquity can be excused by the spirit of the age. His refusal at Göttingen on matriculation to allow himself to be entered except as a ‘student of philology’ probably sprang from his dislike of anything connected with theology; it was typical of the man, if only because he gained his point. In effect, the impulse he gave to scholarship in a particular direction was more important than his programme.5

Wolf would surely have bridled at the implication that he was merely extending the Heynean programme; and Rudolf Pfeiffer takes issue with Wilamowitz over his assessment, singling him out as ‘the scholar most conspicuously guilty . . . in recent times’ of having ‘unjustly depreciated’ Wolf ’s achievements.6 Yet even such an ardent admirer of Wolf as Pfeiffer was willing to term his hero ‘The last and greatest of Winckelmann’s followers’.7 In this—as on many other points—he appears to follow Wilamowitz, who also connects Wolf and Winckelmann by characterizing the former as a follower of Heyne, and crediting Heyne in turn with the introduction of ‘the study of art and the historical approach of Winckelmann’ into German universities.8 There is therefore a difference of opinion between the predominant view of Wolf put forward in the anglophone literature, according to which his work marks a revolutionary break with prior conceptions of classical studies, and the assessments to be drawn from the German scholarship, which has never displayed anything like this level of consensus and within which at least one strand connects Wolf persistently to Winckelmann. How is this gap to be explained? Pfeiffer attributes the ‘unjust’ verdicts of later scholars to their disapproval of Wolf ’s ‘exceedingly difficult character’.9 There may be truth in this: Wilamowitz’s comment that the studiosus philologiae 5 6 7 8 9

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 108. Pfeiffer 1976: 176–7. Ibid. 173. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1982: 108, 101. Pfeiffer 1976: 176; see too Fuhrmann 1959: 187–92.

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legend is ‘typical of the man’ suggests impatience with Wolf ’s personality, while Volkmann’s discussion of Wolf ’s conduct during his quarrel with Heyne (see Chapter 5 above) is further evidence of nineteenth-century disapproval of Wolf ’s behaviour. It may also be that different commentators are focusing on different aspects of Wolf ’s activities and/or stages of his career. While Wolf ’s reputation within the English-speaking world is founded above all else on the claims of the Prolegomena to innovation, German commentators have tended to evaluate Wolf in terms of his overall impact as a pedagogue and educational reformer, considering how far the ambitious programme for classical studies sketched out in his Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft (1807) was actualized within and beyond his lifetime. Their rather meaner evaluations of Wolf ’s overall achievements may be explained as reactions either to the manifest failure of his later career to realize the promise of his early decades at Halle, or to the overall failure of the Wolfian-Humboldtian vision of cultural renewal through Bildung as it played out in the course of the nineteenth century. It is only an apparent paradox that the dissolution of the comprehensive conception of Altertumswissenschaft through specialization and a factionalism that recurred through successive generations might lead scholars as invested in that ideal as Wilamowitz evidently was to take a disillusioned view of its founders’ limitations and failings.10 In a sequence of important essays, Anthony Grafton has developed an assessment of Wolf which also sees his later career as failing to realize the promise of his earlier work.11 Contrasting the Wolf of the Prolegomena and that of the Darstellung, Grafton posits a trend in Wolf ’s writings of the later 1790s and 1800s towards stronger and more exclusive classicism, which he explains by the increasing influence upon him of Wilhelm von Humboldt.12 For Grafton, the Darstellung’s Schillerian-Humboldtian conception of Altertumswissenschaft as the

10 Fuhrmann 1959: 189. The secondary literature on the fate of the WolfianHumboldtian ideal in nineteenth-century German classical scholarship is legion; see in particular Grafton 1983; Most 1997; and of course Marchand 1996. Grafton makes a compelling case that for Altertumswissenschaftler of the 1850s and later, ‘the great creation of Humboldt and Wolf looked very much like a self-consuming artifact’ (1983: 184). 11 Grafton 1981, revised and reprinted in Grafton 1991: ch. 9; 1986; 1999; see too Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985. 12 Grafton 1981: 108–9, 1999: 27–8.

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edifying study of the twin cultural models of Greece and Rome constitutes a regrettable abandonment of the Prolegomena’s genuinely comparative approach, which supposes that Greek literary traditions should be studied in relation to those of other ancient peoples (most notably, Hebrew traditions).13 One may perhaps quibble with the chronology of this account. Wolf and Humboldt corresponded regularly from late summer 1792 onwards, and the conception of a comprehensive science of ‘antiquity’ which privileged the study of Greece and Rome above that of other peoples appears to have had even longer roots within Wolf ’s thinking.14 The earliest drafts for his long-standing project of an ‘encyclopedia’ of philology indicate that even during his early years at Halle he was willing to proclaim a highly classicizing view of the virtues of those two cultures: By ancient literature we mean the idea of those branches of knowledge that acquaint us with the entire political, intellectual, and economic constitution and culture of the ancients, especially of the two peoples of antiquity, with their languages, arts, and sciences, manners, character, and way of thinking, in such a manner that we are placed in a position both thoroughly to comprehend their various surviving works and to employ them for worthwhile ends. The general overview of all this may most conveniently be termed an antiquarian encyclopedia. The kinds of knowledge mentioned above are obtained only from the works transmitted to us from antiquity. These are principally of two kinds: writings and artworks. Both must be treated as debris from a great shipwreck, which in many cases chance seems to have cast up onto the shores of modern times. They are, therefore, not always sufficient for us to be able to discover the entire state of humanity in antiquity, in all its relations, in the clearest and most complete fashion . . . the surviving remains are nevertheless enough to enable us to form our sensibility for the beautiful, develop and cultivate our powers of thought, and derive a host of insights that are important and useful in various areas of knowledge. Among all ancient peoples, it is from the Greeks and Romans that the learned culture of the modern world proceeded a few centuries ago, and to their literature that all learning, if it is fundamental and perfect, still coheres; whose languages are among the most perfect that we know, and who have left behind linguistic masterpieces of various kinds that will forever remain models of good taste and objects of admiration to the greatest appreciators; who have, moreover, raised a great many arts to a level of perfection which moderns, hindered as they are by political and other circumstances, will 13

Grafton 1999: 25–30.

14

Mattson 1990.

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never again approach. Finally, the Greeks and Romans are the peoples through whose writings and other monuments the greater part of the history of ancient times is known, and without whom we would be entirely deprived of the most interesting information about the progress of humanity towards culture; indeed, one is aware in their case of an altogether higher degree of moral greatness than one finds in the peoples who imitated them.15

Wilhelm Körte dated this fragmentary draft of Wolf ’s ‘Idea and outline of an encyclopedia of ancient literature, for lectures’ to 1785.16 If correct, it shows that long before Wolf was to publish his articulation of Altertumswissenschaft ‘according to its concept, scope, goal, and worth’ (indeed, even before he had settled upon the name ‘Altertumswissenschaft’ to denote this endeavour) he could talk of the Greeks and Romans in exclusive terms as ‘die beiden Völker im Alterthum’, and characterize the goal of their study as ‘den ganzen Zustand der Menschheit im Alterthum nach allen seinen Verhältnissen aufs Deutlichste u. vollständigste zu erkennen’.17 Grafton’s view of a genuinely innovative and comparative younger Wolf gradually ceding ground to a more reactionary classicizer therefore stands in need of some fine-tuning. At the very least it must be conceded that the narrower approach was a potential within Wolf ’s outlook as early as the 1780s. Institutional factors may help to account for these emphases, for Wolf ’s first decade at Halle was marked by his successful efforts to reform the university’s theological-pedagogical seminar, from a moribund institution run along rationalist lines into a pedagogical instrument that turned out teachers fit to take up positions in universities and the higher classes of Gymnasien and Latin schools. Wolf ’s success in persuading Halle’s chancellor, Carl Christoph von Hoffmann, that such ends were best met by a rigorous form of linguistic and historical training in classical studies was later reproduced on a greater scale with Humboldt’s reforms.18 It is clear that an emphasis upon the exceptional and 15

Wolf 1999: 52, emphasis in original. Ibid. 50, see too Reinhard Markner’s comments at 48–9. 17 Ibid. 51–2; compare the Darstellung’s famous definition of Altertumswissenschaft as ‘die Kenntniss der alterthümlichen Menschheit selbst, welche Kenntniss aus der durch das Studium der alten Ueberreste bedingten Beobachtung einer organisch entwickelten bedeutungsvollen National-Bildung hervorgeht’ (Wolf 1869b: 883). 18 On Wolf ’s reform of the Halle pedagogical seminar in the 1780s see Arnoldt 1861: I. 72–135; many interesting details of its operation are also now traced in Clark 2006. La Vopa 1990 and Turner 1983 provide illuminating, complementary 16

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exemplary value of Greek and Roman cultures would have served the earlier programme just as much as the latter. Traces of the pedagogical battles of prior decades are detectable in Wolf ’s essay on Winckelmann. They are present in his pointed observation that Winckelmann remained in Germany long enough to experience the publication of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) and Johann Bernhard Basedow’s early writings on educational reform, but that he was uninterested in either: a fact which Wolf says is worth mentioning only because, in the years since his departure to Italy, such ideas have ‘filled so much paper and emptied so many heads’.19 Elsewhere, he seems barely able to rein in a tirade against those ‘artists of education who, bowing to the genius of the times, have succeeded in debasing those studies that lead to the ennoblement and elevation of the spirit and in directing the best forces only to those sciences through which commerce and finance and wars on land and sea prosper’.20 Such comments suggest that part of Winckelmann’s attraction for Wolf, as for later generations of Altertumswissenschaftler, was his suitability as a figurehead for campaigns in favour of non-vocational and non-utilitarian forms of Bildung. And this also helps to explain another aspect of Wolf ’s assessment: the positive emphasis placed upon Winckelmann’s status as autodidact. Given the educational institutions of Winckelmann’s day, it was, Wolf suggests, achievement enough that he was not utterly corrupted by the instruction he received, and placed upon a path that prevented him from realizing his destiny. Like Heyne, then, Wolf has his doubts about Winckelmann’s scholarly credentials, and Wolf also echoes Heyne in his observation that, once Winckelmann reached Italy, ‘he lost himself in a sea of beauty’, which inclined him to ignore the finer points of historical criticism. But Wolf ’s attitude towards these faults is very different from that of his former teacher. Whereas Heyne had declared that Winckelmann’s overheated imagination had vitiated at least half of the Geschichte, Wolf comments discussions of the role of Hellenism and historicist philology in neo-humanist scholars’ successful efforts to counter the new pedagogy propounded by mid- to late-eighteenth-century school reformers. On early nineteenth-century developments, see O’Boyle 1968. 19 Wolf 1969: 240. Wolf refers to Basedow’s 1752 dissertation on the Inusitata et optima methodus erudiendae juventutis honestioris. On Basedow see Turner 1983: 453–4. 20 Wolf 1969: 237.

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simply that such a way of thinking strikes him as ‘extremely pardonable’ in the case of a man who had seen many other, better-educated predecessors either drowning in antiquarian detail or resorting to philosophical flights of speculation about objects they had not seen for themselves. More than this, Wolf claims that Winckelmann’s enthusiasm was necessary in order for him to break new ground, and to embark upon the kind of task ‘before which a mind that deliberated more coldly would take fright’.21 ‘A few must err, so that many may find the right way’, Winckelmann had said. In his contribution to Goethe’s volume, Wolf appears to appreciate and accept these arguments. There could be many reasons behind Wolf ’s rather more sympathetic picture of Winckelmann. His sense of the kind of praise that his friend Goethe expected from him is not to be underestimated, nor his sensitivity to the conventions of a commemorative volume, nor indeed his sheer contrariness and wish not to be seen to agree with Heyne on anything. In Chapter 6 I suggested that another reason may be furnished by Wolf ’s own historical researches. We saw there that certain broad methodological affinities are perceptible between Wolf ’s approach in the Prolegomena and Winckelmann’s in the Geschichte. Both scholars aspired to construct a comprehensive, explanatory narrative under conditions of evidential scarcity; and in the face of that challenge, both resorted to a use of conjectural reasoning which exceeded that to which more conservative interpreters might assent. Although Wolf ’s emphasis upon the inadequacies of Winckelmann’s educational background works firmly to historicize his achievements and cast his own in sharper relief, is it too fanciful to see some recognition of that similarity in Wolf ’s decision to praise Winckelmann’s powers of ingenium? ‘The laws of historical investigation’, Wolf declares, as well as those of philological criticism, which form its basis, demand a rare mixture of sobriety of spirit and pedantic, restless concern for countless details trivial in themselves, with an all-inspiring fire that devours individual particulars and a gift of divination that is offensive to the uninitiated. We must confess that our Winckelmann lacked the more common of those talents, or rather lack of proper preparation for his history of art meant that it failed to gain efficacy.

21

Ibid. 242–3.

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It was nevertheless this ‘fire’ which distinguished Winckelmann from those contemporaries who simply collected reports (Nachrichten) about artworks without giving the originals ‘long, studied consideration’. It was because Winckelmann refused to speak of ancient art ‘without having taken an image of them into himself, their full spirit into his inner being’, that he was able ‘to rise to the flower of all historical investigation: to the great and general view of the whole’.22 The work he produced was not perfect—given his training and opportunities, it could hardly have so been. Nevertheless: ‘He won something from the ancients which established philologists learn only late, or perhaps not at all: their spirit.’23 In 1898, the author of the 6,000-word-long entry on Friedrich August Wolf in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie spared a few lines towards the end of his treatment of the founder of Altertumswissenschaft in order to address his Winckelmann essay: ‘It is noticeable that Wolf was conscious of an inner affinity with the autodidact and inquiring spirit of whom he wrote, even though in other ways Winckelmann showed little understanding of the visual arts, especially of sculpture.’24 I have tried to show that there is some sense in the linking of their two names beyond its obvious attraction for those who sought to construct monumental narratives of German classical scholarship’s history. In different areas of research on the ancient world, Wolf and Winckelmann both attempted to fashion explanatory narratives, and both were gripped by the ideal of fashioning a comprehensive picture of a long-vanished past. The older literature provides an interesting correction to those who would see them as antitheses, representing perhaps ‘science’ and ‘romanticism’ respectively. Instead, they emerge as something more like antitypes, with Wolf acknowledging the ways in which Winckelmann’s apparently unscientific approach and aspirations foreshadowed his own endeavour. This observation in turn perhaps goes some way towards illuminating what Manfred Fuhrmann identified half a century ago as the most difficult problem faced by attempts at an intellectual-historical assessment of Wolf: the relationship, in his thinking, between

22

23 Ibid. 243. Ibid. 244. Baumeister 1898: 745; Wolf is designated ‘Begründer der Alterthumswissenschaft’ at the very beginning of the article. 24

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‘classical dogmatism and “unprejudiced” historical research’.25 Wolf is traditionally cast as the inaugurator of the scientific study of antiquity, yet it is notable that even in the Darstellung he leaves it to others to judge ‘whether our treatment of [this subject’s] objects and indication of its goals merit the name “science”’.26 Once we look beyond the more obvious manifestations of Hellenism to the methodological problems with which Wolf grappled, we can see that he did indeed recognize a gap between the evidence available, the principles of interpretation, and the goal of the comprehensive study of the ancient world. In the Darstellung, indeed, this becomes part of Wolf ’s argument for the primacy of the study of Greece and Rome; for, quite apart from his view of their status as representatives of a ‘higher, authentic, spiritual culture’, Wolf held that they were the only ancient peoples to have left behind remains sufficient to provide an object for systematic study.27 It is this recognition of the endeavour’s ideality, even in the eyes of the founder of the ‘scientific’ study of antiquity, that a reading of Altertumswissenschaft via Winckelmann can help to bring into view.

25

Fuhrmann 1959: 188, n. 3.

26

Wolf 1869b: 813.

27

Ibid. 819.

Part III Altertumswissenschaft and the Amateur: Johann Gottfried Herder

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7 Herder, Winckelmann, and Wissenschaft Aber der Erklärer ist mein Mann, der der Vorwelt, und der Zeit, und der Nachwelt eines Autors ihre Gränzen ziehet: was ihm die erste geliefert, die zweite geholfen oder geschadet, die dritte nachgearbeitet. (Herder, ‘Über Thomas Abbts Schriften. Der Torso von einem Denkmaal, an seinem Grabe errichtet’)1

This book will give the last word on Winckelmann to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). In various ways he could be said to have been accompanying this argument all along. A generation younger than Winckelmann and Heyne, but from a similarly humble background, Herder took a third path of advancement from those open to poor students in the eighteenth century: that of preacher, teacher, and administrator. A friend and close intellectual collaborator of Goethe over several decades, throughout his career Herder was passionately concerned with the literary, cultural, and intellectual debates of his day, and his long and loyal friendship with Heyne prompted the latter to exert his energies twice in the attempt to secure him a Göttingen chair. Yet Herder never held a university position, and his intellectual career was punctuated by a series of fallings-out with academics: his mid-1790s quarrel with Wolf over the Prolegomena was preceded by controversies with the Göttingen historian August Wilhelm Schlözer and with his own former teacher and intellectual mentor, Immanuel Kant. This makes Herder an interesting case for our study, for by both institutional position and intellectual inclination he provides an

1

SWS II 266 (English translation HPW 173).

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eccentric perspective on the classical scholarship of his day. Certainly, his own self-image was always as something of an outsider, a perception exemplified beautifully in the introduction to an unpublished essay on Greek literature from 1768: I am no professor of Greek language who seeks to reawaken it through his office and his learned works; no famous pupil of a still more famous teacher charged with making his lost treasures of erudition and arguments about antiquity known to the world; no natural Greek, who, by Pythagorean transmutations of souls, has once more come to life in Germany; I write nonetheless of the Greeks, because what I have to say is true and can be useful for my time. Far from Germany, unacquainted with the writers whose writings I know, attached to no school of taste and criticism by bonds of blood-friendship and filial piety, without a Greek reputation to uphold or a system to support—why shouldn’t I write what I think?2

This outsider status was perpetuated in Herder’s twentieth-century reception, to the extent that the editors of a recent collection on his ideas introduce him as ‘the Famous Nobody’.3 One reason for this is that some of Herder’s most distinguished and influential interpreters, such as Rudolf Haym and Friedrich Meinecke, have tended to paint him as intellectually deficient in various ways. Meinecke, for example, privileges Herder as ‘one of the greatest and most effective among the first pioneers of the new sense of history’, but also presents him as an ‘inharmonious and puzzling personality’, whose writings show him to have suffered from an ‘excess of imagination’ and a ‘deficiency in clarity of ideas and logical coherence’. Herder’s inability to ‘give adequate form to his ideas’ was part and parcel of his ‘tragic life’: the product of a particular psychology which rendered him unable to ‘grasp the individuality of history’: The man who was endowed with such wonderful gifts and a delicate sense of form was never able to form himself, and therefore found it so difficult to understand the fully formed individual personality. The man who was once instrumental in arousing the personality of Goethe appears in the end, alongside that towering growth, as no more than a withered stump.4

2 SWS II 111 (reworking of the second collection of the Fragmente, late 1767/early 1768). 3 Adler and Koepke 2009: 1. 4 Meinecke 1972: 295–6, 335. For criticism of Rudolf Haym’s broadly similar interpretation in his major intellectual biography of Herder, Herder nach seinem Leben und seinem Werken, see Adler and Koepke 2009: 1–2.

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As Adler and Koepke observe, such a starting-point is hardly conducive to an independent evaluation of Herder’s qualities, and opinions have been skewed further by his presentation as a forerunner of the völkisch and racist, nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 A revaluation has now been under way for some time, and a number of contemporary scholars are promoting Herder’s ideas and writings as ‘an integral part of teaching and understanding in today’s humanities’.6 Herder’s claim to consideration in this respect rests in large part upon his contribution to hermeneutics, or the theory of literary and historical interpretation.7 Here, debates have centred around Herder’s promotion of a method of Einfühlung or empathetic understanding, famously encapsulated in his direction to those who seek understanding of past times and cultures to ‘go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything’.8 Interpretations of this key Herderian injunction have, however, differed. For Meinecke, Einfühlung denotes an ultimately mysterious and intuitive process of inner revelation, part and parcel of the later eighteenth century’s ‘revolt of the irrational full-blooded human powers against the cold rationality of the Enlightenment’, and summed up in the principle that ‘Individuum est ineffabile’.9 His views find a recent echo in Beiser’s claim that ‘Herder thinks that all historical enquiry should end with an ineffable experience, the direct intuition into the sheer individuality of an action, person or epoch’.10 Yet Michael N. Forster has propounded a very different understanding of Einfühlung as ‘an arduous process of historical-philological inquiry’, necessitated by Herder’s belief that, ‘in order to understand another person’s concepts an interpreter must also in some manner recapture the person’s relevant sensations’.11 Forster connects this to another key

5 For brief, English-language discussions, see Arnold, Kloocke, and Menze 2009; and the important and provocative Norton 2007. Several pertinent essays are contained in the German-language collection Borsche 2006. 6 Adler and Koepke 2009: 1–2. In addition to two edited collections already cited, the work of Hans Dietrich Irmscher and of Michael Forster has particularly influenced the approach to Herder taken in this chapter. 7 Although not solely upon this; see Forster 2002a, 2002b. 8 HPW 292. 9 Meinecke 1972: 334, 322. 10 DKV I 559, V 74–5; Otto 2/1 431–41; see Beiser 2011: 136; Forster 2002a: 353–4. 11 Forster 2002a: 353; see too 2002b: xvii–xx.

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Herderian notion: that of ‘divination’, which he interprets as ‘a process of hypothesis, based on meager empirical evidence, but also going well beyond it, and therefore vulnerable to subsequent falsification’.12 Despite these contrasting interpretations, two things are clear. The first is that Herder’s espousal of Einfühlung as a mode of historical understanding pre-dates its best-known formulation (quoted above) in the 1774 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. Similar formulations may be found in the uncompleted Über die ersten Urkunden des menschlichen Geschlechts, Einige Anmerkungen (1769) and in Herder’s major published works of the 1760s: the Kritische Wälder (1769) and Über die neuere Literatur: Fragmente (1766–8).13 Likewise, the necessity of divination is emphasized not only in Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele of 1778, but also in Über Thomas Abbts Schriften, published a full decade before. Clearly, these are ideas that Herder returned to again and again over the years as he worked through his sense of the challenges involved in interpretation of the past. Second—and as it will be the task of this chapter to argue— Herder’s formulation and refinement of these ideas was intimately bound up with his reception of Winckelmann’s work. This point has not received as much attention as it merits from interpreters, amongst whom Herder is often portrayed either as having defined his historical methodology in opposition to Winckelmann’s or as having moved from a position of early admiration to later disagreement and critique. In fact, the intellectual relationship between the two is deeper and more complicated than this. The young Herder’s engagement with Winckelmann was of an intensity to match Heyne’s, and laid the foundations of a lifelong admiration for the author of the Geschichte. Winckelmann is accorded high praise in the Fragmente, Herder’s earliest major literary effort; among his last, an essay included in the Adrastea (1801–3) names the awakening of ‘the man, who became, so to speak, a divine interpreter of the whole of antiquity’ as ‘the greatest benefit’ bequeathed the world by the previous century’s discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii.14 Winckelmann’s importance to the formation of Herder’s own literary style can hardly be underestimated. The younger writer excerpted

12 14

13 Forster 2002b: xix. See Beiser 2011: 118–9. SWS I 218, 293–4; Herder 1803: 41–2.

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Winckelmann diligently, and many of his favoured figures, such as the imagery of the sea and the employment of extended similes, pay homage to Winckelmann’s works.15 Yet although frequently enthusiastic, Herder was never an uncritical follower of Winckelmann. This is apparent as early as the Fragmente, where Herder issues a call for ‘a German Winckelmann, to unbar the temple of Greek wisdom and poetry for us in the manner in which he, from afar, revealed the secret of the Greeks to artists’. For the prospect for a history of Greek poetry that follows he appropriates Winckelmann’s own words: This History of Greek poetry and wisdom should inform us about the origin, growth, changes, and fall of art, together with the various styles of the locations, times, and poets, and demonstrate this by reference to the remaining works of antiquity through investigations (Proben) and testimonies (Zeugnisse). It is no mere narrative of chronology and alterations, but the word history retains here its wider Greek sense, indicating the attempt to provide a system. One should investigate the poetic art of the Greeks according to its essence, its difference from the other peoples [of antiquity], and the causes of its advancement in Greece: here an ocean of considerations would present itself about how far their climate, constitution, freedom, passions, manner of governance, thought, and living, the respect accorded to their poets and philosophers, practice, different ages, their religion and their music, their art, their language, games and dances, etc., raised them to that height upon which we wonder at them.16

Such a history ‘should present us the true ideal of the Greeks in each of their genres of poetry and art for emulation (zur Nachbildung)’; yet this eminently Winckelmannian credo is rounded off by a rather un-Winckelmannian coda: ‘. . . and its individual, national, and local beauties in order to wean us from such imitations (Nachahmungen) and encourage us to imitation of ourselves’.17 A similar note of caution is sounded in Herder’s first Kritisches Wäldchen (1769), which opens with what is ostensibly a defence of

15 Irmscher 1973: 30 comments that passages from Winckelmann often find their way, transformed, into Herder’s writings. 16 DKV I 310–11, emphasis in original. 17 Ibid., emphasis mine. This comment is far from expressing straightforward opposition to Winckelmann’s doctrine of imitation, and could plausibly be seen as an appropriation and creative development of the Gedancken’s distinction between Nachahmung and Nachmachen/Nachaffen. Herder nevertheless takes issue with one reading of Winckelmann, as common in the eighteenth century as it is today, as commanding the slavish imitation of ancient artistic forms.

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Winckelmann against Lessing’s criticisms. Towards its end, Herder declares that Winckelmann has formed his guide on his pilgrimages among the ancients, and that he has read the Geschichte through no fewer than seven times. Yet although he claims to regard Winckelmann with no less reverence than he does Homer, Bacon, or Plato, he also admits that he has committed to paper certain ‘doubts’ concerning the way in which Winckelmann constructed his Geschichtsgebäude out of the materials of Greek literature. These remain unexplained within the Wäldchen itself, but Herder goes on to observe that the form of his wanderings resembles Lessing’s ‘disordered notes for a book’ more closely than Winckelmann’s elegantly ordered system.18 Such juxtapositions in Herder’s writings are rarely accidental, and raise questions over Winckelmann’s work as effectively as Heyne’s and Lessing’s more direct criticisms. More direct criticism is, however, evident in the 1774 Auch eine Philosophie: the work Meinecke described as Herder’s ‘greatest work as a historical thinker and pioneer of histori[ci]sm’.19 There, Herder sketches a broadly Winckelmannian image of ancient Greece as ‘the place where humanity spent her most beautiful youth and her bridal bloom’, while denying Winckelmann’s claim that it represented a moment of historical perfection.20 For Herder, ‘the human container is capable of no full perfection all at once; it must always leave behind in moving further on’.21 To pretend otherwise is ‘magically to transform a favorite people’ on the earth into ‘superhuman brilliance’: the method of a poet who seeks to ennoble human ideas through ‘fair prejudices’, but inappropriate for the historian.22 Despite his admiration for Winckelmann, then, Herder developed an understanding of history that was in many ways opposed to him. 18

Otto 2/1 176–7. Meinecke 1972: 298. 20 HPW 286–7, emphasis in original. Herder is fond of emphasizing words and phrases, using sometimes letter spacing, sometimes quotation marks, and occasionally a combination of the two. Where I give my own translations from Herder in passages below, I follow Forster in differentiating typographically between these different forms of emphasis. In an attempt to render the resultant English less confusing than it would otherwise appear, I have substituted underlining (rather than Forster’s quotation marks) where Herder uses quotation marks as a means of emphasis, but have followed Forster in using italics where the German has letter spacing. An excellent discussion of the characteristic features of Herder’s style, and the manner in which it has posed a barrier to his reception, is Adler 2009 (originally published as Adler 2006). 21 22 HPW 288. HPW 296. 19

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John Zammito captures something of the Janus-faced character of this response in his study of the relation of Herder’s ideas to those of the pre-critical Kant. Identifying Winckelmann as ‘the major German influence on Herder’s sense of historical method’, Zammito suggests that ‘Herder came away from reading Winckelmann with a vision of Greek aesthetic creativity that became a model for culture. Yet Herder at the same time challenged Winckelmann’s representation.’ Zammito finds three areas of significant disagreement between the two thinkers: Herder found Winckelmann’s presentation of history ‘ahistorical in its refusal to see any connection between the prior art of Egypt and the cultural efflorescence of Greece’; he ‘rejected the idea that contemporary Germans could simply ape Greek forms’; and he ‘rejected Winckelmann’s methodological proposal that history could serve as the vehicle for the exposition of a theoretical system’.23 It is the third of these propositions that will chiefly concern us here. I will argue that, although Herder’s writings of the 1760s and 1770s do indeed voice scepticism about historical systematizing in a manner that parallels Heyne’s, there was also another side to his decades-long fascination with Winckelmann. Herder’s admission of the necessity of Einfühlung and Divination shows that he was unconvinced of the possibility of achieving a comprehensive view of the ancient past without recourse to speculation and conjecture. Consequently, he celebrated those qualities of desirous imagination in Winckelmann which Heyne had censured, as a route—albeit a problematic one—to establishing knowledge of the ancient world. A further hindrance to appreciation of Herder’s ideas has been his writing style. In Chapter 5 we saw Wolf censure him on this account, complaining that ‘the points upon which everything depends spin around in a magic lantern of images and flashing ideas, out of which one is left to find whatever path one dares’.24 Such criticisms have been common since the eighteenth century, and underline Meinecke’s characterization of Herder’s thought as somehow incoherent. It has

23

Zammito 2002: 334–5. Wolf 1869a: 2.726–7. The overall tenor of Wolf ’s comments recalls the influential (and malicious) criticisms made by Kant in his review of Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91). For a discussion, see Adler 2009: 334–7. 24

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taken a long time for Herder’s style to be appreciated for what it is: as an attempt to bring something of the fluency and creativity of oral language into his texts.25 In a sensitive and interesting study, Michael N. Morton has gone further than this, arguing that Herder’s style should be read as his attempt to realize in prose a form of dialectical thinking based around the philosophical notion of the coincidentia oppositorum. Morton argues that the distinctive structure and style of many of Herder’s essays are the result of his effort to synthesize apparently contradictory positions in a manner that nevertheless manages to preserve something of their original opposition or tension. Morton suggests that in order to achieve this, in many of his writings Herder ‘constructs his exposition on two levels [of meaning] simultaneously’, pursuing one line of reasoning at the level of explicit argument (what Morton terms the ‘discursive level’) and implying the other through his use of figures, recurrent motifs, abrupt shifts in emphasis, and other literary techniques (what Morton terms the ‘gestural level’). Moreover, Morton holds that: The relationship between these levels is itself multiple, consisting variously of mutual reinforcement but also opposition, harmony but also a kind of counterpoint . . . The overall structure of the text thus becomes in its own right, in exemplary fashion, a principal bearer of the argument, embodying in itself the sort of coincidence of opposites that is its object.26

Morton’s identification of a contrapuntal element in some of Herder’s writings certainly applies to those works in which the latter discusses Winckelmann, and his insight has informed the analysis developed in this chapter. Beginning from one text which is particularly germane to our inquiry, I will broaden the discussion to consider other of Herder’s writings of the 1760s and 1770s, focusing upon two strands: his complex critical response to Winckelmann’s Geschichte, and the ways in which he used it as an example to think through more general, methodological issues concerning historical inquiry and interpretation. I will argue that Herder offers a theorization of some unacknowledged dilemmas of Altertumswissenschaft as practised by his contemporaries, and diagnoses an imaginative orientation to the past as a constitutive element of classical studies.

25 26

Forster 2002b: viii–xi; Adler 2006, 2009; Morton 1989. Morton 1989: 20–4.

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‘ER BETRACHTETE SICH ALS EINEN ALTEN’: HERDER’S DENKMAL JOHANN WINCKELMANNS Herder was, as it happens, the only other entrant to the 1777 competition of the Kassel Society of Antiquities in which Heyne’s Lobschrift auf Winckelmann carried away the prize. Commentators on the competition have suggested that the result was a foregone conclusion; for Heyne already enjoyed mutually respectful relations with Jean Pierre de Luchet, the Society’s secretary. The committee may indeed have found it more important to cultivate the approval of the Göttingen professor than that of the General Superintendent at Weimar. Yet, even when such factors are discounted, it is easy to see why Herder’s entry was deemed ‘mediocre’.27 Herder began with a barely veiled criticism of the Society’s resolution to print the winning entry in French, then moved on to criticize the superficiality of eulogies in the French style, and eventually to object to the whole practice of setting prize essays as of little benefit to the sciences and arts.28 His essay thus combined elements of encomium and harangue; it was also composed in his apparently spontaneous and undisciplined prose style, and was twice as long as Heyne’s elegant entry. Heyne appears to have been unaware of his friend’s participation in the contest, and Herder’s unsuccessful essay remained unknown to scholars until its discovery in the Society’s archives in 1881.29 In the light of the two men’s friendship, which had begun earlier in the decade and was fuelled, at least initially, by common admiration of Winckelmann, it is interesting to note certain similarities between their approaches.30 Both took the competition as an opportunity to compose something which they claimed was rather different from a standard eulogy. We have seen that Heyne explicitly refused the role of panegyrist, offering instead a sober assessment of

27

See the discussion of Albert Duncker, editor of the first edition, in Herder 1882:

xiv.

28

Herder 1963: 31, 32, 47. Herder 1882: xxx–xxxv. The essay was not included in the first collected edition of Herder’s works, undertaken by Herder’s widow Karoline, Heyne, Johannes von Müller, and Johann Georg Müller. It unclear whether Herder confided his participation in the competition even to his wife. Parts of the essay were recycled in an appreciation of Winckelmann published in Der Teutsche Merkur in 1781 (Herder 1781). 30 Heyne 1829: 5. 29

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Winckelmann’s services as ‘a scholarly researcher into antiquity and an expert on ancient art’.31 Herder also eschews what he calls ‘the usual lieux communs of French encomia’, declaring that ‘no purchased crown can bring [the writings of a scholar] praise’.32 Unlike Heyne, however, Herder does not renounce altogether the traditional tasks of praising Winckelmann and giving details about his life. His discussion is structured biographically, but along its way it incorporates observations that invite a series of questions about Winckelmann’s historical work. These begin right from the title Herder gives his essay. In place of a ‘French’ encomium, Herder pointedly offers a monument (Denkmal) for Winckelmann, which he describes as having been erected (errichtet) before the Kassel Society on the occasion of the competition.33 The sentiment is echoed at the end of the opening paragraph, where Herder characterizes his essay as ‘a German monument, a rough, unformed stone inscribed with Winckelmann’s name and, like a lonely grave mound, consecrated to the memory of a hero’.34 He portrays this as consonant with the Academy’s decision to make Winckelmann the subject of their inaugural competition, an action by which it ‘places the statue of a noble man at the gates of its temple, so that all who enter, fortified by his example, may follow him and complete the path he abandoned so early’.35 It also has a number of further consequences. First and most obviously, Herder’s choice of title contributes to the classicization and monumentalization of Winckelmann, already set in train by the eulogies published after Winckelmann’s death, Herder’s own comments in the Fragmente, and the 1776 Vienna edition of the Geschichte. In the Fragmente Herder had praised Winckelmann as ‘the glory of the Germans under the Roman sky’, comparing him to Oedipus as a man ‘whom the Muse of Antiquity and of History, immortal Clio, allowed to be born in order to elucidate the art of the ancients’.36 The Denkmal extends the heroic comparisons further, likening the ‘statue’ commissioned by the Society to the images of ancestors displayed in Roman homes, or the manner in which Pindar selects a god or hero to glorify the entrance to the ‘the structure 31

32 Heyne 1963: 17. DKV II 630. 34 35 Herder 1882: 3. DKV II 631. Ibid. 36 DKV I 241, 310; compare Riedel’s characterization of Winckelmann’s life story as the ‘Geschichte eines Helden’ [Riedel] 1776: lviii. 33

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(Gebäude) of his songs’.37 Pindaric resonances are indeed present throughout the essay, from its likening of Winckelmann’s style to a torrent in flood, to its closing motto taken from the sphragis of Olympian 9.38 Alluding to Winckelmann’s Abhandlung in praise of Reinhold von Berg, Herder casts his own Denkmal as a Pindaric praise-song in commemoration of a hero. Beyond its Pindaric motifs, the essay is also unified by Herder’s repeated citation of the competition-setters’ demand that entrants consider ‘the point at which Winckelmann found the science of antiquities, and the point at which he left it’.39 This functions almost as a refrain throughout the first two-thirds of the text, as Herder returns to it again and again in varied paraphrases.40 But he wilfully misinterprets the question, omitting throughout all his reformulations any mention of that ‘Science des Antiquités’ which, as we have seen, formed Heyne’s point of departure. In Herder’s successive rephrasings, the question of ‘where Winckelmann began’ becomes instead a query about ‘the point in his soul’ from which Winckelmann set out on his distinctive life and intellectual course: an inquiry into the genesis of Winckelmann’s intense and highly productive orientation towards the ancient world.41 In its portrayal of itself as an artistic monument which simultaneously undertakes to decipher an author’s soul, Herder’s Denkmal for Winckelmann recalls his 1768 character sketch of the recently deceased philosopher and critic Thomas Abbt.42 In that essay, Herder also casts his literary work as both a portrait (Gemälde) and a commemorative statue (Ehrensäule).43 Originally conceived of as part of a larger work, which would have linked discussion of Abbt’s life with similar ‘monuments’ to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Johann David Heilmann, Über Thomas Abbts Schriften incorporates a section of general, methodological discussion of the art of biography or, as

37

Herder 1963: 32. ‘The ways of wisdom are steep, but when you present this prize boldly shout straight out that with divine help this man was born’. Pind. Ol. 9.107–10, tr. Race. 39 ‘le point, où il a trouvé la Science des Antiquités, et à quel point il l’a laissée’; see above, Chapter 6. 40 See e.g. DKV II 631, 634, 635, 643, 644. 41 Ibid. 635. 42 SWS II 249–95/DKV II 565–608 (full title: ‘Über Thomas Abbts Schriften. Der Torso von einem Denkmaal, an seinem Grabe errichtet’). 43 SWS II 252. 38

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Herder terms it, ‘of depicting another’s soul’.44 Here Herder emphasizes the difficulty of producing an accurate image of another human being’s thoughts and attitudes, while awarding the historian or biographer the palm over the philosopher when it comes to ‘the cognition of individual minds’.45 The particular difficulties attendant upon writing about Abbt are also at the forefront of Herder’s account, for he emphasizes that he neither met nor corresponded with Abbt in life, that in any case only God truly knows the inner workings of a man’s soul, and that Abbt’s early death meant that he left only few and incomplete writings as ‘a measure of his spirit’.46 Consequently, he professes uncertainty as to whether the statue he is labouring to produce will be veristic or idealized: it shall, in any case, be nothing more than ‘a mutilated Torso’.47 Despite certain similarities in situation (Herder and Winckelmann also never met) and presentation, such difficulties seem initially to be further from the surface of Herder’s account of Winckelmann’s life and works. And the Denkmal takes a further turn away from its predecessor when Herder goes on to insist that any monument he may succeed in constructing must take second place to Winckelmann’s own writings, for Winckelmann was a man ‘who always remains his own best monument’.48 In the tradition of the impartial biographer, Herder has already mentioned desire for renown as one of the few ‘small weaknesses’ in Winckelmann’s character.49 But the simile which marks the transition to Herder’s next topic, Winckelmann’s life, suggests a different construal of these comments: The early years of Winckelmann’s life resemble a river, which flows from an invisible and hidden source for a long time under the earth or through narrow channels, meanders, tries to break out here and there but still at an unsuitable point; through this motion, however, it continually increases its striving force and its inner richness; and at last it breaks forth, magnificently and abundantly, but briefly and, only a few stades later in its course, to fill the sea.50

As well as paying homage to Winckelmann’s own frequent use of water imagery, Herder here alludes to Horace’s celebration of 44

SWS II 257–67; two highly insightful discussions are Irmscher 1973 and Güthenke 2010: 127–9. 45 46 SWS II 258–9 (HPW 168–9). SWS II 252, 256, 262. 47 48 Ibid. 256, 262. DKV II 633. 49 50 Ibid. 632. Ibid. 633.

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Pindar’s inimitable style.51 This reshuffles the identities previously established and sets up a new correspondence, not between Winckelmann and the athletes and heroes celebrated by Pindar, but between Winckelmann and the praise-poet himself. If, however, it is Winckelmann who sings his own celebration, what does this mean for those works in which his monumentalization is accomplished? Later in the Denkmal Herder likens the Geschichte to ‘a living, fully populated Thebes with seven gates’, inscribing Winckelmann within an ancient poetic tradition which involves a less intrusive and self-publicizing narratorial voice.52 Whether epinician, epic narrative, or visual monument, what does this subtle yet insistent assimilation of Winckelmann’s achievements to those of a poet or sculptor imply about the historicity of Winckelmann’s greatest work?53 That question is left hanging until Herder turns to discuss the Geschichte directly, about two-thirds of the way through his essay. Before then, he takes us on a tour of Winckelmann’s life and writings, encompassing his life in Prussia and Saxony, the Gedancken, and the early Roman works.54 Here, as in Herder’s memorial to Abbt, the accent is frequently upon the difficulty of reconstructing his subject’s path. Thus Herder takes time to regret that, with the death of Francke, Winckelmann’s years in Prussia may remain a closed book, and to exhort Oeser to publish an account of Winckelmann’s year in Dresden that might show ‘from what point in his soul Winckelmann set out to comprehend antiquity and to dedicate himself with such discrimination to the study of its art’.55 The chronological narrative is also punctuated by analytic sections, in which Herder takes up objections against Winckelmann raised by others. The first of these is Herder’s fairly lengthy discussion of the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet’s criticisms of Winckelmann’s

51

52 Hor. Carm. 4.2. DKV II 651. The question is further underlined at a lexical level, by the network of terms (errichten, Gebäude, liefern) common to Herder’s descriptions of Pindar’s praisepoetry, his own quasi-Pindaric offering of a Denkmal, and both his and Winckelmann’s characterizations of the Geschichte. 54 ‘Tour’ is appropriate here, for Herder closes the Denkmal with an extended simile comparing himself to a thirsty wanderer returning home from an expedition through ruined cities in Egypt, Greece, and the Levant (DKV II 670–1). This provides a further connection to the Erstes Wäldchen, which Herder figured as a critical walk in the woods. 55 DKV II 637. 53

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presumption in speaking about art at all.56 In quasi-Socratic style, Herder takes up the amateur’s defence, arguing that as the task of making works of art and that of judging them are distinct they call for men equipped with different skills and capacities. If Falconet’s prescription that only artists should be allowed to speak about art were accepted, art itself would gain no advantage thereby, for art exists not for its own sake but for the pleasure and utility it affords the viewer. At one point, Herder describes Falconet’s position as an attack on the idea of ‘an academy of amateurs’, a comment that recalls Caylus’s discours on the utility of the role. Nevertheless, he asserts that Winckelmann was ‘more than’ a mere amateur, ‘and something entirely different: a researcher into antiquity (Altertumsforscher), expert in antiquity (Altertumskenner)’. This provides the opportunity for Herder to distinguish the roles of artist and antiquarian expert in general terms: The task of the artist when confronted with a statue and that of the antiquarian are fundamentally different. The artist, as an artist, looks for beautiful or ugly, scarcely imitable, mechanically or ideally imitable forms, and need not trouble himself over the identity of the man or god that is represented. For the antiquarian, that is the main task. The question need never occur to him: ‘Could I represent this? Could my age do so?’ Enough that it has been represented, and he asks: ‘By whom? When? How? What does it mean? What purpose did it serve?’ For him is incidental whether it is beautiful or ugly—except, of course, that the more beautiful the better, for even the antiquarian should be a man endowed with eyes and spirit and soul.57

It is only with some violence that Winckelmann can be assimilated to this portrait of the unprejudiced Altertumsforscher, and Herder’s championing of the historicizing interpretation of a statue without regard for its beauty sounds closer to the model of all-encompassing Wissenschaft propounded by his friend Heyne. This is underlined by the manner in which Herder brings his ‘dispute’ with Falconet to an end by allowing that the artist may ignore the antiquarian’s observations. This concedes to Falconet one of his main arguments against Caylus. But in awarding the artist autonomy within his own sphere, Herder implies the same for Altertumsforschung, liberating it from

56 57

Ibid. 639–42. On Falconet see Weinshenker 1966. DKV II 642.

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subordination to beauty towards a free-standing consideration of the historical questions of ‘who?’, ‘when?’, ‘how?’, ‘what?’, and ‘what for?’ If the first of Herder’s digressions is haunted by Falconet and Caylus, the second is evocative of Lessing and Heyne. It falls in the course of Herder’s discussion of Winckelmann’s unfinished project to write descriptions of the Belvedere statues, which he singles out as further significant evidence of ‘where he set out from and where he was heading’.58 Along with the Gedancken and the Abhandlung, Herder classed Winckelmann’s ‘Pindaric’ descriptions among the most important of his works.59 In the Denkmal, his declaration that ‘they will endure for as long as the statues [themselves] and our language’ precedes a request for his readers to tolerate discussion of a ‘minor objection and conjecture’ with regard to Winckelmann’s treatment of the Apollo Belvedere. There follows a reinterpretation of the statue not—as Winckelmann would have it—as Apollo in victory over the Python, but instead as the angry Apollo of Iliad 1, descending from Olympus to cast fire upon the Greek ships. This ‘fit’ between a plastic and a poetic representation might appear to counter Lessing, but Herder continues by expatiating upon the point that the sculptor has not portrayed the god at the moment where he ‘sat down’ (Ç’, Il. 1.48) opposite the Greek camp in order to open fire, but rather in mid-stride: ‘The artist did not select from the poet the moment of sitting, which in his case would have ruined the entire effect; but he drew out as much of the poet’s action as belonged to the life of the image . . . in short, it is the most all-encompassing moment of the Homeric picture that Art could depict.’60 Herder’s characterization of the Apollo as ‘der umfaßendste Augenblick des Homerischen Bildes, wie ihn die Kunst darstellen konnte’ is a nod to the doctrine of the ‘pregnant moment’ made famous by Lessing’s work. He proceeds to declare that certain elements of Winckelmann’s descriptions must be pardoned, for ‘even Winckelmann was often led astray by enthusiasm’: ‘In excitement (Wärme) over beauty he often failed to observe the mechanical aspects, upon which everything depends, with sufficient accuracy, and in general a short and fundamental description that is more historical than critical would be most appropriate for the student eye that hungers for knowledge.’61 This is reminiscent of Heyne, as is his closing call for a catalogue raisonné of extant 58 60

Ibid. 645. DKV II 647.

59

Ibid.; see too Irmscher 1973: 30–3. Ibid. 648.

61

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antiquities, organized iconographically rather than stylistically and including information about each object’s date and place of discovery, history of previous publications, and restorations. Within its biographical narrative, Herder’s Denkmal thus incorporates objections raised by some of Winckelmann’s most prominent critics. But ‘incorporates’ is the correct term, for Herder’s subsumption of Falconet’s, Lessing’s, and Heyne’s arguments into his essay in praise implies they do not strike at the heart of Winckelmann’s endeavour. Herder leaves it open just what kinds of modifications Heyne’s and Lessing’s arguments would force on Winckelmann’s writings.62 This question becomes more pressing when, in the third and longest digression, he comes to discuss the Geschichte itself. Herder’s discussion of the Geschichte is prefaced by the usual high praise. It is here that he compares Winckelmann’s magnum opus to ‘a Thebes with seven gates’, marvelling at his predecessor’s achievement in conceiving such a narrative amid the ‘forest’ of statues, busts, lying Cicerones, and ignorant antiquarians he encountered in Rome.63 Winckelmann was a second Herodotus, pioneering new forms of inquiry for the education of his countrymen. To greet such an accomplishment with carping and pedantic criticisms is unworthy, and Winckelmann’s own remarks in the Preface provide ample evidence of the point ‘from which he set out’ to transform the study of ancient art. Herder thus turns—for the first time in the Denkmal— to the second half of the competition question, and asks: ‘what remained to be done after him?’ He interprets this as a request to judge the Geschichte by its own standards, investigating what it had proved impossible for Winckelmann to accomplish within the short time destiny had allotted him: Winckelmann’s History of Art was supposed, as he himself says, to be not merely a history but a system of ancient art: which means, in the first part especially, a historical system. There is little point in asking: Whether the Greeks understood the word historie in such a manner? Whether one must understand it so? Whether perhaps, besides Winckelmann’s work, another

62 At the end of the essay, Herder praises Lessing’s Laokoon and Heyne’s Berichtigung as examples of how contemporary scholars have begun to cleanse Winckelmann’s writings of their various failings. Like Heyne in the Berichtigung, he seems to imply that this will be a work of ‘purification’ and supplement, rather than full deconstruction and rebuilding (DKV II 672, n. 23). 63 Ibid. 651.

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may well be possible (möglich und gut sei) which has no system in mind, but which views matters just as they are, connects them in the manner of history and not of ‘Raisonnement’, allows them to proceed and unfold as they unfold? There is no doubt about any of this, but this was not Winckelmann’s goal and one must only judge a master-builder (Werkmeister) by his goal.—— And why wasn’t it Winckelmann’s goal? It seems to me that the reason is not as mysterious as all that: put simply, because to write such a history is impossible, was impossible for Winckelmann, because to provide fragments for it without Winckelmann’s goal is less useful by far, and his soul would have had to forsake itself in order to yearn for that. So he left the task behind for another and pursued his work.64

The sentences with which Herder opens his examination of the Geschichte are deeply ambiguous. Read one way, his series of rhetorical questions appears hostile to Winckelmann’s work. If they are taken to imply that Winckelmann was mistaken in attributing his sense of ‘history’ to the Greeks, and that an alternative account which stays closer to what has happened is not only possible (möglich) but also good (gut), we are not far from the terms of Heyne’s contemporaneous criticisms in the Sammlung. ‘Was helfen uns so viele neue Schriften, welche statt einer Geschichte, die sie versprechen, Raisonnements über die Geschichte liefern, und doch dabey nicht einmal das, was wirklich geschehen ist, sondern ihre Vorstellung, wie das alles hätte geschehen können, unterlegen!’, Heyne had exclaimed.65 In the face of complaints about the pointlessness of all but accounts of ‘was wirklich geschehen ist’, Herder’s excuse of Winckelmann on the grounds that he did not aim at providing this offers poor mitigation. Yet a further—and perhaps a stronger—line of defence is provided by Herder’s claim that to write such a history would have required Winckelmann to forsake his soul. This recalls a passage earlier in the Denkmal, when Herder called for learned academies to forego the practice of setting essay competitions and instead to reward the freely chosen intellectual projects of others. Herder paints an inspiring image of such an academy as an ‘Olympic gathering of Greeks’: ‘a sanctuary of the Muses’, before which a writer might dedicate ‘that considered (stille) work to which God and no book dealer called him . . . the favourite of his spirit and the free child of his youthful powers, which he has carried long in his breast and heart and now 64

Ibid. 654.

65

Heyne 1778a: 166; see above, pp. 180–1.

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feels to be complete’: ‘What advantage this would bring for the sciences and arts! In supporting and crowning one Winckelmannian offering it would gain more renown, than by ten narrow prize questions and their tortured answers about space and time, bookworms, muck and monads.’66 This suggests at the very least that Herder is working with a conception of what is useful that is rather broader than Heyne’s. Moreover, although it is almost immediately qualified by reference to Winckelmann, his comment that ‘solch ein Geschichte . . . zu schreiben nicht möglich ist’ hints at more fundamental questions over the ideal of a system-free history. Do Herder’s reservations about the idea of a history which ‘views matters just as they are’ extend beyond considerations of its utility?

‘ABER EIN LEHRGEBÄUDE? ’ HERDER’S CRITIQUE OF WINCKELMANN IN THE 1760S Herder had been rehearsing just these questions in relation to the Geschichte some ten years before. Among his manuscript remains are several versions of an essay from 1767–8, which develops what are surely those ‘doubts’ about Winckelmann’s system confessed to in the Erstes Wäldchen. One of the drafts takes the form of a letter to Johann Christoph Gatterer, showing that Herder hoped at one point to publish his reflections in the newly founded Göttingen journal, Allgemeine historische Bibliothek. Some parts also found their way into Herder’s ‘fully revised edition’ of the second collection of the Fragmente, which was largely complete by early 1768.67 None found publication in the 1760s, leaving the material available a decade later when he came to compose his monument to Winckelmann. Much of it was published for the first time in Regine Otto’s edition of 1990.68 66

DKV II 652–3. For the composition history of the Fragmente, see Otto 1 677–86, 697–9. 68 Otto 2/1 641–83 (the so-called ‘Älteres Wäldchen’, see below); 684–91 (the letter to Gatterer). Suphan had previously published selections from the Älteres Wäldchen, as well as Herder’s unpublished revisions to the second collection of the Fragmente (SWS IV 199–218; II 111–204). The title Älteres Wäldchen is Suphan’s; Otto correctly points out that it is somewhat misleading, as both content and compositional context connect it to the Fragmente as much as to the Kritische Wälder. Selections from Älteres Wäldchen (comprising more or less those parts reprised in the letter to 67

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Previous commentators upon the methodological issues raised in these materials have tended to concentrate on one version: the letter to Gatterer.69 This focus has brought its advantages, but also has some drawbacks. As Otto and Beiser have noted, the short and succinct letter (only four pages long in manuscript) provides a ‘more compressed and direct statement’ of the questions and problems debated in the other drafts.70 It is, however, uncompleted, and presents what amount to initial observations divorced from their original context in Herder’s thought and writings. The focus on the letter has affected interpretations: Beiser, for example, treats Herder’s discussion as primarily a critique of the views on historical method Gatterer had presented in the first volume of the Bibliothek.71 He is undoubtedly correct that Herder has Gatterer and other contemporary historiographers in view; the other drafts nonetheless show that the main provocation to Herder’s reflections was his reading of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. These drafts thus testify more clearly than the letter does to the importance of Winckelmann to the development of the young Herder’s ideas about historical method. Paying attention to them may also help with interpretation of those ideas, for commentators’ verdicts on Herder’s overall position in these essays have differed substantially. For Zammito, the writings are evidence that, in the 1760s, ‘Herder found himself driven to a relentlessly empirical approach to historical writing and to emphasis on the situatedness of cultural forms’.72 Beiser sees matters differently: he interprets the letter as expressing Herder’s ‘skepticism about a scientific history and his preference for the artistic dimension’, and maintaining that ‘the best history would be that where the historian is aware of the gulf between fact and theory but still attempts to combine both’.73 Both interpretations have their merits, and the divergence reflects something of the inconclusive and aporetic quality of Herder’s arguments. While it Gatterer) are translated as the ‘Older Critical Forestlet’ in HPW 257–67 and as ‘Early Leaves of Critical Groves’ in Herder 1997: 23–32. Where possible below I use a modified version of Forster’s translation in HPW. 69 Zammito 2002: 337–40, 2009: 70–5; Beiser 2011: 116–18. 70 Beiser 2011: 116–7, n. 46; Otto 2/2 215. 71 Gatterer 1767b, 1767a; see Beiser 2011: 116–18. 72 Zammito 2002: 335. Yet he goes on to claim that: ‘For Herder, historical writing was a form of art, not a science: the true “historical artist” was the “creator of a world of occurrences” as a “beautiful totality”.’ 73 Beiser 2011: 118.

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would be a mistake to seek too much clarity and cogency from what are, after all, abandoned drafts, I argue below that in them we may see the beginnings of a contrapuntal strategy of argument which is continued in the later Denkmal. I focus not on the letter, but on the aforementioned revision of the Fragmente (henceforth F), as well as an even earlier version, known since Suphan’s day as the Älteres Wäldchen (henceforth AW).74 These show that as early as the 1760s Herder was developing a response to the Geschichte which in many respects strikingly anticipates Heyne’s. Herder goes further than Heyne, however, in that he devotes more time to diagnosing the reasons for Winckelmann’s faults as a historian. Significantly, Herder is less willing than Heyne to see them as the result of Winckelmann’s idiosyncrasies. Instead, we see in these texts the beginnings of an analysis which connects them to the uncertainties and obstacles inherent in the position of an Altertumsforscher. Herder’s critique of Winckelmann can be seen to proceed in three stages. First, he criticizes Winckelmann for relying on untested and implausible hypotheses about the uniform progress of art among different ancient peoples, and for refusing to investigate the particular interactions between nations in early periods that, in Herder’s view, shaped the genuine, historical development of particular artistic styles and practices. Second, he points out how this simplification both serves and is served by Winckelmann’s (unwarranted) assumption of the superiority and originality of the Greeks. Third, however, he refuses to banish hypotheses and Raisonnements from ancient history altogether, arguing that they are a necessary resort in the face of the unsatisfactory and fragmentary character of the ancient evidence available to us. These reflections are pursued further in the Denkmal, which develops them into a qualified defence of Winckelmann’s approach to the ancient world.

74 I follow Otto (2/2 201, 215) in treating the letter to Gatterer as a partially reworked version of the themes treated at greater length in the Älteres Wäldchen. Beiser (2011: 116–7) states that the letter to Gatterer is earlier than AW, but gives no reasons for his divergence from Otto’s view. A terminus ante quem for the Fragmente revision is given by a letter to Hamann of late April 1768, in which Herder refers to the work as lying ‘im Manuskript’ (see Otto 1 698–9). Such evidence is lacking in the case of the other drafts, but it seems to me to make sense to interpret the more direct and concise line of reasoning expressed in the letter as a revision of the earlier AW, rather than vice versa.

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The Älteres Wäldchen 1: Herder as critic of Winckelmann The greater part of AW (sections II–V) comprises an examination of the first chapter of the Geschichte. In a manner that anticipates Heyne’s Berichtigung, Herder provides a running commentary on a part of Winckelmann’s text, quoting key passages from each step of his argument and interrogating them phrase by phrase. Unlike Heyne, however, Herder targets the Geschichte’s ‘systematic’ part directly. Moreover, although his discussion reveals his disagreement with Winckelmann on several substantive points, his primary concern lies in elucidation and criticism of its methodology. These priorities are reflected in Herder’s decision to concentrate his criticisms on Winckelmann’s opening chapter. We saw in Chapter 4 that it was in this section, titled by Winckelmann ‘The Origins of Art and the Reasons for its Diversity among Peoples’, that Winckelmann sketched out an overview of his Lehrgebäude, summarizing the overall pattern of development manifested by the particular histories of different nations and offering a preliminary discussion of the uniform, causal factors to which he planned to appeal in order to explain their diversity and change. Herder concedes that such a structure may be appropriate to Winckelmann’s primary audience of ‘students of art’ nevertheless; a reader in search of history must approach this Gebäude with caution. Winckelmann’s chapter will be found ‘full of excellent tenets for all history, all philosophy of the beautiful, but nonetheless . . . an unstable foundation for such a grand structure’.75 Given Herder’s interest in questions of cultural transmission and innovation, it is unsurprising that he concentrates upon two arguments that, above all others, support Winckelmann’s view of the ‘originality’ of the Greeks. These are his assumption of the polygenetic origins of art, and his discussion of the influence of climate upon beauty. In the course of his essay Herder does indeed argue for substantive counter-theses: that Greek art and culture was influenced decisively by that of Egypt, and that ethnicity is a more important determinant of physical differences between peoples than climate. It is, however, the general methodological criticisms that he makes in the course of advancing those arguments that will form

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Otto 2/1 653.

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our focus here. These are put forward mainly in sections II and III, where Herder examines Winckelmann’s account of the origins of art. The primary target of Herder’s discussion here is nothing less than what Winckelmann designated the ‘overall plan’ or ‘scheme’ of his Geschichte: his claim that the artistic development of the Greeks followed an inner logic which is also exemplified (albeit less perfectly) in the art of other nations.76 It is this key assumption that Herder aims to expose as insufficiently historically grounded. He begins by pointing out that Winckelmann presents this proposition as a simple application of a more general thesis about the beginnings of art in all cultures. This is his claim that: ‘Art seems to have arisen in a similar way among all peoples who have practiced it, and there are not adequate grounds to assign one particular homeland to it.’77 Herder suggests that such a ‘historical hypothesis’ is suitable for a schoolbook, but insufficient for a ‘critical and historical investigation’.78 Such an assumption would be plausible if the civilizations of antiquity had existed in isolation from each other, but this is plainly not the case. Herder immediately lists three possibilities (common descent, inter-societal interaction, and the human propensity to imitation) which support the theory that artistic practices diffused from one culture to another. He admits that these considerations are as unproven as Winckelmann’s assumption; nevertheless, even their possibility is enough to make him ‘uneasy’ about Winckelmann’s hypothesis.79 But Herder also attacks Winckelmann’s thesis on the evidence of history itself. ‘Why pit opinion against opinion, where historical demonstrations should play their role?’ From Winckelmann’s star testimony—Pausanias 7.22.4 on litholatry among the people of Pharae—Herder extracts a conclusion the opposite of Winckelmann’s own, interpreting Pausanias’ description of ‘thirty square stones’ as evidence that indigenous Greek religious practices had failed to give rise to a felt need for art.80 Herder thus finds no reason to doubt Or, as Herder puts it in F, that ‘art originates among the Greeks and advanced among them along an orderly and natural path’ (SWS II 123). 77 Winckelmann 2006: 111, quoted by Herder at Otto 2/1 653. 78 Otto 2/1 653. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 656. For discussion of the status of this passage from Pausanias as a site for definition of the primitive in both art history (including Winckelmann) and anthropology of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, see Gaifman 2010. Like Herder, 76

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Herodotus’ claim that the Greeks inherited the names and forms of their early religious worship, along with the techniques of stonecarving, from the Egyptians, and invokes the support of early Greek legend, which narrates how the Greeks took ‘the first foundations of literature, most of the arts of living, and many other inventions too unimportant to be recounted’ from other peoples.81 ‘The whole of antiquity speaks against Winckelmann’, and Herder concludes that this part of his argument is ‘an example of how far the desire for system can mislead us’.82 These arguments lead Herder to an assessment that is highly critical of Winckelmann. In ‘one of the most artistic historical structures the world has ever seen . . . a work full of grand historical prospects’, he confesses to seeking in vain ‘the grandest of all, how one people formed or deformed another’:83 In a history of art which lacks a historically determined investigation into the origins of art among different peoples, each individual Lehrgebäude may stand in the utmost magnificence—the chain between the peoples is clearly missing. The book thus falls into as many parts as peoples are described; but I do not see stated in a clear and historical manner that shining, interconnecting path taken by art across peoples and times. The link between Egyptians and Greeks, Phoenicians and Greeks, Greeks and Parthians, Greeks and Etruscans is insufficiently sharply drawn, for all is obscured with that insidious maxim: ‘Art seems to have arisen in the same way among all peoples who have practised it . . .’84

Herder raises a parallel set of objections in relation to Winckelmann’s treatment of the early development of Greek art, concentrating this time on Part 1, chapter 4’s outline of the succession of four period styles. His strategy here is to target Winckelmann’s discussion of the Gaifman recognizes the stakes of Winckelmann’s interpretation of Pausanias for his account: ‘By blurring the original passage’s distinction between rough and square rocks, between the remote past and the second century ad, Winckelmann could make a claim which was fundamental to his project, namely that the Greeks themselves were the inventors of their art. The notion of the indigenousness of Greek artistic production was one of the cornerstones of Winckelmann’s Geschichte, whose purpose was not only to describe the holistic path of image-making in antiquity, but also to demonstrate the superiority of Greek art. Within his universal model for the development of an artistic tradition from humble beginnings that were driven by necessity, through the ascent to greatness and beauty to its eventual downfall, the art of the Hellenes was to stand out’ (ibid. 257). 81 82 Otto 2/1 657–8; see Hdt. 2.4.2, 2.43. Otto 2/1 659. 83 84 Ibid. 660. Ibid.

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similarities between the ‘more ancient style’ of Greek art and that of the Etruscans, a style Winckelmann had characterized as ‘built on a system consisting of rules that were taken from nature and subsequently departed from it and became ideal’.85 For Winckelmann, the resemblance between early Greek and Etruscan art served to support his assertion of a universal thesis, namely, that ‘science precedes beauty in art’, and thus that the art of all nations must pass through a period of ‘exacting and vigorous regulation’ before developing grace.86 It is this assumption that Herder again chooses to dispute, on both philosophical and historical grounds. While he does not contest Winckelmann’s claim that such a progression is evident in the history of both Greek and Etruscan art, he questions whether this occurs universally, rather than by the confluence of particular, contingent factors. Winckelmann’s posited advancement from crude simplicity, through rule-bound regularity, to beauty and freedom is implausible as ‘the natural course taken by a self-developing art’, and Herder points to the similarity between Winckelmann’s own stylistic characterization of early Greek, Etruscan, and Egyptian art in order to argue, yet again, that it is far more likely that the ‘strictness’ and ‘proportion’ of the oldest Greek style was influenced by that of the Egyptians.87 Herder concedes that this hypothesis generates almost as many questions as it answers. It is nevertheless in the retracing of such particular relations and interactions that the work of real history consists.88 Here we arrive again at the root of Herder’s disquiet with Winckelmann: his refusal to investigate just the particular interactions between ancient peoples that, on Herder’s view, constitute the proper study of the historian. For a true history of ancient art to be written, these gaps would have to be filled in: Can I view and treat Greek art, in every stage of its alteration, as the ideal of a self-originating and naturally self-developing art? Can I, just as it suits me, divide people from people in order to found a Lehrgebäude upon the history of each? No! And now it seems to me as if the entire Winckelmannian edifice totters. The foundation in the origins of art must be laid more securely, the

85

Winckelmann 1764: 224 (2006: 232); quoted in Otto 2/1 662. Winckelmann 1764: 10 (2006: 114); in Otto 2/1 665, emphasis Herder’s. Herder rightly sees this as a restatement of Winckelmann’s principle, discussed in Chapter 4 above, that ‘the three principal stages of art’ are necessity, beauty, and superfluity. 87 88 Otto 2/1 663. Ibid. 667. 86

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history of peoples considered country by country, the ancient Greek style related more closely to that of Egypt, various principles and periods of Greek art examined more precisely—and how much depends on these changes.89

Herder leaves the question hanging of just how much of Winckelmann’s Geschichte would survive such a critical inspection. On chapter 1, AW’s verdict, at least, is unambiguous: ‘I would wish this whole chapter . . . gone!’90

‘Der ädle Grieche unsers Vaterlandes’. Herder’s critique of Winckelmann in the revised edition of the Fragmente Herder’s framing of the problem in F arrives at a similar conclusion by a somewhat different route. His comments may be seen as a development of an observation made in the course of AW’s criticisms of Winckelmann’s use of Greek sources for his reconstruction of the origins of art. There, Herder stated that he found Winckelmann’s reliance upon Pausanias problematic because the latter was ‘not a historian, but a travel writer, and moreover a late author’.91 Herder argues that Pausanias described few pieces from the earliest periods of Greek art. This was partly because few had survived down to his day, but also because, in line with the Greek national characteristics of vainglory and love of the new, he took account of little that was not recent or did not tend towards demonstrating the superiority and originality of Greek culture. Pausanias’ utility as a historical source therefore turns out to be limited for two different reasons: the lack of survival of very many early pieces down to his day, and his own, typically Graecocentric prejudices in selecting what to write about. Nevertheless, Herder concludes that careful reading of Pausanias reveals ‘traces enough of [an] alien, particularly Egyptian antiquity, although it was clearly not to his taste’.92 In AW Herder does not pursue this interesting insight any further. In F, however, the criticism is expanded into a set of reflections upon the limitations of all available literary sources for ancient history. Herder begins with what sounds like a profession of faith:

89

90 Ibid. Ibid. 682. On the importance of Pausanias to Winckelmann’s account of the history of art, see Harloe 2010; Pretzler 2010; Kochs 2005. 92 Otto 2/1 659–60. 91

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The fathers of all European literature are the Greeks. From our historical perspective, the first people in the world among whom it blossomed—if we are talking about the kind of literature of which we know more than names and legends. From our perspective, the first and only people of antiquity among whom science and art were raised to a perfect state. And to a state Minerva had designated a model for the entire world.93

This sounds familiar enough, and Herder’s characterization of the Greeks as favoured by Minerva is such as to remind the reader of the opening of Winckelmann’s Gedancken.94 Yet Herder’s repeated mention of ‘our perspective’ (unser Gesichtskreis) indicates that this is not all that is at stake. Herder goes on to explain that this view of the Greeks as ‘fathers of literature’ is a function of the lack of written records produced by other ancient peoples. The Greeks were the first to emerge out of the ‘dark’ ages of the history of the human spirit; hence ‘our’ understanding of their cultural history is essentially limited by what they happened to transmit. The need to rely upon Greek history, a source which is ‘riddled with holes’ and often ‘runs quite dry’, is enough to undermine the aspirations of those who seek to write the early stages of a ‘general history of humankind’.95 But it also imposes a limitation upon interpretation even of those periods for which literary records survive; for Greek historians did not compose their narratives as omniscient cosmopolitans, writing for all times and peoples. Rather, the writers of Greece, or to speak more highly of them, the transmitters of the oldest world history, are nothing more and nothing less than national historians, and unfortunately often national poets! Greeks therefore, who saw only what they were able to, considered them with Greek eyes often as enemies, and always as others, always compared them with themselves, and ultimately described them with a Greek pen, in accordance with Greek beliefs, for Greece.

A more appropriate title for an account based upon such sources would be ‘History of antiquity, as it has been transmitted to us by the Greeks’.96 Herder thus proclaims the need to study Greek history as ‘an orthographic projection of the most ancient history of the world’, a critical endeavour which ‘is difficult and has hardly begun’. As a pioneer in this field he singles out none other than Heyne, whose 93

SWS II 112.

94

KS 29.

95

SWS II 113.

96

Ibid. 113–4.

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careful and sceptical approach to the sources has allowed him to identify more precisely those inherited ‘prejudices, which cloak us all around’.97 But what of Winckelmann? Did he too strive to rectify his sources’ partiality? Not at all: Herder holds that Winckelmann wrote as ‘the noble Greek of our fatherland’, who found in Greek art and culture ‘the ideal of all divine and human beauty’, and celebrated it ‘with Greek feeling’. He suggests, however, that Winckelmann failed to be equally ‘an Egyptian among the Egyptians’, and also among other non-Greek peoples to be their ‘contemporary and fellow countryman’.98 He illustrates his point with an examination of chapter 2’s account of Egyptian art, finding Winckelmann’s discussion at every turn not ‘history pure and simple’ but the product of ‘prejudice that stems from his system’. Throughout his discussion of Winckelmann’s arguments, Herder censures him for retaining ‘Greece in his view at every step’ and characterizing the Egyptians ‘only as non-Greeks’.99 He invokes Plato to contest Winckelmann’s claim that music was not practised in Egypt, and provocatively suggests that an unprejudiced consideration of Winckelmann’s own characterization of the Egyptian style would find in it those characteristics of ‘calm grandeur’ he had prized in the masterworks of Greek art.100 Had Winckelmann been able to summon up greater sympathy for Egyptians and their culture, he would have recognized that Greek art of the classical period would have been equally alien and disturbing to them.101 He was unable to arrive at such a positive appreciation, however, because in his investigation of the reasons and causes of diversity and change in ancient art he was led at every stage by a Greek Muse: ‘His eye, which was formed on Greek models, and his spirit filled with the ideal of Greek beauty, seeks out the image of his love everywhere, as if enchanted, even where he cannot find it, and where he cannot find it he often refuses to see what he could see.’102 Herder thus convicts Winckelmann of following Greek prejudices, which enabled him to see Egyptian art and culture only in a negative 97

98 Ibid. 115. Ibid. 119–20. Ibid. 128. This discussion (Part 5 of F, SWS II 128–36) has no analogue in AW. 100 Ibid. 129, 134–5. 101 See ibid. 132–5, where Herder imagines the shocked speech of an Egyptian upon entering a gallery or temple decorated with classical Greek art. 102 Ibid. 119; note the allusion to Winckelmann’s imagery at the Geschichte’s conclusion. 99

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light. Of chapter 2 as a whole, he comments that one would wish to see its subject treated ‘not as an episode of Greek art, but as history’. Given Herder’s own emphasis earlier in the essay on the limitations of our sources for the history of ancient times, one may well ask how he thought this could be achieved.103 He does not address this question, but instead repeats the main desideratum voiced in AW: ‘how useful it would be to investigate what the Greeks received from other peoples.’ However inspiring it is to behold, Winckelmann’s Lehrgebäude did not contribute much to the advancement of this eminently worthy endeavour. As a ‘noble Greek of our fatherland’, he surveyed non-Greek peoples only from afar and through Greek binoculars.104

The Älteres Wäldchen 2: Herder on history and system In the course of AW and F we have seen Herder advance objections to Winckelmann’s Geschichte on both substantive and methodological grounds. Substantively, Herder takes issue with Winckelmann’s claims about the indigenous origins of Greek art, and with his refusal to countenance alien (especially Egyptian) influences upon the formation of the most ancient style. Methodologically, he criticizes Winckelmann for relying upon assumptions which he claimed to hold true universally, but which in fact are both erroneous in themselves and circumvent investigation of the particular interactions among ancient peoples that are the real task of the historian. In this respect, Herder’s critique proceeds along similar lines to that of Heyne, who (as we saw in Chapter 6), also condemned Winckelmann for producing Raisonnements instead of an account of ‘what actually happened’. When, apropos of Winckelmann’s programmatic declaration that ‘The history of art should instruct (lehren) us about the origin, growth, change, and fall of art, together with the various styles of peoples, periods, and artists, and should demonstrate (beweisen) this as far as possible by reference to the remaining works of antiquity’, Herder comments that ‘the student of history might wish not that one instruct and only then proceed to demonstrate, but vice versa’, his position appears very close to that of the Göttingen 103 Herder’s praise of Gesner’s posthumous edition of the Orphic poems (Gesner and Hamberger 1764) suggests that he may have seen part of the answer as lying in yet-to-be-published sources. See SWS II 137. 104 SWS II 136.

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professor.105 Moreover, Heyne is praised as the antipode of Winckelmann when it comes to analysis of the limitations inherent in our ancient sources. While Heyne is adept at identifying the particular prejudices which inform the ancient writers’ testimony, Winckelmann blindly and enthusiastically accepts Greek prejudices wholesale, and is unable to attain an even-handed consideration either of Greek or of non-Greek peoples. Nevertheless, there is also reason to suspect that Herder might not have followed Heyne all the way to his conclusions. As we saw in Chapter 6, Heyne proposed that the antidote to Winckelmann’s excesses lay in ‘cool consideration, weighing and testing’ of the ancient sources in order to place the history of art and culture on a firmer foundation.106 Progress along this route might be incremental; it might take several generations; scepticism and restraint nevertheless held out greater hope than speculative fantasy as a means of establishing the truth about ancient history. Albeit inconclusively and ambiguously, AW suggests that Herder took a different point of view. For it opens with a set of general reflections (reprised in the letter to Gatterer), which appear to question the feasibility of a narrative of ‘was wirklich geschehen ist’ presupposed by its critique of Winckelmann. Here, Herder appears far less confident than Heyne about the possibility of a history which ‘views matters just as they are’. The doubts he raises go unanswered within the essay, but prompt the reader to ask whether his rejection of Winckelmann’s particular ‘Grundsätze’ amounts to a rejection of the practice of historical hypothesizing itself.

105 Winckelmann 1764: 10 (2006: 71), cited by Herder at Otto 2/1 653 (translation modified). The similarities between Herder’s and Heyne’s critiques appears all the more striking when one remembers that Herder composed his arguments three or more years before the Berichtigung was published, and that he and Heyne did not make each other’s acquaintance until 1772 (Clark 1955: 162). It therefore seems that they arrived at their critiques independently. Potts 1978: 240–1 suggests that Herder’s early thinking about Winckelmann may have been influenced by Heyne’s 1768 GGA review of Winckelmann’s Monumenti. The praise accorded Heyne in F shows that Herder was already an admirer of Heyne’s work in the 1760s. Influence may, however, have flowed in both directions: for in the preface to his 1806 edition of Herder’s Kritische Wälder, Heyne writes that common regard for Winckelmann had prepared the way for the mutual esteem that had existed between himself and Herder, and that he had been ‘very taken’ with the arguments of the Erstes Wäldchen before he became aware of the identity of its author (Heyne 1829: v–vi). 106 Heyne 1778b: vii, quoted in Chapter 6, above, p. 176.

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This first section of AW is entirely devoted to commentary upon Winckelmann’s opening statement of his aim: The plan in accordance with which Herr Winckelmann wanted to execute his excellent history of art is by his own advertisement this, and I confess that in a modern book such an advertisement has seldom been so magnificently executed: ‘The history of the art of antiquity is no mere narration of the chronological sequence and of the changes in it, but I understand the word history in the broader meaning it has in the Greek language, and my intention is to supply an attempt at a system.’107

Herder disposes swiftly of the meaning of ‘history in a Greek sense’, glossing it as alternatively ‘observation, knowledge, science (Besichtigung, Kenntnis, Wissenschaft)’ and ‘a correct narration of things that have happened (eine rechte Erzählung geschehener Dinge)’. ‘But a system? Did the Greeks want to construct such a thing in their history? Can such a thing be constructed so that the work remains a history?’108 Herder goes on to distinguish three ways in which an account, be it of ‘complicated occurrences’ or ‘simple productions’, might aspire to a ‘systematic’ character. A historical narrative may approach systematicity by virtue of providing a ‘clear representation’ and ‘complete description’ of a particular event; by inquiring after its causes and effects; or by revealing the conformity of a series of historical events to a law-like pattern or ‘plan’.109 It is the third of these that Herder designates history in a higher sense, proclaiming that ‘such a philosopher of the world would be the first for me, if he existed’: ‘But precisely his greatness makes it the case that I am unable to reach his face; so I cast down my eyes, and prefer to think.’110 Herder then turns to reviewing each of these possibilities in turn. The result of his explorations is a paradoxical, twofold emphasis on both the incompatibility of history and system and the impossibility of writing a history that avoids any elements of the latter. Herder’s explicit question throughout is whether the aspiration towards system is appropriate for a historian.111 His wanderings nevertheless provoke the further question of how far ‘a correct narration of things that have happened’ is a realizable goal for any form of history.

107

108 HPW 257, quoting Winckelmann 1764: ix. HPW 257. 110 Otto 2/1 641–2 (HPW 258). Otto 2/1 642 (HPW 258). 111 See the letter to Gatterer, in which Herder summarizes his primary question as ‘whether the historian in general can provide a system’. Otto 2/1 684. 109

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Fundamental to Herder’s critique of the idea of history as a ‘clear representation’ or ‘complete description’ is his emphasis on the ineradicably perspectival element in interpretation. Even if history were ‘nothing but a description of an occurrence, of a production’, such a description would need to ‘be whole, exhaust the subject, show it from all sides’. Such a history would indeed constitute a system, albeit in a limited sense; nevertheless, Herder retorts that ‘I would like to see the historian who even merely in this could achieve all completeness’: Just as it is impossible for a whole body to be perceived, represented on a surface, as it is without projection from a viewpoint, it is equally impossible for the annalist and the writer of memoirs to make a historical system out of the subject, even if it were the most important of subjects, and even if his account of the detail were nothing less than rambling excess.112

To order the complexities of historical happening into a ‘clear representation’ is to impose upon them a system of a sort. Such a description can, however, never be ‘complete’, and moves us away from what actually happened towards a perspectival ordering of events.113 Still greater problems obtain when we move to consider ‘this subject-matter’s inner aspect’: the causes of its coming into being or its nature. Herder holds that ‘here historical seeing stops and prophecy begins’: Since I never see cause as cause and effect as effect, but must always infer, conjecture, guess; since in this art of inference nothing but the similarity between cases is my witness, and hence my intelligence or my wit for finding this similarity between cases . . . is my sole guarantor of truth; since, however, this guarantor can be nothing but my intelligence, my wit, and hence can be a deceptive witness, and perhaps a prophet of truth only for me and a few of my brothers—one therefore sees that the historian and the philosopher of history do not fully stand on common ground.114

Herder thus proposes an intellectual investigation into the psychology of historical knowledge: ‘To what extent in matters of history is the sensus communis of judgment still one in kind in the case of human beings of different classes and modes of life, but even more so with different compositions of their souls’ forces, and above all 112 113 114

Otto 2/1 642–3 (HPW 258–9). Zammito 2009: 70–1; see too Seeba 1985. Otto 2/1 643 (HPW 259).

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with different educations and modifications of those forces?’115 Even if two or more agree, however, the fact remains that ‘no human being can see the efficacy of the discovered cause, the more or less of its efficacy; this each person has to infer, suspect, guess’.116 Finally, Herder considers the form of historical system that ‘orders together many occurrences into a plan, into a vision’. According to contemporary notions, only such a creator would be ‘a true historical artist . . . the historical genius, he is the true creator of a history!’117 Despite this enthusiasm, Herder again demurs: ‘the historical creator who imagined a world of occurrences, wove together their connection, and created a history according to this plan—to what extent is he still a historian?’118 There follows a catalogue of ancient and modern historians from Herodotus to Hume, whom Herder examines to see how far their works have combined history and system. Finding that none has done so successfully, he pauses to draw certain lessons from his account. The first of these is that, ‘if one believes in a legitimate (rechtmäßig) history, one must investigate everything in it that may be system’.119 This inconclusive discussion motivates the rest of the essay: Herder’s investigation of the ‘system’ of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. As we have seen, his conclusion is that Winckelmann by no means manages to confine his interpretation to ‘was wirklich geschehen ist’, and that his systematic aspirations led him astray, causing him to falsify history in various ways. Winckelmann therefore belongs with the other famous historians mentioned in Herder’s catalogue, as one who has tried unsuccessfully to realize simultaneously the demands of history and system. Nothing Herder says in the course of his criticism of Winckelmann is such as to increase the hope that their simultaneous satisfaction is possible. 115 HPW 259–60; see too 266: ‘the bond is not seen, but inferred, and the art of inferring concerning it is no longer history but philosophy.’ 116 Otto 2/1 643–4. In the letter to Gatterer (ibid. 686), Herder explicitly attributes this insight to his reading of Hume. 117 Otto 2/1 644–5 (HPW 260). My interpretation is dependent upon understanding Herder’s references to ‘unsre Theorie der Geschichte’ and ‘unsre historische Kunst’ in this paragraph as denoting contemporary currents in historiography, such as those advanced by Winckelmann, Voltaire, or Gatterer. This is confirmed by the letter to Gatterer (Otto 2/1 688), in which Herder links this point to Gatterer’s and others’ contributions to the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek. 118 Otto 2/1 645 (HPW 260). 119 Otto 2/1 651 (HPW 266–7); see too Otto 2/1 644 (HPW 260).

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Yet the questions and doubts also point in the other direction. For the general discussion that occupies AW’s first section does equally little to encourage hope about the viability of a ‘system-free’ history. Indeed it tends to undermine optimism in that regard, for if systematizing is involved not only when historians seek to demonstrate the conformity of events to an overall plan but also whenever they seek to investigate the causes of events or even to describe them comprehensively, a history that eschewed all philosophizing would have to be very austere indeed. With such insinuations, Herder appears to undermine the very ideal of a history of ‘was wirklich geschehen ist’ which his (and Heyne’s) criticisms of Winckelmann presuppose.

THE DENKMAL REVISITED Herder’s critique of Winckelmann from the 1760s thus concludes in a dilemma. Given the state of the manuscripts, there is no way of telling whether Herder believed he would be able to find a solution to this aporia.120 In the Denkmal, however, the themes are reprised, and developed into a qualified defence of Winckelmann. I have already argued that the opening of its digression on the Geschichte is ambiguous as to the feasibility of a narrative that simply allows events ‘to proceed and unfold as they unfold’. In particular, Herder’s comment that ‘to write such a history is impossible, was impossible for Winckelmann’, leaves his readers uncertain as to whether such a project was merely ill-suited to Winckelmann’s particular character, or whether it is unrealizable altogether. The continuation of Herder’s essay suggests that the latter is his view. He proceeds with a statement of the ideal of a true history of art, but does so only to question it: A ‘History of the Art of Antiquity’ must be formed from true, perspicuous, and complete writings and monuments of art. It must be formed completely from them—but are they to be found anywhere? Is the task of forming a history from them to be expected of any man, any stranger, Winckelmann? Should we read the lovely rarities reported by Pliny, Pausanias, and 120 The final page of the manuscript of AW is damaged, and Herder’s argument breaks off in mid-flow. It is impossible to tell what completion he planned. But his designation of his reflections as a ‘thought-stroll’ (Gedankenspaziergang) in a ‘critical grove’ suggests that he may have intended to leave these questions open.

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Philostratus, and form a complete history from them? Had Winckelmann overlooked not one iota of their testimony, would a History of Art have been made then?121

Moreover, he firmly rejects the argument that ancient monuments may be relied upon to provide sufficient evidence by themselves: ‘How simple it is to make this suggestion and how hard to carry it out! To review all the ancient statues, gems, busts, paintings, and other remains, to study, bring together, order, and explicate them, can that be expected of any man? And is something of this kind not always demanded when we ask for a complete history of art?122 Herder goes on to emphasize the obstacles that lie in the way of such an undertaking. Innumerable works of art from antiquity have been destroyed or else lie still buried, awaiting excavation. Comparison of those monuments that are known to surviving literary sources suggests that few of those rated most highly by the ancients have survived. The literary testimonies themselves are, moreover, meagre, and even where a description contained within them appears to tally with an extant statue, there can be no guarantee that they are the same.123 Herder appears equally dismissive of the claims of connoisseurial analysis, arguing that even before the more recent history of deceptions, forgeries, and restorations is taken into account, the fact that ‘superior works may be produced in inferior times and inferior in superior’ renders any attempt to infer a statue’s age from its artistic quality insecure. Moreover, the distinguishing characteristics of different national traditions are ‘not so distinct that a strict historical researcher could base anything satisfactory upon them’. The net effect of all these doubts and objections is a scepticism about the prospects for a history that is vollständig that appears to exceed even Heyne’s. It is not simply (although it is partly) a question of adequate criticism of the sources, but of the conception of the task itself; for Herder concludes that to write such a history is an

121

I give the German of the opening of this passage, which is particularly difficult to render into English: ‘Eine Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums muß aus treuen, verständigen vollkommenen Nachrichten und Denkmalern der Kunst geformt, vollständig geformt werden; und wo sind jene? wo ist, sie aus diesen zu formen, Eines Menschen, Eines Fremden, Winkelmanns Werk?’ 122 Otto 2/1 654–5. 123 Herder is alluding to the long-standing debate over whether statues such as the Laocoön and the Toro Farnese match the descriptions in Pliny.

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aspiration fit only for a seer, devil, or god.124 Yet he follows this hyperbolic scepticism with a far more sympathetic summary of what Winckelmann did achieve: Instead of history, which cannot be written, he wrote a historical system: that is, out of the reports and monuments known to him he established first of all distinguishing signs between peoples, and then among them, between periods and classes, or styles. In this manner he began to order and to write. This may be imperfect (unvollständig)—more than imperfect, Ideal: but in view of the serious lack of names, reports, and actual history it is, so far as I can see, the sole means that miserly history affords us to create a whole.

Herder is careful to specify that this argument does not commit him to accepting Winckelmann’s account of the characteristics (Charaktere) of the art of different nations and periods, still less his application of them in particular cases. Nevertheless, he suggests that ‘to write a history of art in the outline of such of classes and characteristics’ is unavoidable: ‘After Winckelmann, Heyne wrote on the history of Etruscan art, and he found no other means of recourse. The same goes for Caylus; I see no other path.’125 Herder’s reasons for this highly provocative statement are not made explicit in the Denkmal. The bulk of his digression on the Geschichte covers much of the same ground as AW and F, and phrases its objections in very similar terms. Thus Herder rehearses again how Winckelmann’s fundamental assumptions about the indigenous genesis of art make his history seem ‘very simple’, and allow the different parts of his system to fall elegantly into place. They are, however, ‘unproven, or proven inadequately’, and it is just the interconnections between people that a history of the ancient world should investigate. Herder again takes his readers through an examination of Winckelmann’s main claims, testing what may be concluded by an unprejudiced consideration ‘in accordance with comparison, with the fragments of ancient report, and the ancient Greek style itself ’. Each of these strongly supports the conclusion that Greek art was decisively influenced by that of other ancient peoples, and Herder criticizes Winckelmann’s ordering hypotheses for excluding consideration of cross-cultural interactions upon a priori grounds. The Denkmal’s verdict that Winckelmann’s system fails to depict ‘matters just as

124

DKV II 655.

125

Ibid. 656–7.

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they are’ is thus fully consistent with the arguments advanced in AW and F.126 Implicitly, however, the Denkmal tells a different story. For Herder’s categorization of his arguments against Winckelmann in terms of comparisons between peoples, the analysis of fragmentary testimonia, and of style reveals his reliance upon the very imperfect methods adopted by the author of the Geschichte. It is by ‘analogy’ with other cultural ‘inventions’ that Herder seeks to cast doubt on Winckelmann’s claims about the independent origins of art among the Greeks; by consideration of the ‘similarities’ between ancient Greek and Egyptian artefacts that he seeks to destabilize Winckelmann’s assumption that it followed a separate path of development in each land. Even where Herder turns to considering ancient testimonia, he concentrates his analysis upon Pausanias, the source whose reliability he had criticized in the Fragmente. At every turn, Herder’s substantive arguments against Winckelmann advertise their reliance upon just those methods the imperfection of which he had earlier emphasized. This reliance is, finally, underlined by the Denkmal’s biographical frame. It is the speculative and uncertain character of his reconstruction of Winckelmann’s life that Herder emphasizes, while simultaneously, by his very effort of construction, refusing to step back from the challenge of providing an explanatory narrative. By this combination of striving and hesitancy, Herder’s essay conveys the message that all historical reconstruction is necessarily imperfect. Rather than criticizing Winckelmann’s Geschichte for its imperfections, the question his discussion raises is: ‘what are the standards of probability and certainty that we may reasonably demand of a history?’ In this manner, the Denkmal re-enacts on various levels the dilemma posed throughout Herder’s earlier critiques of Winckelmann. Moreover, it also enacts a cautious rehabilitation of those imaginative and desiring capacities in Winckelmann which Herder had earlier appeared to criticize. In F, we saw Herder censure Winckelmann for treating the entirety of ancient history in line with Greek prejudices, like a lover who ‘seeks out the image of his love everywhere, as if enchanted . . . and where he cannot find it often refuses to see what he could see’.127 These objections are repeated in the Denkmal, with Herder’s complaints that Winckelmann treated

126

Ibid. 658–67.

127

SWS II 119; quoted above, p. 231.

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Egyptian and Etruscan art only ‘in negative or privative’ fashion.128 These criticisms are, however, counterbalanced by his casting of this ‘sense and spirit for the ancients’ as the ‘root’ of both Winckelmann’s life and his scholarly endeavours. It is the key to understanding Winckelmann’s early life-course, for even in his early years of poverty and oppression, Winckelmann’s writings show him striving, ‘with noble pride, with an unsatisfied, yet also inextinguishable feel for the freedom, friendship, simplicity, and sense of the ancients’: He thirsted after the healthy human understanding and simple sense of the ancients, to flourish according to their simple way of life and in praiseworthy manner, to a noble end—yes! To have achieved something in the world and to leave a monument of himself behind—to use his life thus. Granted this may have been a dream, romantic ideas: they were nevertheless to become the soul and the root of his life. Without them there would never have been a ‘Winckelmann’.129

Lest we should think that Herder has only Winckelmann’s biography in mind, he expands the scope of his comments to include his antiquarian endeavours: ‘To write about the ancients, to interpret and comment without any feeling for them, their virtues and ways of living—in short, without virtually sharing in their mind (Sinne), even if paired with high erudition and linguistic knowledge, gives rise only to stupid sophists and pedants.’ It was Winckelmann’s Gefühl for the Greeks, his ‘sense and spirit for the ancients’, in both his scholarship and his life, which formed ‘the point from which Winckelmann set out, and to which he ever returned’.

CONCLUSION All general judgements about the literature of an entire country are difficult and insecure. Where ought one to stand to survey it: high above it, or in its sphere? If above it, who can raise himself to that height? Who can judge a people’s manner of thought from a position on their outside? . . . If from a point within the circle, how—assuming that one is not the centre—can one oversee the whole? It recedes away from us into darkness, the prospect becomes sloping and incomplete: and why? You 128

DKV II 666.

129

DKV II 634–5.

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Altertumswissenschaft and the Amateur yourself stand in that series about which you sought to judge; you yourself are cast from the mould of such a manner of thought. You would, like Archimedes, have needed to take up a position outside in order to move the whole world. (Herder, Über die neuere deutsche Litteratur, Fragmente. Dritte Sammlung)130

In an oft-quoted passage from the first Kritisches Wäldchen, Herder characterizes Winckelmann as ‘a master of Greek art, who even in his History of Ancient Art is more concerned with furnishing a historical metaphysics of the beautiful derived from the ancients, and from the Greeks in particular, than with history proper’.131 The conclusion of Herder’s thought is less often quoted: ‘And hence he is even less preoccupied with a critique of artistic taste.’ In the mouth of the young Herder, very much influenced by the philosophy of Hume and of his former teacher Kant, the mention of ‘historical metaphysics’ points us towards the scepticism about causal knowledge and attempts to derive laws from history enunciated in relation to Winckelmann in the unpublished Älteres Wäldchen. In the context in which it occurs (the attempt to define Winckelmann’s peculiar virtues against those of Lessing, arbiter of the ‘limits’ appropriate to depiction in the verbal and visual arts), this comment may also be read as commending Winckelmann for his attempt to develop a causal story about change and development in artistic taste, rather than prescribing ahistorical rules to creativity. This nuanced evaluation—commending Winckelmann as well as criticizing him—is characteristic of the two-sided response to the Geschichte Herder developed in the period up to 1768. Why he failed ever to publish these reflections is unclear. It is certainly true that publication of the first edition of the Fragmente drew him into literary polemics, and that the wish to defend himself deflected his attention from revising them towards the Kritische Wälder. News of Winckelmann’s sudden death in 1768 may also have prompted Herder to reserve his more serious criticisms to a later date, and it may be that his desire to air them publicly waned with the failure of the Denkmal to carry off the Kassel Society’s prize. Whatever the reasons, Herder’s drafts reveal that he was one of Winckelmann’s most insightful eighteenth-century readers, adept at 130

DKV I 371.

131

Otto 2/1 13; English translation Herder 2006: 53.

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identifying both the particular prejudices that structure the Geschichte’s highly idealized picture of the ancient world and their grounding in fundamental elements of Winckelmann’s methodology. In many respects, his criticisms resemble those of Heyne. Unlike Heyne, however, Herder was not ready to attribute Winckelmann’s faults to failings in education or character, but rather accepted them for what, by Winckelmann’s own lights, they were: a means of trying to achieve a holistic understanding in the face of the fragmentary picture of the ancient world provided by the ancient remains. Herder certainly did not hold that such assumptions should be accepted without question: his criticisms of Winckelmann testify to the importance of testing (prüfen) and investigating conjectures and hypotheses. But—more clearly, perhaps, than Heyne—Herder saw that such hypotheses could not be eliminated altogether in the ancient historian’s search for truth. This insight made Winckelmann’s mistakes, and his achievements, of more than biographical interest to Herder. For he saw the Geschichte as exemplifying the potential for both understanding and error that is inherent in the situation of all human interpreters. Unsurprisingly, then, his conception of Altertumsforschung involved collaborative endeavour: The reasonable man treats his perspectives as only apparently true; he does not behave as if sitting upon a judge’s lofty throne, nor does he climb into a ditch in order to squint up in knavish wonder, lest all his observations appear the expressions of a crazy fool. But he politely invites his reader, as a friend, to ascend the neighbouring hill; shows him what he has seen; asks him for the verdict of his eyes. If they disagree about what they have seen, the wise man will reflect on the difference in their views and investigate where the mistake has arisen. Those who simply deride [the other] or dismiss [his] folly love only the cuckoo’s mocking call.132

This is not Wilamowitz’s ‘pure, beatific conception of something we have come to understand in all its truth and beauty’, still less Wolf ’s powerful and all-seeing judge. For Herder, both of these approaches to antiquity outstrip anything that imperfect mortals may hope to achieve. Within Herder’s human and fallible conception of knowledge there is, however, room for Winckelmanns as well as Heynes: enthusiastic seers, and careful revisers. 132

DKV I 371–2.

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Index academies, English Royal Society of Antiquaries 30, 86 n. 62 see also Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society academies, French Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 79, 110 Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture 61, 69 academies, German Augsburg Academy of Art (Kayserlich Franciscische Akademie der freyen Künste) 34, 98 n. 109 Kassel Society of Antiquities 170, 213 Leipzig Academy of Drawing, Painting and Architecture 57 n. 92, 58, 60 Royal Göttingen Society of Sciences 34, 147, 167, 168–9, 177, 179 academies, Italian Real Accademia Ercolanese 97, 100; see also Herculaneum Accademia di San Luca (Artistic Academy of St Luca) 30 Etruscan Academy of Cortona 31, 86 n. 62 Società Colombaria of Florence 80 Acta eruditorum 54, 128 Nova acta eruditorum 128 advancement, social and clerical careers 33–4, 41–5, 47–9, 205 see also Winckelmann: life Albani, Cardinal Alessandro 42 n. 47, 46, 47, 98 Alcubierre, Joaquin Rocco 97 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond 69 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 140, 142, 150–1 Allgemeine historische Bibliothek 222, 236 n. 117 Altertumswissenschaft late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury institutionalization xii, 7, 10, 14, 17, 196

as paradigm of multi-disciplinary study of antiquity vi, x, 1–2, 164, 172, 198 see also Winckelmann, Wolf amateur, see connoisseurship analogy, as mode of historical analysis 141, 159, 239–40, see also comparison Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte, see Herculaneum Anderson, Benedict 14–17 Antiquaries, Royal Society of, see academies, English Archinto, Cardinal Alberico 80 art theory 60–3, 71–2, 74–7, see also rubenistes/poussinistes, Richardson Augsburg Academy of Art, see academies, German Bayardi, Ottavio Antonio 97 n. 102, 98 n. 103, 100 Basedow, Johann Bernhard 199 Baumecker, Gottfried 60–3 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb xii n. 11, 40 n. 40, 54 n. 85, 199, 215 Baumgarten, Siegmund Jakob 40 Bayle, Pierre 33, 54, 55, 181 beauty, in art 73–4, 75, 76, 82–6, 93, 104, 108, 114, 122, 125; see also grace, Herder as critic of Winckelmann, Heyne as critic of Winckelmann in art in general 61–2, 66, 73, 74, 75, 81, 83, 88, 90, 92–3, 218, 228 as a distinguishing characteristic of Greek art 67, 74, 76, 77, 82–3, 84–5, 102–3, 104, 122, 165, 179, 231 the ‘beautiful style’ of Greek art 67, 82–5, 108, 114, 176, 179, 184–5 see also grace Bellicard, Jerôme-Charles 97 n. 102, 103

270

Index

Belvedere statues Antinous 74, 86, 116 Apollo 86, 92, 93, 116, 219 Torso 86, 91–4, 116, see also Winckelmann: works: Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom Laocoön 58, 62 n. 105, 87, 90, 93, 116, 129–30, 184, 238 n. 123 Bentley, Richard 3, 155, 193 Berendis, Hieronymus Dietrich 11, 44–5, 133 Berg, Reinhold von 94, 134, 215 Berlin, University of v, 1, 7–8, 162 Bernal, Martin ix Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 75, 77 Bianconi, Giovanni Ludovico 30, 98, 110, 115–6 n. 39 Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste 65–7, 70, 98 n. 108, 103, 116, 127–8, 169 Blackwell, Thomas 119 n. 46, 139, 142, 153 Boeckh, August 4, 193 Borbein, Adolf 19 Böttiger, Karl August 150, 152 Bouchardon, Edmé 78 Boysen, Friedrich Eberhard 47–8, 49 Brühl, Heinrich von (Saxon minister) 49, 116 Brühl, Heinrich von (son of the Saxon minister) 95 Bünau, Heinrich von 29–30, 42 n. 47, 44, 47–56, 57 n. 92, 99, 133 Carlyle, Thomas 161–2 Carracci, Annibale 88, 89 Casanova, Giovanni Battista cause, as category of historical analysis 114–5, 116–8, 121, 125–7, 128, 165, 182–4, 209, 234–7 Caylus, Anne-Claude Philippe de Tubières, comte de 38 n. 28, 68–9, 103 n. 128, 109–12, 121, 126, 130 n. 71, 171, 176, 218–9, 239 Charles Bourbon, King of the Two Sicilies 95–6 Christ, Johann Friedrich 77–8, 166 Cicero 108, 109 n. 11, 123, 172

climate, as category of historical explanation 114–5, 122, 126–7, 128, 184, 225 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas 97 n. 102, 104 conjecture, as technique of historical reconstruction 119–127, 185–7, 188–92, 211, 219, 235–6, 243 comparison, as mode of historical analysis 111, 118 n. 45, 178–9, 185, 190, 238–40, see also analogy contour 62, 74, 77, 85, 92–4, 104 connoisseurship 60–3, 67–9, 70–4, 75, 77–9, 81–6, 109–12, 129–30, 172, 238, see also design, grace, Richardson Curtius, Ludwig 20 dactyliothecae, see gems, Lippert Daßdorf, Karl Wilhelm 135 de Brosses, Charles 97 n. 102 de Piles, Roger 61–3, 69, 71, 75–6, 162 Dempster, Thomas 120, 122 Décultot, Élisabeth 52–5, 60, 63, 108 n. 9, 112–3, 126–7 design (‘dessein’, ‘disegno’) 82–5 desire, as a quality of the historian or antiquarian 68, 123–7, 187, 227, 241 Deutschland (periodical) 149, 151 Diderot, Denis 69 disciplinization vii, 17, 23 divination, see Einfühlung Dresden 29–30, 56–60, 63–4 Gemäldegallerie 72 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste 115 Egyptian art 111, 121, 165, 190, 211, 226–7, 228–9, 231–2, 240–1 Einfühlung (empathetic understanding) 207–8, 211 ekphrasis 87–94, 109, see also Winckelmann, Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom Erdmansdorff, Friedrich Wilhelm von 46 Etruscan Academy of Cortona, see academies, Italian Etruscan style, in art 81–6, 111, 178–9, 227–8 Etruscans 120–3

Index execution, in art 73, 75–6, 83, 85, 91, 110 expression, in art 73, 75–6, 87–90, 91, 179 Fabricius, Johann Albert 40 Falconet, Étienne Maurice 217–8 Félibien, André 61 Fernow, Karl Ludwig 133, 135 finish, see execution Florence 67, 70, 79–80 Francke, August Hermann 39 Francke, Johann Michael 129 n. 69, 133, 134, 217 freedom as theme in Winckelmann’s life 6, 42, 44, 64, 241 attributed by Winckelmann to ancient Greek culture 6, 33, 115, 128, 182–4, 228 Füssli, Johann Heinrich 71, 103 n. 130, 134 Galiani, Berardo 99, 101 Gatterer, Johann Christoph Allgemeine historische Bibliothek 222–3, 236 n. 117 gems, engraved dactyliothecae, see Lippert inscriptions 79, 81–2 Stosch gem (or ‘Five heroes before Thebes’) 81–4, 82, 85, 86 Tydeus gem 84–6, 84 Gerhard, Eduard 7–8, 13, 18–19 Gesner, Johann Matthias 40 n. 41, 45, 164, 169, 232 n. 103 Gibbon, Edward xi n. 10, 161 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 17, 59, 96, 135, 151–2, 163, 195 Leiden des jungen Werthers 162–3 Winckelmann essay 11–12, 35–6, 41–2, 43, 57, 58 Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert 11–13, 133–6 Gori, Antonio 82, 97 n. 102 Göttingen Philological Seminar 40 n. 41, 162, 163–4, 173 Royal Society of Sciences 34, 167–9, 177, 179 University 166–9, 193–4, 205, 222 Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (GGA) 137, 162, 169–70 grace, in art 73, 74–7, 83, 85, 91, 103–4, 108, 228

271

Greifswald, University of 7, 8 Hagedorn, Christian Ludwig von 57, 70, 164, 187 Halle, University of 37, 39, 40, 54 n. 85, 110 n. 14, 137, 170, 197–9 Philological Seminar 198–9 Haller, Albrecht von 167, 170 Hamilton, William 96 Heeren, Arnold Ludwig von 161, 165–6, 188 Heimersleben (Hadmersleben) 40 n. 40, 45, 47, 53 Hellenism, see philhellenism Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabia Academy (Accademia Ercolanese), see under academies, Italian Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte 99, 100 excavations 95–7, 100, 101 Museum 96–7, 99, 101 paintings 97, 98 n. 109, 101–2 papyri 100–1 sculptures 102–3 ‘Vestals’ 95–6 Herder, Johann Gottfried friendship with Heyne 152, 205, 233 n. 105 works Adrastea 208 ‘Älteres Wäldchen’ 222–4, 225–9, 232–7, 242 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit 210 Denkmal Johann Winckelmann’s 213–22, 237–41 Fragmente (Ueber die neuere deutsche Literatur) 208, 209, 214, 222–4, 229- 32, 242 ‘Homer – ein Günstling der Zeit’ 138–44 Kritische Wälder 209–10, 233 n. 105, 242 Ueber Thomas Abbts Schriften 208, 215–6 Heyne, Christian Gottlob as founder of Altertumswissenschaft 161–4 life education and early career in Saxony 45, 49, 166 call to Göttingen 166, 168

272

Index

Heyne, Christian Gottlob (cont.) career at Göttingen 162–79 Archaeology lectures 164–6, 168 Philological Seminar 162, 163–4, 173 description of the ‘Wissenschaft des Altertums’ 171–2 friendship with Herder 152, 205, 233 n. 105 friendship with Winckelmann 133, 168–9, 187–8 teacher of Wolf 137–8, 142–3 quarrel with Wolf 144–59 review of Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum 144–52 works Berichtigung und Ergänzung der Winkelmannschen Geschichte der Kunst 177–80 Einleitung in das Studium der Antike 164–5 Lobschrift auf Winckelmann 170–7, 186 Sammlung antiquarischer Aufsätze 175, 180–4 ‘Über die Künstlerepochen beym Plinius’ 180–4 historicism, German v, ix, 136, 210; see also Einfühlung Hobsbawm, Eric 16 n. 43 Homeric Question 136, 138–47, 147–9, 153–8 homoeroticism 33, 36, 93, 96, 104 Horen, Die (periodical), see Schiller Huber, Michel 38, 97 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 7, 153, 163n. 6, 196–7, 198 Hume, David 112, 117, 118 n. 44, 236 idealism, in art 61–3, 66, 74, 77, 82–6, 93, 228 imagination, as quality of the historian 123–7, 174–6, 180–7 imagined communities 14–19 and the early modern Republic of Letters 31–4, 54–6 imitation, in art 60–3, 73, 74–5, 129, 209–10; see also grace, rubenistes/poussinistes Institut für archäologische Korrespondenz 7, 17 invention, in art 74–6

Jaeger, Werner 20 Jahn, Otto 8–11, 19, 23–4 Jena 39, 135; see also Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Schlegel Josephus 154 Junius, Franciscus 128 Justi, Carl 13, 35, 38, 47, 53–4, 56–9 Kant, Immanuel 194, 205, 211 n. 24, 242 Kassel, Society of Antiquities 170–1, 213 Klotz, Christian Adolph 94 n. 90, 129, 170, 172 n. 31 Körte, Wilhelm 150–1, 198 Lachmann, Karl 163 n. 6 Lamprecht, Friedrich Wilhelm 36, 42–3, 45–6, 47–8 Laocoön, see Belvedere statues Latin Schools 37–8, 198 Le Brun, Charles 61 Leipzig Academy of Art, see academies, German University 45, 153, 166 Leo, Friedrich 163, 194–5 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 129–30, 184, 209–10, 219–20, 242 liberty, see freedom Lippert, Philipp Daniel 58, 171 Dactyliotheca universalis 60, 78, 79, 168 Locke, John 71 (ps.) Longinus 75, 139, 188 loss, as theme in Winckelmann’s writings 123–5 Maffei, Paolo Alessandro 78 Maffei, Scipione 120 Mariette, Pierre-Jean 69, 78, 86 n. 62, 109–11 Martorelli, Giacomo 100–1 Mazzocchi, Alessio Simmacho 99, 100 Medici Venus 74 Meinecke, Friedrich 194, 206, 207, 211 Mendelssohn, Moses 55, 65 Mengs, Anton Raphael 31, 87, 95, 102, 175 Merian, Johann Bernhard 145, 155 Meyer, Johann Heinrich 133, 135 Michelangelo 59, 76, 85, 93 Momigliano, Arnaldo xi n. 10 Mommsen, Theodor 11 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 112, 115, 117–18 Montfaucon, Bernard de 73, 78, 172 n. 31

Index monumentalization, of Winckelmann 7–14, 24, 214–7 Münchhausen, Gerlach Adolph von 167 Muzell-Stosch, Wilhelm 79, 134 Naples 94–7, 99–101, 115 n. 39 Nicolai, Friedrich 55, 65–6, 70 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 3, 122 Niobe and her children (statue group) 86, 184 Nolte, Johann Rudolf 38, 40, 49 n. 72 Nöthnitz, see Bünau Oeser, Adam Friedrich 30, 57–60, 113, 217 Ossian 148 Osterburg 42 Paalzow, Johann Gottfried 38, 44, 46 n. 60 Paderni, Camillo 97, 99 paintings, ancient, see Herculaneum papyri, see Herculaneum Passionei, Cardinal Domenico Silvio 56, 64, 80 patronage 31–4, 37–9, 41–6, 47–52 Pausanias 177–9, 226, 229, 237–8, 240 Chest of Cypselus 178–9 philhellenism viii–ix, 10, 21, 22–3, 193–202 philology 1–5, 164, 173, 197–202 Philological Seminar (Göttingen) 40 n. 41, 162, 163–4, 173 Philological Seminar (Halle) 198–9 philologiae studiosus legend, see Wolf, Friedrich August Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 96 Philostratus 87, 237–8 Piaggio, Antonio 101 Pindar and Heyne 149, 167 and Winckelmann 214–15, 217, 219 Pliny the Elder 108, 121, 177–8, 180–3, 237–8 polyhistory 54–5 Pompeii, see Herculaneum Poussin, Nicolas 62 poussinistes, see rubenistes/poussinistes progress, in Altertumswissenschaft 18–19 Querelle des anciens et des modernes 115 Quintilian 108 race 115 n. 39

273

Raphael 58–9, 61 n. 103, 62–3, 66, 83, 85, 88–9 reception studies, classical vii–viii Rehm, Walther 21–2, 35 n. 19, 113 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich 149, 151 Republic of Letters 31–4, 47–56 Richardson, Jonathan, the Elder 71–4, 75–7, 88–94 Riedel, Friedrich Justus 40 n. 41, 48, 134 n. 4, 214 n. 36 romanticism, German 12–13; see also Schlegel Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 119–20 rubenistes/poussinistes 61–3 Ruhnken, David 168 Elogium Tiberii Hemsterhusii 171–2 St Laurent, Joannon de 80 San Luca, Accademia di, see academies, Italian Saxony, Electors of August I 40 August II (Friedrich August I) 29, 44, 63, 95 August III (Friedrich August II) 63 Friedrich Christian 30, 98 Schiller, Friedrich 135 n. 7, 151–2 Die Horen (periodical) 138, 151 Schlegel, Friedrich 151, 163; see also romanticism, German Seehausen 39, 40, 42, 45–6, 47–9, 53–6 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl 33 Sichtermann, Hellmut 21–2 Stabia, see Herculaneum Stendal 38–9 Stosch, Philipp von 79, 82, 110 Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch, see Winckelmann, works Stosch gem, see gems style, as category of art-historical analysis in Winckelmann’s early Roman writings 67, 73–4, 80–6, 92–4 in the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums 108–11, 121–2 and Heyne’s criticisms of Winckelmann 176, 181, 184–5 and Herder’s criticisms of Winckelmann 209, 227–32, 239–40 see also Caylus

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sublime, in art 75 Sulzer, Johann Georg 103, 163 Tanucci, Bernardo 99 Turnbull, George 119 n. 46 Uden, Conrad Friedrich 39–40, 45–6, 53, 64 Usteri, Paul and Leonhard 134 van der Werff, Adriaen 66 Vasari, Giorgio 87–90, 108–9 Venuti, Nicolò Marcello 97 n. 102, 103 Villoison, Jean-Baptiste d’Ansse 142, 143, 144, 154, 157 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 112–3, 117, 127 von Riedesel, Johann Hermann 133 Voss, Johann Heinrich 150, 163 Walther, Conrad 29–30, 56, 113 n. 26, 116, 130 Weber, Karl Jakob 100 Weimarer Kunstfreunde 11, 12 Weisse, Christian Felix 70, 127–8 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 1–7, 17, 19, 23–4, 126, 163, 165, 194–6 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim as ‘founder’ of Altertumswissenschaft vii, 4–14 life Catholic conversion 30, 43–5 death 38, 58, 134 n. 3 early life in Prussia 38–43, 47–56 education 38–40 excerpting, habit of 53–4 freedom, see freedom friendships with Heyne 166, 168–9, 187–8 with Lamprecht 36, 42, 45–6, 48 with Stosch 79 fur coat, purchase of 46 homoeroticism/homosexuality 33, 36, 93, 96, 104 hot chocolate, predilection for 46 manuscripts 53–4, 60, 110 n. 14, 118 n. 44 patronage, search for 47–56, 63–4 poverty, modesty of lifestyle 38–9, 45–6 reading 52–6

works Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben 71 n. 15, 94, 170 n. 25, 215, 219 Anmerkungen über die Baukunst 30n. 4, 169–70 ‘Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der alten Tempel zu Girgenti in Sicilien’ 70n. 12 ‘Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom’ 70–1, 86–94 Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch 79–86, 99, 110 n. 16 ‘Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst‘ 70–4, 74–5, 76, 77 Erläuterung der Gedanken von der Nachahmung 30 n. 3, 56, 57, 59–64, 72 Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst 30 n. 3, 33, 45, 56–64, 65–6, 73, 90, 93, 96, 115, 130, 209 n. 17, 219, 230; see also Laocoön Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums 28, 29–34, 38 n. 28, 57 n. 92, 66–7, 68, 72, 77, 81, 86–7, 101–2, 103, 105–30, 134, 169–70, 208–10 Heyne’s criticisms of the Geschichte 171, 175–87 Herder’s criticisms of the Geschichte 208, 220–37, 237–41 see also Wolf, essay on Winckelmann Monumenti antichi inediti spiegati ed illustrati 130, 170, 171, 174–5, 180 n. 52 ‘Nachrichten von den berühmten Stoßischen Museo in Florenz’ 70, 80–1 Sendschreiben über die Gedanken von der Nachahmung 30 n. 3, 59–64, 72 Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen 30 n. 3, 38 n. 28, 94–104, 105, 110 n. 16, 169–70

Index Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst 30 n. 3, 130, 169–70 ‘Von der Grazie in Werken der Kunst’ 70–1, 74–7 Winckelmannstag celebrations 7–14, 17–21 Wolf, Friedrich August v–vi, vii, 133, 135–6 as founder of Altertumswissenschaft vii, 136, 153, 201–2 Briefe an Herrn Heyne 149–50, 158 career at Halle 137–8, 198–9

275

character 152–3, 195–6 Darstellung der AlterthumsWissenschaft 196–8, 202 essay on Winckelmann 133–5, 199–201 philologiae studiosus legend 193–6 philhellenism 193–202 Prolegomena ad Homerum 136, 138, 141–59, 187–92, 200–1 Philological Seminar at Halle 198–9 Wood, Robert 139, 142, 153, 155, 158, 162 workmanship, in art, see execution