WINCKELMANN, JOHANN JOACHIM (1717–1768)

WINCKELMANN, JOHANN JOACHIM (1717–1768), German art historian, archaeologist, and philosopher of aesthetics, and one of the leading proponents of neoclassicism. Winckelmann is regarded as the first modern historian of art for his systematic treatment of ancient art as an expression of historical conditions, rather than as a tradition of artistic skills and ideas passed from one generation of artists to the next, which was the arthistorical approach practiced by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Karl van Mander (1548–1606), and Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) in their Lives of artists.

Winckelmann was born on 9 December 1717 in Stendal, a town between Hannover and Berlin. The son of an impoverished cobbler, he sought, as a young man, to better his conditions through devotion to academic study, and fell in love with the literature of classical antiquity. In hopes of securing a measure of financial security, and on the advice of his father, Winckelmann pursued a course of study in theology, mathematics, and medicine, as well as Greek and Latin, at the Universities of Jena and Halle. At Halle, Winckelmann was a student of Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762), the founder of modern aesthetics, and developed his own philosophy of beauty, involving the direct experience of beautiful objects, in reaction to Baumgarten's rather cold (in Winckelmann's own opinion) philosophical formalism.

Not finding theology or medicine his calling, Winckelmann left the university and continued to pursue the study of ancient literature and contemporary aesthetics privately, while serving in various positions as a tutor and schoolteacher. A student tutored by him, F. W. Peter Lamprecht, became one of the great loves of his life and followed him to Seehausen after Winckelmann accepted a position as a teacher of Classics there in 1743. In 1748 Winckelmann left Seehausen to work as a librarian and researcher for Count Heinrich von Bünau in Nöthnitz, near Dresden. Lamprecht did not follow, although Winckelmann would continue to lavish his affections upon his former student in private correspondence for years to come. In 1754 he moved to Dresden to work as librarian to Cardinal Passionei, a position that afforded him access to works of literature, art objects, and contemporary cultural debate previously unavailable to him in the provinces where he had been raised and schooled. It was during this period in Dresden that Winckelmann wrote what would, in retrospect, count as the manifesto for the rest of his scholarly life: the brief but powerful and influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Reflections on the imitation of the painting and sculpture of ancient Greeks). The essay took up a long-running debate in eighteenth-century European intellectual circles, called "The Battle of the Books" in London and the "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" in Paris, about which culture was superior—ancient or modern—and why. Winckelmann argued that ancient art was clearly superior and that, for the moderns, the only art worth making is the imitation of the art of the ancients, but added (in a rhetorical flourish typical of Winckelmann's style of argument) that the art of the ancients is so superior to the moderns that it is inimitable. He therefore counseled his artistic contemporaries that, since they are doomed to the ineradicable falseness of painting and sculpture in modern times, they should imitate that which is inimitable. Winckelmann reinforces his valuation of the impossible imitability of the Greeks by being the first art historian to discriminate between Greek originals and their inferior Roman copies.

Winckelmann's Reflections were quickly translated into several languages and found a wide audience. In 1755, with his intellectual reputation established, Winckelmann, encouraged by a group of Jesuit dignitaries visiting Dresden, moved to Rome, where he would be able to pursue his studies and personal inclinations more freely. By 1763, with Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692–1779), the Vatican's chief librarian and a leading patron of the arts, as his sponsor and confidant, Winckelmann became papal antiquary, a position that included escorting visiting dignitaries through Rome's art and antiquities collections. In Rome, Winckelmann set to work on his most important book, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764; The history of ancient art), an ambitious, multivolume account of the art of antiquity in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, written in a style that mixes the sentimental with the clinical and the platonic. Winckelmann narrated the course of each of these cultures as a kind of life cycle showing "the origin, progress, change and downfall of art, together with the different styles of nations, periods and artists," and drew for his studies upon the concentrations of collections of antique art and artifacts in Rome. Elaborating on the thesis first offered in his Reflections, he argued that the felicitous cultural situation of ancient Greece—including political freedoms and unfettered opportunities to view and appreciate the naked body—could not be repeated in modern times. Following a logic reminiscent of the Socratic doctrines of love and beauty, he lamented the passing of Greek art and the beautiful male bodies that inspired it, but found consolation in the historian's ambition to know about it.

Winckelmann met with an untimely death at the hands of an unemployed cook and thief, Francesco Arcangeli, in a hotel in Trieste on 8 June, 1768, while on a diplomatic mission. The motive for the murder was never determined, although speculation about this and other details of Winckelmann's very public private life has inspired numerous literary treatments and plays.

WINCKELMANN, JOHANN JOACHIM (1717–1768)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources