Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Gradually, the idea began to form in me that I should take a trip back to that world I once knew—changed though it was, utterly, from those times when I was there, and party-states held sway. That idea turned, almost against my intent, from a notion into a plan; it gained definition, it became convenient, it fitted easily in with other projects—and by the year’s end I was setting off, bound for Europe. All, at first, went well enough: I spent long days on the trail of my particular interests, in the towns of Weimar and Wittenberg; but how hard the past’s shadows fell; in my mind’s eye I could see my younger self in the castle square, or walking, half-lost, down the alleys of the Ilmpark; impressions and odd thoughts from long ago surfaced in me: how much more I knew, about life’s patterns, and fate’s grip, and how little what I knew now brought by way of benefit. A glance, a stare, a touch—they were still the same—it was still a mystery to leap from breath to breath, to survive a second, let alone a lifetime—to endure, and be aware that one endures—for what?

  The trip unfolded: it was archives, it was hotels—but throughout its course I could feel a tension, an expectation building in me; I could tell how it would end: I would give in to the film-maker’s wish—I would follow her script. It was an unfamiliar pleasure: the acceptance of a bond; the surrender of one’s will. I decided: the obscure town of Stendal it would be. I made my plans: one morning, in the murk of the clouded sunrise, I set out, on back roads, bound north from Magdeburg, following the bank of the wide, slow-moving Elbe. On both sides, water meadows: sky, land and river channel interweaving. Towns, villages—neat, well-ordered—factories, rail crossings, church towers, lights. There was Tangermünde; there, ahead, Stendal: the pedestrian zone. So easily from thought to life.

  I clambered from the car; the streets were quiet. The clouds darkened: they came lower. It began to rain, gently at first, then more insistently, angling down, until standing or walking in the open were impossible. I took shelter: beneath awnings, or in the arcades of shopping streets, making quick feints out into the rain; then retreating, until an interval between the showers, or a slackening, and then I would go darting here and there, looking up from moment to moment, trying to track my progress, to take the measure of the town, its landmarks, and how they hung together: the cathedral spires, the main gate, the station, the theatre square. Soon the rain became a downpour: I was in a byway off one of the main avenues, running, staying close to the walls of the buildings; there was a long, half-timbered house front; I found a doorway, with steps up; I pushed against it: it opened.

  Inside all was warm, and calm: no sound of driving rainfall. I was in a large hallway: it had the feel of the entrance to an academy, or institution. At the centre of the open space, dominant, stood the marble bust of an individual with anguished features; there was an archway, columns, a small stage with lectern, chairs in precise rows. To one side there were faces: a gathering. Eyes turned to stare at me.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked, and there was the sound of gentle laughter.

  Standing nearest to me was a young woman, half-turned, smiling.

  ‘Please—come inside,’ she said: ‘Are you looking for somewhere?’

  ‘I was on a search, of a kind,’ I said. Water dripped off my coat: I took in the scene, and its absurdity. ‘A quest, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘A quest—in Stendal! Then you must have been looking for us: there’s nowhere else here anyone would want to search for.’

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked.

  ‘But it’s the Winckelmann Association,’ she said, smiling and looking round.

  ‘Winckelmann,’ I echoed, and she took the echo as a sign of bafflement.

  ‘Surely you know of him? The founder of classical archaeology. A man who saw very far.’

  ‘I imagine, then, this is the place I was looking for,’ I answered, a little hazily, still glancing round.

  A group of men and women, both young and middle-aged, all of them immaculately dressed, all with subtle, open faces, looked back at me.

  ‘It’s a small enterprise, of course,’ the woman went on, ‘our association—but in the tapestry of art and learning, it has its part to play: we publish; we hold symposia.’

  ‘And are you all always here, like this?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no!’ She laughed: ‘Normally there’s only a handful of us: two or three, the staff. It just happens that today is the day that Winckelmann was born, in 1717—here in this town.’

  ‘You celebrate his birthday?’

  ‘It’s a little custom, with us: a tradition. We feel close to him: we admire him—and in his life, there wasn’t a great deal in the way of kindness or love. Maybe it might interest you to look through the exhibits we have here, in the set of rooms behind you: they offer a brief account of the externals of his life. And then, perhaps, you might want to join us—we stand at your disposal.’

  And with that she made a brief gesture of courtly elegance, as if to escort me on my way.

  *

  Johann Joachim Winckelmann was of simple background, and for all the elusive, airy glamour that surrounds his name in our time, he lived a simple, emblematic life, enslaved to beauty and to his love for it. This love gnawed at him: it drove him on. He studied it; it was his subject and the centre of his thoughts and theories—those theories that are emotions frozen into structure and form. At first, Winckelmann took the familiar path available to a young man of his station and multiplicity of gifts: public schools, where his adoration of Greek and Latin literature was first kindled; then higher studies, but of strictly practical stamp, and in provincial centres—theology at Halle, medicine at Jena. He was an instructor in languages: he became a teacher in a small school in the Altmark; he took a tutorial post near Magdeburg, with a landed household, and there fell deeply in love. This affection, like the great passions of his later life, was for a young man, unattainable, of noble birth. It hovered in his mind, gaining ever greater resonances and depth: longing, unrequited longing for the perfect, youthful body became his religion—to love was to want; art’s purest, truest form and wellspring was love; to see beauty and know it was to worship nature and its finest emblem, man.

  Such thoughts as these pulsing through him, Winckelmann, who was even in his early writing years a stylist of chill perfection, turned to anatomising his own sense of incompleteness and grief. The pain he felt needed form; the longing needed words, to damp it down; ideas, to veil it, to staunch the heart’s blood. Love, above all else, must seek the far horizon, he believed, and know that it is a horizon dweller: it must adopt the logic of distance, of abstinence; hold itself aloof from its desires, and, like a storm that feeds on its sheer intensity, gain, from its self-denial, strength.

  He turned thirty: his life underwent a change. The literary-minded Count Heinrich von Bünau, with whom he had been in correspondence, appointed him as secretary of the castle library at Nöthnitz, close by Dresden with its royal gallery and collection of antiquities. There, for the first time, Winckelmann came into the company of artists and scholars. He was engaged in helping Bünau compile a history of the Holy Roman Empire—but what could such a history be if it was not based on its deepest origins: on the art of ancient times that still survived and could be seen, far away, in the citadel of beauty, Rome itself. Winckelmann had been taken up by the court painter at Dresden, Adam Friedrich Oeser: they shared ideas; the first book Winckelmann published was dedicated to Oeser; it was a dream in print, an evocation of the beauties of classical sculpture, based wholly on the casts in the royal collection and the bound engravings of Greek works that Winckelmann had discovered on the Nthnitz shelves—how sensuous the statues he described in its pages were, how self-contained in their poise and grace; they exhibited an inner quality—a ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ of the soul.

  This love song to works of art that Winckelmann had never seen he set, entirely characteristically, within a complex frame. ‘Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture’ was
presented as an essay, tentative, uncertain: it was followed by a sharp text of rebuttal, anonymous, though written by Winckelmann himself, and a further coda, also from his pen, but offered as the last word of a third, impartial critic surveying the scene. The sole means for modern man to become great, and even inimitable, wrote Winckelmann, was precisely by imitating the ancients, developing an intimacy with them—and so striking was this argument and the elegance of the prose in which it was cast that it earned him, among the cognoscenti of the courts of Europe, a degree of literary repute. At once, he wrote Bünau a letter, tortured, subservient, yet determined: his course was clear. He longed to be face to face with what he idealised: he would leave for Rome.

  It was a match. If romance could ever unfold between place and man, it did so here. He was well suited to the post of librarian-scholar. He worked for a series of cardinals, and steeped himself in archives and in texts. He was able to view the best known antique statues of the city: in their gleaming limbs his longings seemed at last to have been given a substantial form. Winckelmann, who was at that time already close to forty years old, now flowered: in a brief period he made himself the master of a new field; he became the close observer of the past in all its phases, the classifier, the taxonomist; he was the man who first saw the full sweep of antiquity; he bequeathed it an order and a system, phases and periods; in his words its descent line became clear.

  Soon he entered the service of Cardinal Albani, one of the chief collectors of the age: this brought him to lodgings in the ornate Villa Albani, beside the Porta Salaria on the edge of Rome, and so into contact with the most famous painter in the city, the Bohemian portraitist Anton Raphael Mengs. Mengs had just completed a large fresco of Apollo and the Muses for the ceiling of the villa’s piano nobile. The two became friends, confidantes: they began work on a treatise devoted to the artistry of the Greeks. Mengs served as a guide for Winckelmann: he showed him the treasures of Rome’s princely families—the finds amassed by the Ludovisi, the Farnese and their peers.

  These statues Winckelmann took not just as marvels of the past, but as incarnations of a philosophy: they needed interpretation, just as a beloved object needs a lover to perceive its qualities. He gave himself to this task: he clothed the statues in his prose. He widened his search: he made visits to Naples to inspect the excavations under way at Pompeii and Herculaneum; he travelled further down the coast, to the site of the Doric temples at Paestum, which were then still ruined and overgrown.

  His was not a quest after the obvious: ‘The beautiful and the useful are not to be grasped at a glance, as an unwise German painter thought after a few weeks of his stay in Rome—for the significant and the difficult run deep and do not flow on the surface.’ No: they give up their secrets only to those who surrender themselves, who lose their hearts, who find in the arms of art a means of escape from the base matter of the world: ‘The first sight of a beautiful statue is, to him who has feeling, like the first view of the open sea, wherein our gaze loses itself and becomes fixed, but after repeated contemplation, the soul becomes more still and the eye quieter and moves from the whole to the particular.’

  Winckelmann looked: he saw deep worlds, full of metaphor and meaning, where before him the scholars and collectors had seen mere forms of elegance. He discerned the history of the statues from the clues lying hidden in their style: he came to know them as well as those who made them. Without precursors, without equals among his contemporaries, he poured out his intense, romantic prose; it still stands as a model today: fluent, in constant motion, free from artifice, poised. His masterwork, The History of the Art of Antiquity, appeared in 1764, printed by a court publishing house in Dresden; it made his name known throughout the world of European letters, and transformed the wider understanding of ancient art—no longer were the statues relics, unreadable in their obscurity: now they seemed to pant and breathe; they were vessels of desire. Readers passed around Winckelmann’s book in their circles; they recited his bravura passages, they imitated them and learned them by heart. In his rendition, the carved muscles of a marble torso could be like the lie of hills flowing into each other, or the swell of a quiet ocean, or the undulations, barely perceptible, of molten glass—but it was the reactions to the art of the author himself, described in the most intimate detail, offered up almost as confession, that formed the most striking feature of the work.

  In gazing upon the statue of Apollo in the Belvedere, he wrote, ‘I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it. My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence’—but still they were far from him, still he would not see them; he was always striving, yearning, his feelings exceeded all he knew from books. ‘How is it possible to paint and describe it! I place the concept of this figure that I have conveyed at its feet, like the wreaths offered by those who could not reach the head of the deities whom they wished to crown.’

  Such was the trope: the new emotion Winckelmann bequeathed to the world of thought. Not love thwarted or denied, so much as love that could never reach its goal: longing that was sustained for its own sake—melancholy languishing of precisely the kind that shaped Winckelmann’s tormented path in love. This jump from life to thought was next to natural for him. He had spent much of his time in Rome guiding and instructing young noblemen, to whom he dedicated monographs and learned studies, to whom he poured out tender letters, and from whom nothing of substance came back. The antique statues and the youths of the present—what were they but desire embodied, hanging before him, present only to the imagination, forever beautiful and forever out of reach. And here, abruptly, he crossed a line: in imagination, in sensibility. To be without was to be with; to deny oneself was to fulfil one’s being more completely: for Winckelmann the mark of love, which was itself a sign of authenticity, was now none other than isolation, separation, anguished distance from everything one desired; and this shift inside him of the aims of romance, this preference for entangled, joyless passion, brought other transformations in its wake. If love was a lost quest, so, too, was the quest for antiquity.

  With that, the past’s meaning changed. The world of the ancient statues was now presented as a high, perfect realm, where thoughts were truer, bodies brighter, feelings noble, clear and pure. Gazing down into time’s well, surveying the remains of Greece and Rome, and examining the marble evidence, how could one not feel regret, and a further emotion, too, more poignant still: nostalgia, which rots the present and its joys away. What, indeed, was time past but the realm of romantic love; who else was Winckelmann but its prophet, chosen by fate for this special role: an individual of the most feline charm and elegance, a writer and a thinker of the highest gifts, the sole conceiver of rich new fields of study—yet a man stamped by his birth, barred by his rank—a cobbler’s son from Stendal, never able to speak his heart to those he loved. Hence the drift from the travails of emotion to the province of the intellect; hence love’s slow invasion of study, and its eventual triumph: the two fuse.

  In the final pages of his History, after a long disquisition on the collapse of art in Christian times, Winckelmann allows himself a last gaze at the vanished world of ancient Greece and its pale reflection, Rome—and he adopts a yearning persona: abandoned, classical. Antiquity has gone; the real artworks of the past have gone; only fragments and pale replicas survive. ‘Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tearful eyes her departing lover, with no hope of seeing him again, and believes she can glimpse his image even in his vessel’s far-off sail, so we, like the lover, have only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining’—but the copies are more potent than the originals, loss is possession, the mind’s creative power is more than the strength of the world. ‘One always imagines that there is much to find, and so one searches much to catch sight of something.�
� Irony threatens. Self-awareness descends. With Winckelmann, we step into modern times—and he could read the modern landscape very well. Coherence was fading. Splinters remained. Love was simply the way one gathered fragments up. How much had vanished!

  Winckelmann lists the losses, dwelling on the details with an anguished delicacy and care. ‘Treasures—the likes of which neither time nor the hands of all present or future artists are capable of producing—were destroyed in a wild fury by barbarians in their many assaults on and plunderings of the city’—and by the Romans themselves, who, when besieged, hurled down ancient statues as missiles against their assailants. Even in Constantinople, the last refuge of the empire, the handful of precious bronzes salvaged from fallen cities in the Greek diaspora were eventually all sacrificed: the Pallas from Lindos, the Olympian Jupiter carved by Pheidias, the Venus of Cnidus by the hand of Praxiteles—there is no trace of any of them after the crusader sack of the city; almost certainly they were melted down and their metal used for coin. Each one like a lost beloved, each one—and love’s trials were at a peak, in those days, for Winckelmann: it was the time of his brief encounter with a young nobleman from the wilds of Latvia, Friedrich Reinhold von Berg.

  They met in 1762: the flame burned bright—far brighter in recollection than in life. A romance by written word, by letter, ensued. It was one-sided. Winckelmann was just completing his Treatise on the Capacity for the Feeling for Beauty, a slender text. As he assured his young friend, to whom he dedicated the book, its contents were taken from the life: the form of the man allowed the writer to fulfil his task. ‘The parting from you was one of the most painful of my life—may this essay be a monument to our friendship’—for the friendship was already memory; it could only flourish in the mirror of the mind. Berg had gone; he sent Winckelmann a single letter of warm feeling; a torrent came back from Rome, and these were published in due course: they secured a brief, minor celebrity for Berg’s name. That correspondence held the code to Winckelmann’s thought, and to his heart—for all must tell their secrets if they wish truly to be known, and every secret longs to find the light. ‘Friendship arose from heaven and not from human feelings,’ wrote Winckelmann in his great declaration letter: ‘It was with a certain awe that I approached you; and as a result I was deprived of the highest good by your departure. What should I have had to write were a single one among a hundred of my readers to understand this sublime secret’—so Winckelmann, as if already knowing that his words would be betrayed. What else is love but an act of theft; what is beauty but the coin of its traffic: the eyes were instruments of violence; the horizon, death—and what was that gleam beyond its line? It could be nothing but the fire where all were purified and melted down at last.