Johann Joachim Winckelmann

German historian

• Born: December 9, 1717
• Birthplace: Stendal, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: June 8, 1768
• Place of death: Trieste (now in Italy)

Winckelmann’s studies of ancient Greek art profoundly influenced the development of the European neoclassical movement in the arts. His work helped to shape literature, the fine arts, art history, and classical archaeology.

Early Life

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (YOH-hahn YOH-ahk-ihm VIHN-kehl-mahn) was born the son of a poor shoemaker, Martin Winckelmann, in a rural village of the Mark Brandenburg, in what was then Prussia. He was an extremely intelligent and academically gifted child and was thus able to attend a formal Latin school. In 1735, he went to Berlin to study at a high school. The young Winckelmann graduated and in 1737 registered in the department of theology at the University of Halle. His interests, however, were in the study of classical antiquity. He left after two years and worked as a private tutor until 1741, when he entered the University of Jena. After finishing at Jena, he taught school in Prussia.

Life’s Work

From the early days of his childhood study of classical Greek and Latin at the local Latin school, Winckelmann was intensely dedicated to the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature, art, and civilization. In 1754, he entered the court of Augustus III, a great collector of artworks. At this time, Winckelmann wrote an essay on ancient art that would become a major influence on succeeding generations of scholars and writers, his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Reflections on the Paintings and Sculpture of the Greeks, 1765). He was awarded a pension by the Prussian monarch because of this essay. It serves, in part, as a study leading to Winckelmann’s later monumental history of classical art, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, 1776; History of Ancient Art, 1849-1873), and therefore deserves some detailed discussion of its major themes and insights.

Winckelmann clearly favored the art of the ancient world. The Greek sense of taste, he contended, is unparalleled, and the only path to greatness for the modern world is to imitate the artistic production of the ancients. His essay seeks to characterize the major distinctive features of Greek art. He begins his examination with a discussion of art and nature in the ancient world and sets it in comparison to the depiction of nature by modern painters. Greek artists portrayed nature in its purest and most beautiful form. This portrayal is most apparent in their representations of the human form. The human body is presented in its most ideal form, at the height of the perfection of its youth and beauty. The Greek style reflects the Greeks’ societal and cultural standards, their love of physical activity, and their competitive games that glorified the body. Disease and other maladies of modern society, Winckelmann claims, were not present in Greek society. He clearly prefers the artistic idealization of the human form in ancient art to the more realistic representations of the body that predominate in postclassical art.

In the second section, Winckelmann discusses the aesthetic dimension of contour, a domain in which the ancients excelled. Their figures exhibit the noblest contours, again in contrast to those found in the works of more modern artists such as Peter Paul Rubens. Winckelmann praises the sculpted figures found at Herculaneum. The brief third section deals with the artistic issue of drapery, or the way in which the human form is enveloped in garments. Again, he claims that the Greeks were far superior to the moderns in the way they depicted clothing and robes in their art.

The fourth and final section of the essay deals with the overall Greek sense of aesthetic expression. Winckelmann’s characterization of ancient art in this section as exhibiting a “noble simplicity and sedate grandeur” (Edel Einfalt und stille Grösse) was to become the most influential and frequently quoted description of the Greeks. German neoclassicist writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, for example, were to make this concept of aesthetic value the ideal of much of their literary production. Winckelmann discusses the Laocoön statue, one of the most famous examples of Greek (actually Hellenistic) art, which is based on a story from the legend of the Siege of Troy. Laocoön and his two sons had set out to warn the Trojans of the Greek plot but were killed by a serpent sent by Apollo. The statue portrays the three figures, enveloped by the huge serpent, being crushed to death. Winckelmann notes, however, that despite their immense suffering, the faces of the figures are not distorted by pain—which would render the statue realistic but certainly hideous—but rather are peacefully transfigured, retaining a placid dignity and calmness that suggest the greatness of the Greek soul. This aesthetic ideal evidences the general Greek cultural vision of moderation or measure—the belief that extreme expression in any form fundamentally distorts nature and is to be avoided. Ancient art portrays not the exaggerated but the exemplary individual, whose beauty and greatness of spirit epitomize a balanced and harmonious nature.

Winckelmann’s portrait of ancient Greek culture deserves comment. It should be noted that his observations were based not on actual examples of Greek sculpture but on Roman copies uncovered in Italy. Although his characterization of Greek art is for the most part accurate, his overall vision of their society and culture presents a romantic and conservative idealization of Greek civilization. For Winckelmann, the Greeks were highly spiritual, childlike people who lived in a primitive but pristine harmony with nature. They represented, in essence, a cheerful and optimistic culture. This is clearly a version of the myth of the “noble savage” found at various times in modern European thought. Winckelmann’s vision of Greek culture was criticized in Friedrich Nietzsche’s first philosophical work, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, 1909). Nietzsche claimed that Greek culture and art, especially the drama, sprang not from a harmony with nature but from a profound sense of the suffering inherent in human existence.

In 1756, Winckelmann traveled to Rome, where he managed the pope’s collection of antiquities and also served as professor of Greek in the Vatican Library. His work there established his reputation as a world-famous authority on classical Greek art and the science of archaeology. In 1764, he published his famous and influential History of Ancient Art. This work was Winckelmann’s magnum opus and consists of several volumes. It is divided into two major sections, one that investigates the nature of art philosophically and the other that looks at Greek art historically. In the first section, Winckelmann begins with a discussion of the origins of art in the religious traditions of various peoples. He then focuses on the development of art among the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, and the Persians. Because of certain cultural, political, and social restrictions, Egyptian art never evolved beyond a primitive stage of development, and the same holds true for the other two groups. Winckelmann also discusses the Etruscans and claims that their artistic production, although more developed than that of the Egyptians, is limited by the essentially melancholic and superstitious temperament of the people.

The longest chapter of the book discusses Greek art and reveals Winckelmann’s decided bias in favor of this cultural sphere of the ancient world. Numerous factors such as climate, political organization, the development of philosophy and rhetoric, the cult of physical fitness and beauty, and the general societal esteem for artists all contributed to making the art of Greece the most sophisticated and mature of the ancient world. He goes on to describe the essential features of Greek art, its ability to capture true beauty, that is, the perfected human form that, in its perfection, reminds humanity of the divine. Winckelmann discusses what he sees as the four developmental periods of Greek art as well as aspects of Roman art. The brief second section of the volume elaborates on the chronological development of Greek art and presents discussions of individual statues.

In 1768, Winckelmann briefly journeyed to Germany, where he suffered a severe nervous breakdown. He returned to Italy, bound for Trieste. Winckelmann had exhibited markedly homosexual tendencies for most of his adult life, and, in his depressed condition, he began a casual affair with a young man he met in Trieste. The man, who turned out to be a thief, robbed and murdered the famous scholar at the hotel in which they were staying.

Significance

Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s work as an art critic and historian as well as his archaeological work in Italy served to initiate to a great degree the neoclassical art revival and the new Humanistic and cosmopolitan trends of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in Germany from 1775 to 1832. His somewhat idealized vision of the beautiful as the spiritual harmony and balance in Greek culture profoundly influenced subsequent generations of writers, artists, and thinkers. This was the age of the great German writings of Goethe and Schiller, in which the ideals of human dignity and the perfectibility of individuals through progressive education became the guidelines of bourgeois culture. This was also the enlightened age of rationalism, revealed through the work of philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the development of the idea of freedom of rational choice versus the determinism of the irrational impulse. These new ideas formed, at least in part, the didactic goals of art and literature during this period. Winckelmann’s portrait of Greek culture helped to shape this emergence of bourgeois humanism.

It should be remarked that Winckelmann’s prescription for the modern age—the imitation of ancient Greece—represents an essentially conservative vision of history; that is, it promulgates an idealized vision of some prior “golden age” in which humanity was at one with nature and in which discord and chaos did not exist. This implicit and, at times, explicit rejection of the modern period in Winckelmann’s writings is characteristic of the development of German (and European) historicism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Bibliography

Butler, E. M. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1935. A dated but still excellent scholarly discussion of Winckelmann’s promulgation of Greek art and culture in Germany. Contains notes and a bibliography.

Ferris, David. Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Includes a discussion of Winckelmann’s book, History of Ancient Art, describing how the work created the concept of “culture” and granted Greece its significance as a cultural icon. Ferris argues that in elevating the importance of Greek culture, Winckelmann and other eighteenth century thinkers attempted to reconcile conflicting concepts of individuality, freedom, history, and modernity.

Hatfield, Henry. Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature, from Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. A discussion of the effects of Winckelmann’s work in aesthetics on the development of German literature. Contains notes and a bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Winckelmann and His German Critics, 1755-1781: A Prelude to the Classical Age. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943. A dated but still useful academic work by a prominent scholar on the German reaction to Winckelmann. Contains notes and a bibliography.

Honour, Hugh. Neo-Classicism. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1968. A more general discussion of the artistic movement with sections on Winckelmann’s work and influence. Written by an important critic. Contains notes and a bibliography.

Leppmann, Wolfgang. Winckelmann. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. An excellent critical biography in English, which includes notes and a bibliography.

Morrison, Jeffrey. Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Examines how Winckelmann developed the concept of “aesthetic education” and the appreciation of classical beauty in his roles as teacher and arbiter of classical taste. The final chapter analyzes how Winckelmann influenced Goethe’s aesthetic self-education.

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1873. Includes an important and insightful essay on Winckelmann by a prominent nineteenth century English art historian.

Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. An intellectual biography that analyzes Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art. Potts explains the book’s significance to art history.

Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967. A scholarly work that contains a useful discussion of Winckelmann’s ideas and influence. Contains notes and a bibliography.