Gregory Curtis (7 page)

T
HE
V
ENUS DE
M
ILO
arrived in a Europe that had been hoping—more than that, expecting—that she, or some work like her, would eventually appear. That was because classical Greece did not seem distant to a European in the 1820s. Instead, it was a vital heritage that had recently been revived, a force that had to be understood because it was so much a part of the times. And the person who first thrust the remote Greek past into the consciousness of eighteenth-century Europe was born the son of an impoverished cobbler in Stendal, a remote and backward village in Bavaria.

“Good taste, which is becoming more prevalent throughout the world, had its origins under the skies of Greece.” This seemingly innocuous sentence began a short pamphlet entitled
Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Painting and Sculpture
that changed European taste, art, and thinking forever. It was written and published in Dresden in 1755 by
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a scholar then thirty-eight, largely self-taught, who until that moment had lived in painful obscurity and poverty. At first he published only fifty copies of his pamphlet, but that small edition created a huge demand that even many later printings could not satisfy. As
E. M. Butler wrote in
The Tyranny of Greece over Germany
, Winckelmann had “summoned a submerged continent to the surface of eighteenth-century life.”

Winckelmann’s influence eventually spanned Europe, but it was the French and the Germans who embraced him first. Partial translations of
Reflections
appeared in France within a year of its publication, and his ideas were adopted immediately by the French
Enlightenment.
Denis Diderot, whose great
Encyclopedia
dominated French intellectual life, compared him in importance to Rousseau; entries for topics such as Greece, Art, and Classicism were infused with Winckelmann’s thinking. Among German speakers, his influence went deeper. Winckelmann wrote in an elevated, literary German that was rare in a place where
Latin remained the language of scholarly publications and lectures. He became the honored predecessor of writers such as Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, who were the first to establish a classical literary tradition in the German language.

But his influence across Europe goes much further than that. In
Reflections
and in his later
A History of Ancient Art
, Winckelmann invented art history. Until then what had passed for art history consisted of catalogs with tedious and superficial descriptions. Art was static, and antiquity was considered all of a piece. Winckelmann’s brilliant inspiration was to treat art organically and to try to understand how it grew, flourished, and declined across time. This achievement inspired at least three generations of readers. Today we know that his facts, both large and small, were often wrong. Even at the time, inconsistencies, omissions, and errors were apparent to careful readers. But these errors did not seem important compared to the way Winckelmann experienced art. For him art was mental, physical, and spiritual all at once. He taught his readers by his example to experience art the same way. “One learns nothing from reading him,” Goethe remarked, “but one becomes something.”

B
ORN IN 1717
, Winckelmann seems to have come into the world so possessed by ancient Greece that he could have been the reincarnation of an Athenian who lived during the classical age. In his cobbler father’s hut, which had a straw roof and only one room, the young boy relentlessly pleaded with his parents to send him to a school where he could learn Greek and Latin. He dug in the sand hills outside Stendal hoping to find buried urns.

Eventually his precociousness and his determination attracted attention. Through the generosity of neighbors and acquaintances, he was able to attend a series of schools and to live in Berlin, where he worked as a tutor. In 1742 he became tutor to a family named Lamprecht in the town of Hadmersleben
and fell passionately in love with the son of the family, the first of many romantic attachments to young men throughout his life. But young Lamprecht rejected Winckelmann, who never recovered from the pain that caused. “I shall bury myself in gloomy silence,” he wrote to the boy, and retreated for five years to a school in Seehausen, another small village.

He called those five years his “time of slavery,” when he taught “mangy-headed little boys how to read the ABC’s.” At night during winter he wrapped himself in an old fur and sat by the fire in an armchair, where he read Greek authors until midnight. Then he slept in the chair until four, when he awoke to read for two more hours before leaving for school at six. During the summer he slept on a bench with a block of wood tied to his foot. If he moved, the block fell and awakened him for more reading.

Latin had all but eclipsed Greek in Europe at that time. The Greek authors were ignored if not forgotten, and copies of their works were quite rare. But Winckelmann managed to obtain
Homer,
Aeschylus,
Sophocles,
Plato,
Xenophon, and
Herodotus. Sometimes he would spend hours in a library copying a text for himself in longhand.

Finally, in 1748, when he was thirty-one, he escaped the school in Seehausen to become librarian for a
Count Bunau at his castle near Dresden. Winckelmann remained there for six years. At last he had a vast library at hand, but even more important, Dresden was filled with art. There were impressive baroque buildings filled with paintings by Holbein, Correggio, Veronese,
Titian, and
Raphael, as well as scores of baroque statues from across Europe, all owing an obvious debt to Bernini.

Winckelmann came to hate it all. The baroque to him contained everything that was wrong in the art of his time and nothing of what made Greek art great. In particular Winckelmann hated Bernini or any work that suggested his influence. Bernini inspired art that was filled with curves and twists and false emotion. It was decadent, deceitful. It was feminine. The only thing he hated worse was rococo. It was curvy, false, decadent, deceitful, feminine, and French. Winckelmann hated the
French all his life. All his contemporaries in Europe fell short of the Greek ideal, but the French were the furthest from it of all.

Surrounded in Dresden by such horrors, he consoled himself by studying engravings of carved gems from classical times, the few antique statues that were there to see, and some plaster casts of other antiquities. On this thin foundation—formidable reading but little experience with Greek art and no travel outside Germany—Winckelmann built the theories he expressed in
Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Painting and Sculpture
, which he published in the final months of his employment with the count. No one could have guessed the gaps—the abysses—in his knowledge from reading that pamphlet. It was so confident, erudite, and original.

The “good taste” he mentioned in his first sentence came from “le
bon goût
,” which the hated French, who were the dominant arbiters of art in those days, considered the highest ideal of art. This ideal was to be found in nature. No one before Winckelmann thought to look for its origins in ancient Greece.

For him the Greeks were more natural than nature herself. He wrote, “The only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.” Nature itself is too complicated to imitate, but “the imitation of the Greeks can teach us to become knowledgeable more quickly, for it shows us on the one hand the essence of what is otherwise dispersed through all of nature, and, on the other, the extent to which the most perfect nature can boldly, yet wisely, rise above itself.” This was precisely where the vile Bernini went wrong: “Bernini, by directing young artists primarily toward the most beautiful in nature, was not showing them the shortest way.”

And what was it about Greek art that gave it such perfection?

For the next half-century the phrases “noble simplicity” and “quiet grandeur” replaced “good taste” as the highest ideal of art. It’s a testament to the power of Winckelmann’s ideas that these phrases survived and triumphed even though he used the
Laocoön as his example of a work that shows the perfection Greek art could achieve. This sculpture is a complicated composition of a father, two sons, and writhing snakes that Winckelmann had never seen, that he dated incorrectly, and that has many fine qualities but is neither simple nor quiet at all.

In September 1755, just three months after publishing
Reflections
, Winckelmann left Dresden for Rome. Dresden was then the capital of Saxony. Its king, queen, and entire court were Catholic and regularly received visitors from the Vatican, some of whom were collectors of ancient art. Winckelmann’s talents as a scholar had become evident by then, and he had begun to receive offers to come to Rome. At that time Rome, not Greece, was considered to be the place where the legacy of classical civilization was preserved. But to be allowed to study the ancient artifacts in the Vatican and in the private palaces of notables in the church, Winckelmann would have to convert to Catholicism. He knew he belonged in Rome, but the mere thought of conversion troubled him. He disliked religion in any form, and his deceased parents, whose memory he cherished, had been devout Lutherans. He had withstood the temptation for several years, but finally he succumbed and left for Rome in the company of a young priest.

N
OW ALMOST
forty, Winckelmann was a rather handsome man with short, dark hair and a broad chest and shoulders that
make him appear more athletic than one would expect. He had a straight mouth, a strong nose, and deep oval eyes. In Rome he became a visible but rather enigmatic figure. The nineteenth-century British historian
Vernon Lee described him this way:

Casanova, the great lover and diarist, also knew him slightly in Rome. He came to visit Winckelmann one day in his study, “where normally he was always alone engrossed in deciphering antique characters.” But this time Casanova saw him “withdrawing quickly from a young boy.” Casanova hesitated so that Winckelmann could recover and pretend that nothing had happened. But the scholar was determined to give an account of himself. “Not only am I not a pederast,” he said, “but all my life I have said that it is inconceivable that this taste had so seduced the human species. If I said that after what you have just seen, you would judge me to be a hypocrite. But …” Winckelmann claimed that since his Greeks were all unapologetic “buggers,” he felt it was his scholarly duty to try to understand the practice. “It is now four years that I am working on the matter, choosing the prettiest [boys]; but it is useless. When I set myself to the task, I do not come. I see always to my confusion that a woman is preferable in every respect.” This preposterous lie couldn’t have fooled anyone, least of all Casanova. One can’t help thinking Winckelmann told it more out of habit than from fear of
exposure. Rome attracted rich homosexuals from all over Europe; society there was discreet but indulgent. Nevertheless, Winckelmann, after a lifetime of sponging off friends and patrons yet doing whatever he pleased, found evasion and prevarication came naturally to him.

In 1764 he published his
History of Ancient Art
in four volumes. The scope of this work is so ambitious, its notion of Greece is so idealized, its descriptions of individual works are so passionate, and both its facts and its conclusions are so wrong that it’s almost impossible for a modern reader to know what to make of it. Perhaps it’s best seen as a weird, unintended precursor to fantasy novels, a work that creates an imaginary universe so convincing that it manages to attach itself to the things we know are real and changes how we see them.

But readers in 1764 didn’t share this confusion.
History of Ancient Art
was considered to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the age, having done for art what years earlier Newton had done for science. Three of his ideas in particular continued to affect thinking and taste for the next half-century. First, although Winckelmann believed there were a variety of reasons that art flourished in ancient Greece—the climate was benign; athletes competed in the nude, allowing artists to study the human form in all its attitudes—the most important reason was that the Greeks enjoyed political liberty: “The independence of Greece is to be regarded as the most prominent of the causes, originating in its constitution and government, of its superiority in art.”