Some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe
Nigel Spivey
FLESH AND THE IDEAL: WINCKELMANN AND THE ORIGINS OF ART HISTORY by Alex Potts Yale, £25, pp. 294
For the sake of a sojourn in Rome, he converted to Catholicism. For the sake of a visit to Greece, he claimed, he would undergo castration. J. J. Winckelmann's devotion to Greece was never actually test- ed, but with hindsight one can understand his reluctance to travel. It was on a shuttle between Rome and Vienna that Winckel- mann, generally acknowledged as the father of modern art history, met his end at the hands of an Italian cut-throat. Violence has all under regard, including the best champions of human grace. I like to imagine Winckelmann continu- ally planning to go to Greece, like those two impoverished writers, Reardon and Biffen, in Gissing's New Grub Street. It is not over-dramatic to suggest that the land of the sun would have blown his mind, yet extraordinary to think that Winckelmann, had he made it to Athens, with the Parthenon sculptures still more or less in situ, would not have needed to make sub- stantive revisions to his major work, The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). For he had actually predicted what the Parthenon, to many dilettanti, would con- firm: that Greek art of the fifth century BC was the embodiment of perfection. It was all that art should ever aspire to be. What- ever one thinks of that as a judgment, Winckelmann's pronouncement of it was truly prescient. Tied to Rome by the need to hold down a job (he was the son of a cobbler, mixing in a rich man's world), and acquainted with ancient art chiefly through the large but limited Papal collection, Winckelmann should never have attempted to create a systematic account of what the Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks and Romans achieved. But he did, and it is hardly surprising that in detail his work now seems laughable: archaeologically, his dates were muddled, and as soon as the Parthenon became known, Winckelmann's paragons of perfec- tion fell out of favour — his beloved Apollo Belvedere, for example, was dismissed in post-Elgin England as a mere pansy, a 'theatrical coxcomb'. Nevertheless, the evaluation of Classical Greek art The Apollo Belvedere survived — and it is probably true to say that the major European museums are directly indebted for their foundation to the enthusiasm Winckelmann generated for collecting and 'ordering' Classical antiq- uities.
Like Edward Gibbon, Winckelmann had a sales-manager's view of humanity. He mapped out peaks and troughs on the spreadsheets of cultural history, in a man- ner now deemed incorrect (we talk not of the 'decline and fall' of such-and-such an empire, but its 'transformation). In this respect the cultural relativism of Winckel- mann's near-contemporary J. G. Herder is more acceptable to modern tastes, and some art historians (e.g. E. H. Gombrich) prefer to assign paternity of art history to the more culturally considerate aesthetic systems of Hegel. Yet Winckelmann's anal- ysis of Classical Greek perfection has a thoroughly modern clout to it. With the French Revolution incubating, Winckel- mann asserted that great art was hinged on individual freedom. The establishment of democracy in fifth century Athens, there- fore, had laid down ideal conditions for artistic self-expression.
There are many problems with this equa- tion of liberty with great art: not least is that some of the sculptures Winckelmann most admired, such as the Laocoan group, were produced long after Greek democracy had been crushed. But the premium placed on artistic individuality in the Western tradition is still maintained; and respectable art historians (Gombrich again) can be quoted to support Winckel- mann's line. Gombrich calls it 'the Greek Revolution': the naturalistic celebration of the human form, which does indeed hap- pen most intensely in democratic Athens during the fifth century BC.
Winckelmann's subjective motives for celebrating human form in its male variety are what most interest Alex Potts. One sen- tence from this book will give a good idea of its tone, as Potts tries to explain Winck- elmann's penchant for 'young athletes' in Classical marble: It was a cultural construct with its own logic, imbricated in dominant paradigms of mas- culinity which at some level marginalised and repressed his own desires.
Right, yah — this perhaps goes down well with the Sloane Rangers who do Art Histo- ry, but the further he tries to extend gay counselling in Winckelmann's direction, the more difficult it gets to follow Potts. A pedantic source of irritation is the use of the words 'sensuous' and 'sensual' as if they were equivalent: if Potts is right about Winckelmann, it should be 'sensual' throughout. The stud Casanova once sur- prised the scholar in his study, where normally he was alone engrossed in deciphering antique characters, and I saw him withdrawing quickly from a young boy, but Winckelmann convincingly denies that he was a confirmed bugger. Marble was more gratifying than the flesh: Winckel- mann's recognition of the sublime in Greek statues was itself a sublimation of his own carnal nature.
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