  Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch |
|
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) |
|
German art historian and archeologist, who in initiating the "Greek revival" deeply influence the rise of the neoclassical movement during the late 18th century. Johann Winckelmann was the founder of modern scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style systematically to the history of art. Winckelmann crystallized his famous concept of the essence of Greek art – "Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" (edle Einfalt und stille Grösse) – in Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755). "With an imagination warmed by the desire of assembling all the single beauties which I had observed, and uniting them in one figure, I sought to create a poetic Beauty, and place her before me. But in this second trial and exertion of my powers, I have been again convinced that this is still more difficult than to find in human nature perfect beauty, if such can exist. For beauty is one of the great mysteries of nature, whose influence we all see and feel; but a general, distinct idea of its essential must be classed among the truths yet undiscovered." (The History of Ancient Art by John Winckelmann, Vols. I., II., translated from the German by G. Henry Lodge, Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880, p. 303; first published as Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 1764) Johann Joachim Winkelmann was born in Stendal, Prussia, into
poverty. His father, Martin Winckelmann, was a cobbler, and mother,
Anna Maria Meyer, a daughter of a weaver. Winckelmann's early years
were full of hardships, but his thirst for learning pushed him forward.
At school he was an excellent student. Winckelmann's father expected him to continue with his shoe mending business. To earn extra money, Winckelmann tutored other children and sang in choir. Later in Rome, when Winckelmann was a famous scholar, he wrote: "One gets
spoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much." (quoted in 'Winckelmann,' Selected Works by Walter Pater, edited by Richard Aldington with an introduction, Melbourne, London, Toronto: William Heinemann, 1948, p. 97)
The local schoolmaster, Isaiah William Tappert, almost blind,
took his talented student into his home as his reader and amanuensis.
In 1733, Winckelmann moved to Berlin to pursue his studies at the
Köllnisches Gymnasium At the age of 21 Winckelmann entered the University of Halle where he studied theology. He had became interested in Greek classics already in his youth. At that time the Hellenic scholarship of the 16th and 17th centuries had virtually disappeared and Winckelmann soon realized that teachers could not satisfy his intellectual pursuits in this field. While in Halle, he followed the lectures of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who coined the term "aesthetics". In 1740 Winckelmann started to study medicine at Jena. Between the terms and sometimes during them he worked as a tutor of languages in Osterburg in the Altmark, where he taught himself French. In 1743 Winckelmann was appointed deputy head master of the gymnasium of Seehausen, but from the beginning he felt that his work with children was not his true calling. Moreover, his salary was so low that he had to rely on his students' parents to have free meals. "I have suffered much; but nothing exceeded the servitude at Seehausen." ('Life of Winckelmann' by G. Henry Lodge, The History of Ancient Art, Volume I, p. 12) As associate rector, he was obliged to be present every Sunday at church and listed to the preaching of the Inspector. Instead of opening the Psalm book, he read Homer or some other Greek work. Unable to remain in Seehause, Winckelmann decided to pursue a new course in his career. In a letter to Count Heinrich von Bünau he complained: "little value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books are so scarce and expensive." (quoted in 'Winckelmann,' Selected Works by Walter Pater, p. 100) In 1748 Winckelmann was appointed secretary of the Bünau library at Nöthenitz, near Dresden. The library contained some 40,000 volumes. Winckelmann had read Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Xenophon, and Plato, but now he found the works of such famous Enlightenment writers as Voltaire and Montesquieu. To leave behind the Spartan atmosphere of Prussia was a great relief for him. Winckelmann's major duty was to assist von von Bünau to write a book on the German-Roman Empire. Four volumes had already been finished. During this period he made several visits to the collection of antiquities at Dresden, but his description of its best paintings was left unfinished. Among his new acquaintances was the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799), Goethe's future friend, who encouraged Winckelmann in his aesthetic studies. Wincelman lived for two years in Oeser's home. In 1751 the papal nuncio, Archinto, visited Nöthenitz, and in 1754 Winckelmann joined the Roman Catholic Church, with the hope that the church would finance his stay in Italy. Goethe once stated, that Winckelmann was a pagan, and one anonymous joker said that "Winckelmaan would even have become a Mahometan, provided the rite of circumcision had been performed with a Greek knife, and connected with a promise of having permission to make excavations in Olympia." Soon after arriving in Rome, Winckelmann obtained an audience of the Pope, Benedict XIV, but His Holiness excused Winckelmann from kissing his foot. However, Winckelmann's decision finally opened him the doors of the Pope's library, one of the largest in the world. He was named librarian to Domenico Cardinal Passionei, who was impressed by Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing. After publishing Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildbauer-Kunst (1755), Winckelmann moved to Rome. There he met the painter Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779), and Alessandro Cardinal Albani, a collector of antiquities, who became his patron. Mengs was the channel through which Winkelmann's ideas were realized in art and spread around Europe. "There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients," Winckelmann declared. ('On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculptures of the Greeks,' in Reflections of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: With Instructions for the Connoisseur, and An Essay on Grace in Works of Art, translated from the German Original of the Abbé Winkelmann by Henry Fusseli, London: Printed for the Translator, and sold by A. Millar, 1765, p. 3) With imitation he did not mean slavish copying: "To original ideas, we oppose copied, not imitated ones . . . reasonable imitation just takes the hint, in order to work by itself. Domenichino, the painter of Tenderness, imitated the heads of the pretended Alexander at Florence, and of the Niobe at Rome; but altered them like a master." ('Instructions for the Connoisseur,' in Reflections of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, pp. 256-257) The Roman art Winckelmann discredited, which was unusual at that time – Roman culture was considered the ultimate achievement of Antiquity. Neoclassical artists attempted to revive the spirit as well as the the forms of ancient Greece and Rome. Mengs's contribution in this was considerable – he was in his day widely regarded as the greatest living painter. The French painter Jacques-Louis David met Mengs in Rome (1775-80) and was introduced to the artistic theories of Winckelmann. His painting, 'The Oath of the Horatii' (1784), made in the neoclassical spirit, is one of the greatest interpretations of the French revolutionaries' zeal. Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works made Winckelmann famous. It was reprinted several times and soon translated into French. In England, Winkelmann's views stirred discussion in the 1760s and 1770s. Henry Fuseli's translation of his book, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, came out in 1765, but the translation was not well received. Originally Winkelmann planned to stay in Italy only two years with the help of a grant from Dresden, but the outbreak of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) changed his plans. Though Winckelmann spent many years in Italy, never learned to speak Italian with ease. He disliked Venice. Winckelmann wrote in German, Latin and Greek. An ascetic aesthete by nature, he lived simply on bread and wine, but partly his monk like life style and loneliness was increased by his homosexuality. In Germany he had suffered from bad digestion, which forced him frequently to a water-soup diet, but in Italy his healt was better than ever. Winckelmann's first task in Rome was to describe the statues in the Belvedere – the Apollo, the Laocoõn, the so-called Antinous, and the Torso Belvedere – which represented him the "utmost perfection of ancient sculpture." During a visit in the garden of the Ludovisi villa, he climbed on the base of a statue to examine it more closely; the statue fell and broke in pieces. In 1758 Winckelman made his first trip to Naples where observed the archaeological excavations being conducted in that vicinity. Usually the excavations of Pompeii in 1748 have been considered the decisive stimulus to the new archaeological classicism, but first excavation in Herculaneum took place much earlier. These two cities had been buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. From the middle of the century the collection of "antiques" becomes a passion all over Europe, discoveries in Pompeii and Herculaneum has a profound effect on taste, especially on interior design, and a journey to Italy is a mark of good breeding. Goethe made his journey to Italy in 1786-88 and although he never met Winckelmann – he was nineteen when Winckelmann died – Goethe found his memory still inspiring. At the age of 45 Winckelmann fell in love with a young nobleman, Baron Friedrich von Berg, and wrote for him, in the highest style of prose, Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen (1763). "As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art," he said in the essay. "To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female." (quoted in 'Winckelmann,' Selected Works by Walter Pater, p. 104) Antinous, beloved by the emperor Hadrian, was for Winckelmann a target of specific devotion. A portrait of Winckelmann by Anton von Maron from 1786 shows him writing notes about an engraving of the bas-relief of Antinous. Winckelman rejected in his art theory the sensual
nature of art objects, and idealized expressionless beauty, tranquil
and passionless aesthetic forms. He never learned to appreciate
Egyptian art, but had adopted Aristotle's claim that Egyptians had
outwardly bowed shinbones and concave noses. Thus they had no beautiful
models. While
maintaining a facade of diligence and
respectability, Winckelmann had a semi-secret private life. In his
memoirs Giacomo Casanova tells that in his
second visit to Rome in 1761 he
discovered Winckelmann in sexual encounter with a
young boy, and had explained: "You know I am not only a pederast, but
for all of my life I have said it is inconceivable that such a taste
can have so seduced the human race. . . . But this is the way it is:
During my long studies I have come to admire and then to adore the
ancients who, as you know, were almost all buggerers without concealing
it". (The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy by Robert Aldrich, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 47) The fruits of Winckelmann's journeys to Naples were the studies Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (1762, Letter About the Herculanean Discoveries) and Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen (1764, Report About the Latest Herculanean Discoveries). His major work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, The History of Anciet Art), influenced deeply contemporary views of the superiority of Greek art, but unfortunately, Winckelmann praised in its pages antique paintings, which were clever forgeries, most likely made by his friend Anton Mengs. The best-known of these "rediscovered" frescoes is Jupiter Kissing Ganymede, others represented dancing maenads and the myth of Erichthonios – these two were used to illustrate the first edition of the Geschichte. Winckelmann's major opus was translated into France in 1766 and later into English and Italy. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing based much of his ideas in 'Laokoon' (1766) on Winckelmann's views on harmony and expression in visual arts. Lessing also stated that painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, which depicts progressive action rather than the visible and stationary. From
1763 Winckelmann worked as a prefect of antiquities
(Prefetto
delle Antichità) and scriptor (Scriptor linguae teutonicae) of the
Vatican. His homoerotic leanings were known there. In 1768 he started
his journey over the Alps to the North, but
the Tyrol depressed him and he decided to return back to Italy.
However, his friend, the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi managed to
persuade him into travel to Munich and Vienna, where he met Empress
Maria Theresa; she presented him with a set of medals. There is no
proof, that the reception was arranged so that he could transmit a
secret message to her. Winckelmann was murdered in Trieste by a fellow-traveller, an unemployed Tuscan cook named Francesco Arcangeli, on June 8, 1768, for medals that Maria Theresa and the Prince Kaunitz had given him – or at least that is what is generally believed. Arcangeli altered his testimony several times. The day before the murder, Arcangeli bought a length of rope and a knife. He stabbed Winckelmann five times. Arcangeli thought that he was only "un uomo di poco conto"; he presumed him to be either a Lutheran, a Jew, a spy or a low person. The motives of the murderer remained obscure in the trial; in addition, there was talk of conspiracy. Rumors spread that Winckelmann was involved in an undercover diplomatic operation (he registered at Trieste's largest hotel under an assumed name, 'Signor Giovanni'). Arcangeli was condemned to be broken alive on the wheel – "from the head to the feet, until your soul depart from your body, and that your dead body shall remain exposed upon the wheel." ('Life of Winckelmann' by G. Henry Lodge, The History of Ancient Art, Volume I, p. 14) Winckelmann was buried in Trieste, in the cemetery of the Church of St. Justus. After the cemetery was filled to capacity, his bones were removed and placed in the general ossuary. Winckelmann never visited Greece, and although he had to form his views of the Hellenic art through copies, his insights have not lost their validity. For further reading: 'The Life of Winckelmann' by G. Henry Lodge, in The History of Ancient Art, Vol. 1, by Johann J. Winckelmann (1849); Winckelmann. Sein Leben, seine Werke und Seine Zeitgenossen, 3 Vols., by Carl Just (1866-1872); The Renaissance by Walter Pater (1873); Wesen und Wandlung des Humanismus by Horst Rüdiger (1937); Winckelmann and His German Critics by Henry Hatfield (1943); Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Sprache und Kunstwerk by Hanna Koch (1957); Winckelmann by Walter Leppmann (1971); Johann Joachim Winckelmann 1717-1768, ed. by Thomas W. Gaehtgens (1986); Modern Theories of Art, Volume 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire by Moshe Barasch (1990); Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History by Alex Potts (August 1994); Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education by Jeffrey Morrison (1996); Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller by Catriona MacLeod (1998); Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: Aesthetics and History in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft by Katherine Harloe (2013); 'Ancients, Moderns and the Future: the Querelle in Germany from Winckelmann to Schiller' by Ritchie Robertson, in Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié (2016); Winckelmann-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung, edited by Martin Disselkamp and Fausto Testa (2017); Winkelmann e l'archeologia a Napoli: atti dell'incontro di studi - Università degli studi di Napoli L'Orientale, 1 marzo 2017, a cura di Irene Bragantini ed Elda Morlicchio (2019); Winckelmann: l'uomo che ha cambiato il modo di vedere l'arte antica by Federica La Manna (2022) - For further information: Olga's Gallery: Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann by Anton Raphael Mengs Selected works:
|
