Gregory Curtis (19 page)

In nineteenth-century Germany, unlike in France, classical
philology was the foundation of scholarship about the ancient world. Philology, which involved deriving conclusions and interpretations from a close reading of the ancient texts, originated in the early Middle Ages when monks pondered Latin religious texts letter by letter. The reliance on philology to learn about the ancient world meant that artifacts from the past, whether a shard of pottery or the Venus de Milo, had little importance for scholars compared to the written record, such as it was. For them the goal of an archeological dig was to find writing, manuscripts if possible, but inscriptions at the very least.

For the German public, however, whose professional classes had been steeped in Greek and Latin, the goal of a dig was monumental sculpture, because it was beautiful and inspiring and because it competed with the possessions of the English and French. After statues, wall paintings or mosaics were acceptable, barely, but pottery shards, small figurines, tools, and the detritus of everyday life held no interest for either scholars or the public.

Unfortunately, shards, tools, figurines, and ancient trash are what archeological digs usually find. Certainly that was the case at Olympia. Despite the assumptions of the glories that would be found there, the digs had produced only one spectacular discovery: the Hermes by
Praxiteles. This beautiful statue was at the time taken to be original, and that made it the only positively identified original work still extant by any of the major Greek sculptors. (Beautiful though it is, subsequent research has shown that it, too, is a copy.) Otherwise, the discoveries at
Olympia were not inscriptions or monumental sculptures or even mosaics but, rather, a teeming multitude of small, common objects. That was all Curtius had to show for three years of support from the German government. He had to make some sense of it in order to justify all the time, effort, and expense. This was where Furtwängler was supposed to help.

And he did. After moving from the storeroom in
Athens to the excavations at Olympia, even he was disappointed at first in the finds Curtius showed him. He called them “the rubbish of ancient times, small worthless things or single fragments of larger ones.” But if the quality was low, the sheer quantity was overwhelming. The army of diggers found one hundred to two hundred objects every day. By now they had accumulated some 1,300 stone sculptures, 7,500 bronzes, 2,000 terra-cottas, and 3,000 coins. Furtwängler shrugged his shoulders and happily dug in. As he wrote to his beloved teacher Brunn, “I have to say that I feel quite satisfied. If the cataloging of many small bronze objects, coins, and the like is truly onerous, I am learning so much which one otherwise would have no opportunity [to learn].”

To a layman, creating catalogs like this sounds mundane, and indeed it is often the worst kind of work—tedious, demanding, and endless. Hundreds of objects, or more often thousands upon thousands of objects, need to be handled one by one, measured, described, sketched or photographed, and then filed by style or date or some other kind of classification. Today, no matter how tedious, it is standard practice in archeology, because the accumulation of all this detail, properly organized and then intelligently analyzed, can lead to the most important conclusions about a society’s political and social organization, economy, religion, and daily life. Without a detailed catalog of objects, none of these conclusions could be supported scientifically or even discerned.

At Olympia Furtwängler also described the strata of the site in detail. That in turn allowed him to date the finds according to the level where they were found. Then, combining that information
with methods of dating as he had done with the pottery from Mycenae, he was able to arrange the 7,500 bronze artifacts into groups and then arrange the groups chronologically. His methods for dating Greek bronzes remain the standard.

This was a tremendously important moment, not just in Furtwängler’s career but in the history of archeology. Furtwängler was not working with texts, so he had made a break with
philology. He was working with artifacts, but these artifacts were not isolated objects of great beauty like the
Elgin marbles or the Venus de Milo. Instead they were thousands upon thousands of undistinguished, often unlovely objects he had not chosen and didn’t necessarily like. Faced with this overwhelming flood of things, Furtwängler developed methods of grouping them, comparing them, dating them, and then drawing conclusions from them. Some precedents existed, and there were others involved in a similar process of discovery, but Furtwängler played an important part in the invention of modern archeology. He created a philology based on objects rather than words.

In 1879 Furtwängler left Olympia for Berlin, where there were two collections of Greek and Roman antiquities. But the director of the collections so despised the young man’s arrogance—Furtwängler was twenty-six—that Ernst Curtius took him in at the
Antiquarium, where he was director. Furtwängler, who attributed his troubles to anti-Catholic bias, immediately began cataloging more than four thousand disparate items in the Berlin collections, describing each one in painful detail. He also cataloged the Antiquarium’s collection of twelve thousand engraved stones, gems, and cameos.

Here again he found this tedious work congenial. “I am already in the museum at half past eight,” he wrote to a friend, “and working hard on vases. It is pleasant to be able to work undisturbed on such great material. I have three servants at my disposal who obey all my orders.”

But even these monumental tasks absorbed only a fraction of his boundless energy. He published a torrent of papers and articles. He feuded constantly and was often vicious in his
printed remarks about scholars with whom he disagreed. He called one a “complete ignoramus.” He relished swooping down uninvited and unwanted on some museum’s prized artifact and declaring it a fake, particularly if the museum was French. And yet Furtwängler could not endure being attacked in the kind of brutal phrases he himself used habitually. It hurt and bewildered him. “One of my fundamental failings,” he once remarked, “is my constant readiness to believe that another is hostile to me or despises me.”

In 1886 Furtwängler met
Adelheid Wendt, whose father was the headmaster of a gymnasium just as Furtwängler’s had been. A gymnasium was a secondary school for boys. These schools had been established across Germany early in the 1800s in order to wrest control of education away from the Catholic Church. German civilization at the time was so enthralled by classical antiquity that the students took Greek and Latin, studied classical writers, and learned little else. The intention was to teach the boys not how to do anything but how to be something. The
gymnasiums were prestigious because only their graduates could enter universities, and a university degree was the only path to careers in the state bureaucracy or the professions. The headmasters made a good living and had a highly respectable social position.

Brash and quick-minded in all things, Furtwängler proposed to Adelheid the night they met. She objected that it was too sudden. He agreed, so they waited until the next night to announce their engagement. She had some sort of birth defect on the right side of her face—even casual family photographs always show her in left profile—and grew up slightly wounded, since both her sisters were considered beauties.

Adelheid was typical of the shy but benevolent women who marry interesting but self-absorbed men, and the couple seems to have been very content. Furtwängler liked rural areas more than cities. In Berlin and later in Munich they lived in pretty countryside near the edge of town. He was a tall, lithe, handsome man with bushy hair and a swashbuckling mustache who
adored physical activity. Life with him was almost a self-parody of constant hiking, sailing, and swimming. His idea of the ideal existence was to be an English gentleman living in the country and riding to hounds. He even sprinkled his speech with Anglicisms.

By the time he was at the Archeological Institute in Berlin, Furtwängler could afford books, a fine house, and travel. Archeology had become a mighty force in
Germany. There were museums of antiquities that had an important role in the cultural life of German cities, and in the universities the classical departments attracted eager students. Furtwängler’s father had raised him to believe that a true modern hero was one who devoted his life to the Greeks and Romans, and that was exactly what Furtwängler had chosen to do.

And apparently all Germany felt the same way. Furtwängler’s lectures became so popular that seats had to be reserved in advance. Too busy to prepare, he spoke extemporaneously. His voice was thin, and his bushy hair became a distraction as it shook with his exertions. But he spoke beautiful German with precise diction as hard-won knowledge and brilliant ideas flowed out of him like a river. As one student said, “The influence that radiated from him was overwhelming, because he always spoke from the abundance of his own experiences and his own work, with its continually new perceptions and discoveries, and because his enthusiasm was genuine.” Furtwängler had no time for students who didn’t rise to his standards, but he was fond of those who did and treated them with respect. He welcomed and encouraged women and allowed them to read for a doctorate even though the German universities did not formally admit them.

In Berlin he wrote his great work
Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture
, which contained his long essay on the Venus de Milo. Yet, comfortable and well situated as he was, when
Kekule von Stradonitz, a virulent opponent, was appointed to a post in Berlin that Furtwängler coveted, his wounded pride caused him to leave for Munich, where he lived for the rest of his life.

He and Adelheid had four children, two boys and then two girls. Wilhelm, the older boy, born in 1886, was a musical genius. As a conductor he was one of the foremost interpreters of Beethoven and Wagner in the twentieth century. During the Nazi years he continued to conduct in Berlin for audiences that included Hitler, though Wilhelm was not a party member or even in sympathy with
Nazism. After the war he was formally exonerated of complicity. Nevertheless, public sentiment didn’t agree, and in 1949 hostile protests caused his appointment as conductor of the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra to be canceled.

T
HE ONLY
contemporary archeologist who approached Adolf Furtwängler in stature was French.
Salomon Reinach and he were united by their intellects and their passion for classical antiquity. Otherwise they were opposites who, disagreeing about almost everything, disagreed most about the Venus de Milo. While Adolf Furtwängler loved his wife and children and his family remained close all their lives, the Venus de Milo was the only woman Salomon Reinach ever understood, and he may not have understood her.

Reinach had become famous as a genius when he was still in secondary school. Salomon and his two brothers—Joseph, the oldest of the three, and Théodore, the youngest—won so many scholastic prizes that their accomplishments were heralded in the national press. In fact, the brothers were not awarded all the prizes they deserved, because they were
Jews; their total domination would have caused political trouble. Later, when Joseph and Théodore were in the Chamber of Deputies and Salomon was a famous scholar, a cabaret singer in Montmartre christened them the “Know-it-all Brothers,” which may have been an anti-Semitic jibe.

Their father, a brilliant commercial trader who moved first from Germany to Switzerland and from there to Paris, possessed
one of the five or six largest fortunes in France. Despite their wealth, the three brothers all chose to work hard in careers that combined public service and scholarship. Salomon worked hardest of all. He wrote so much that his bibliography runs to 262 pages, including more than ninety lengthy works and at least seven thousand articles. But this list is certainly incomplete, because he often published his articles unsigned or under a variety of pseudonyms.

The sheer volume of his writings is staggering, but so is the breadth of his subject matter. In addition to detailed, lifelong work on the archeology of the Mediterranean and several hundred pages on the Venus de Milo, he wrote a history of religion and a history of art that were reprinted in edition after edition in both French and English. He wrote French, Greek, and Latin grammars as well as histories of
Renaissance art, the
Spanish Inquisition, and the trials of
Joan of Arc. He wrote a history of the
Celts. He translated the German philosopher Schopenhauer
into French. He wrote a manual of philology, a study of
Albrecht Dürer, a treatise on the way galloping horses were represented in art, and a tome called
Cults, Myths, and Religions
that is well over a thousand pages and influenced Freud while he was writing
Totem and Taboo
.

This almost inconceivably vast output left little time for much else, and his obituary in the
Revue Archéologique
says that he knew nothing of the pleasures of life, had little taste for society, and preferred to work. That assessment seems rather dour, since others’ recollections make it clear that he enjoyed interesting people and was very good company himself. He visited friends such as the
Rothschilds and others at the top of Jewish society, and he was welcomed at the best intellectual and artistic salons of the era. Although he was diabetic and often appeared pasty and overweight from the disease, was a heavy smoker who developed a persistent cough, and easily became excited, which caused him to stammer, he was known—and liked—for launching into dizzying monologues that leapt from topic to topic in a display that was part erudition, part shrewd perception, and part playfulness. His charm was that it became impossible to know which was which. He once insisted to the art critic and historian
Bernard Berenson that it was an important scholarly challenge to establish the exact moment in history when the back of a woman’s neck came to be recognized in art and literature.