Gregory Curtis (8 page)

Next, Winckelmann thought Greek art was not static but cyclical, just as he believed history itself was. It began, advanced, enjoyed a period of full development, then declined into decadence:

Last, Winckelmann’s ecstatic descriptions of individual works created a completely new way of seeing art and responding to it. Here, at enough length to convey its originality and power, is his description of the
Apollo Belvedere, the most famous statue in the world before the discovery of the Venus de Milo:

No one had ever written about art this way before. Who else had ever smelled perfume wafting from the hair of a statue? “The only precedent for this passage,” wrote the contemporary British critic
Hugh Honour, “is to be found in the Christian mystics.” The belief that art could lead to revelation, that it could replace religion as a path to the divine, began with Winckelmann.

All the while he was in Rome, wealthy friends and noble patrons offered to pay for Winckelmann to visit and study in Greece. He always found some excuse not to accept. One can’t help but think he was afraid to confront whatever he might find there. After a lifetime of laborious study, all of it in poverty except for the last few years in Rome, he might not have survived his despair if the stones on the top of the Acropolis in Athens failed to fulfill his expectations. And it would be even worse if somehow those mute stones disproved his theories. When the pressure to go to Greece became too great, he made the bizarre choice—in 1768, when he was fifty-one years old—to return to Germany instead.

Munich, Vienna, the Tyrol—he found them all so appalling that he took to bed with a fever that left him almost delusional. Determined to return to Rome, early that June he made his way alone to Trieste, where, as evasive as he had been with Casanova, he registered in a dockside hotel using an assumed name and began looking for a ship to take him to Venice.

A man named
Francesco Arcangeli had the neighboring room. He and Signor Giovanni, as Winckelmann was calling himself, took to having coffee and meals together. Signor Giovanni showed his new friend two gold and two silver medals he had received from important patrons. Arcangeli then conceived of a plot.

He entered his new friend’s room around ten o’clock on the morning of June 8, 1768, with a long dagger and a rope knotted into a noose. In a sudden movement he tried to strangle Winckelmann, but the scholar proved to be unexpectedly strong. Arcangeli stabbed him several times with the dagger and even then had difficulty escaping Winckelmann’s grip. When he freed himself at last, Arcangeli fled but was soon captured. Winckelmann, covered with blood, somehow got to his feet and staggered downstairs. “Look what he did to me,” he said to a waiter who had heard the commotion. Then he lost the power to speak. These hyperventilated events, which seem as if they must have come from the final act of an opera, concluded eight hours later when Winckelmann, who had been in agonizing pain all the while, died from his wounds.

Over the years the story grew that Winckelmann had been murdered by a street tough he had picked up on the docks of Trieste. When the director
Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in Rome in 1975 during a still mysterious incident involving a young ruffian, the newspapers in Italy compared it to Winckelmann’s murder. But Arcangeli’s motive seems to have been pure greed and only greed. He was a petty thief by trade. While testifying at his trial he never accused Winckelmann of making any advances, a charge that might have helped his case. Instead he simply confessed and was condemned to death. On a piazza in front of a large crowd, his body was pulled apart on a wheel.

E
VEN BEFORE
his death, Winckelmann had destroyed the taste for the baroque and rococo. In their place, classical Greek style became the inspiration for painting, sculpture, architecture, and even fashion. These changes occurred during a time when interest in art began to expand to include a rising bourgeois class as well as the traditional small elite of intellectuals, wealthy nobility,
and church officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, salons in Paris might attract more than seven hundred visitors a day, most of them representatives of the new classes, who were serious and high-minded to a fault. In 1720 there were only nineteen art academies in all of Europe; by 1790, when the
French Revolution had just begun, there were more than a hundred. A new idea—that art could encourage commerce—pushed this steady growth. In time the academies all would teach, in the letter and spirit of Winckelmann, that perfection in art was achieved by imitating the ancients.

Herculaneum and Pompeii, the Roman cities that had been covered in
A.D
. 79 by a sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius, had been rediscovered in 1738 and 1748, respectively. Now, in the final third of the eighteenth century, voyagers to Greece began to write travelogues and publish prints of drawings for an eager audience. They braved the fleas and other insects that rained from the ceilings of local lodgings at night and infested the ruins where shepherds still let their flocks graze. These travelers ignored as well the repulsive stench from the latrines near the monuments and the way the thuggish Turkish guards extracted exorbitant bribes to view the sites. Instead, books such as
Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce
(1758) and
Antiquities of Athens
(1762) contained drawings of wistful, lovely scenes of broken pillars and ferns bursting through the cracks of abandoned temples. Printing after printing sold out. In particular,
Voyage du jeune anacharsis en Grèce
by
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1788) went through many editions in the original French and in every other European language, including Greek. This novel purports to be the journey of a young prince through classical Greece, but its account of ancient people and times was regarded as authentic by its many readers.

In Paris in the 1760s, as a worldly observer noted, “Everything is
à la grecque
. The interior and exterior decoration of buildings, furniture, fabrics, jewelry of all kinds, everything in Paris is
à la grecque
.” Travelers to Rome rushed to see the
Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere with all the expectation and
excitement that is reserved today for the
Sistine Chapel.
Josiah Wedgwood began to mass-produce fine china.
John Flaxman, his principal designer, copied his vases and plaques from Greek originals he found in the
British Museum. Flaxman also produced a popular series of prints of scenes from
Homer.

For fine artists, Winckelmann’s basic ideas seemed to reveal hidden but powerful natural laws: Good taste began in Greece; the only way to achieve great art was by imitating the ancients; the greatness in Greek art lay in its “noble simplicity” and “quiet grandeur.” These ideas inspired neoclassicism, a movement of artists such as the French painter
Jacques-Louis David, the Italian sculptor
Antonio Canova, and the English architect Sir
John Soane, whose work began to appear in the years after Winckelmann’s death. Their principal aesthetic was imitation of the noble simplicity of classical Greek art.

Winckelmann’s belief that Greek art flourished because of the political freedom in classical times became almost a mantra for orators during the French Revolution. His conception of art as moving through a cycle of four distinct periods lasted well into the nineteenth century, when it became a dividing point between the neoclassicists and the romantics. And his belief that art can reveal the divine as well as or better than religion is still with us today.

Winckelmann was the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual father of every aspect of the classical obsession that would last in Europe well past the 1820s. Without the profound change in taste and thinking that he inspired, there would have been no passion for
la grecque
in Paris. But more important, there would have been no paintings by David, no sculptures by Canova, no buildings by Sir John Soane, no Wedgwood china, no prints by John Flaxman. And the Venus de Milo would never have excited the interest of the French ships’ captains and ambitious ensigns who anchored at Melos in 1820. She would have remained in the niche, covered over by the farmer
Yorgos, and never arrived in Paris to become the reigning goddess of the Louvre.

T
HE
V
ENUS DE
M
ILO
arrived in Paris in February 1821. The city, after ten years of revolution beginning in 1789, followed by sixteen years of submission to Napoleon’s will, followed by five years of exhaustion and stagnation, had recently awakened to find itself once again the place where life seemed fullest, gayest, and prettiest. The foreign soldiers who had occupied the city after Waterloo had all left. The reparations demanded of the French government for the
Napoleonic Wars had been paid. The
Bourbons were back on the throne in the person of Louis XVIII, the brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, but he reigned as a constitutional monarch and was by nature neither oppressive nor vindictive. The economy, stalled by the reparations and several years of drought and poor harvests, took off in 1820. At last France was free of war, free of fear, and free of the absolute power of the emperor.

Suddenly, French taste and French style dominated Europe. Elegant shops in Paris were filled with luxurious baubles like a pair of pistols set with gold and pearls that shot perfume instead of bullets. Even the emperor of Austria bought lace, gloves, and stockings for his wife in Paris. French cuisine returned to its preeminence. Paris had more than three thousand restaurants and three to four thousand cafés. Even at the best of them the bill for
dinner was still reasonable, especially when compared with prices in London or other European capitals. But the food was only part of the experience at a Parisian restaurant. One traveler wrote,

There were broad boulevards lined with trees and crowded with shops, cafés, and theaters. In the evening people strolled there or stopped at a café for a lemonade, a beer, or an ice. Just watching the passing crowd was rich entertainment. Peddlers, bootblacks, sword swallowers, jugglers, acrobats, pickpockets, and fortune-tellers made the boulevards a perpetual fair.

Indulgences that were forbidden in other countries were tolerated, if not encouraged, in Paris. There was gambling, drinking, and prostitution. Well-dressed women walked alone amid the luxurious shops and restaurants of the
Palais Royal. They would take their customers to a room in an attic or underground to a small closet in a cellar where, according to an English guidebook of the era, the two would indulge in “frightful and unimaginable sensuality … such as no Englishman can conceive.” Thus warned, the English swarmed across the channel and into Paris. In London there was even a famous afterdinner toast: “London and liberty! Edinburgh and education! Paris and pocket money!”

All this is recognizable in Paris still. But in many other ways the city of 1821 was not at all like the Paris of today. There was no Eiffel Tower. There was no Sacré-Coeur looking down across
the city from atop Montmartre. The Place de la Concorde was mud and ditches. The banks of the Seine were mud, not stone, and lined with public baths and laundries. The
Arc de Triomphe, which wouldn’t be completed for fifteen more years, was nothing but four pitiful stumps.

The population was 800,000, by far the largest of any city on the Continent, and growing daily. Although the boulevards were spacious, the streets were narrow, crooked, and dark. Houses were built with the upper floors overhanging the lower ones so that slop could be poured out the windows into the street. The mess would lie there until passing horses, carriages, or pedestrians pressed it into the mud. Then the rain transformed it all into a black sludge. People who walked in the streets fouled their boots, trousers, skirts, and gloves. Arriving at a destination in spotless clothes was a sign of wealth, since it meant one could afford a carriage. The stench was overwhelming. What sewers there were ran directly into the Seine, where people bathed and drew drinking water.