by Peter Watson
Against this background, a closer reading of Burckhardt’s book reveals some interesting further observations.3 The Renaissance in Italy, he said, was characterized by the following elements: the revival of antiquity, the rediscovery of the texts of Plato and the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, before the years of Christian fundamentalism, “as the source and basis of culture…as the object and ideal of existence.” The recovery of the classics, Burckhardt said, led to the growth of textual criticism and the more advanced study of languages—there was a revival of new learning in which philology played a central role. It was in the High Renaissance (1513) that Pope Leo X reorganized Rome’s university, La Sapienza. The Florentines, Burckhardt said, “made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives,” accompanied by advances in the sphere of science. The treatise was revived, as was history writing, two forms of literature and inquiry that were felt as new. In philosophy, the Florentine Platonists had a massive influence on thought and on literature, aesthetics in particular. In poetry, ancient Greece and Rome were again the model, stimulating imitation but also more imaginative works by poets who were, in addition, often scholars. In natural history there were advances in botany (the first botanical gardens), and in zoology (the first collections of foreign animals). In art it was the era of “many-sided men,” individuals such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, giants who shone in many different fields.
In other sections of his book, Burckhardt said that attitudes to and beliefs about war changed in the Italian Renaissance. In a section on “War as a work of art,” he argued that “War assumed the character of a product of reflection.” And from Dante and Petrarch onward, there was in Italy a ferment of patriotism and nationalism. “Dante and Petrarch, in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the object of the highest efforts of all her children.”
Finally, in music Burckhardt identified a characteristic of the Italian Renaissance as “the specialisation of the orchestra, the search for new instruments and modes of sound, and, in close connection with this tendency, the formation of a class of virtuosi, who devoted their whole attention to particular instruments or particular branches of music.” This all amounted to a celebration of humanism—the glories that humankind is capable of, without specific and continual reference to God.
There is a saying in the military that the darkness is deepest under the light and it is the opening argument of this chapter that such is the case here. That Burckhardt, in shining the light of his intellect and his historical imagination on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, cast a shadow over the culture of which he himself was a part. It will be argued here that, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was a third classical revival in Europe, that it resulted in a flourishing—a renaissance—of the arts and sciences, that it saw great reflection and innovation in military affairs, and that it stimulated an unparalleled philosophical revival. This promoted a surge in new aesthetic theory (already introduced in the previous chapter), including advances by poets—such as Goethe and Schiller—who were also scholars and many-sided men. It was accompanied by a great surge in patriotism and a demand for unification—this time of Germany. Other parallels may be found in music and in Humanität, the German form of humanism. The greatest names in musical history—from Mozart to Arnold Schoenberg—were all German. The links between Wissenschaft, Bildung, and Innerlichkeit, formulated most forcefully in the brand-new University of Berlin (founded in 1810), were to be the clearest embodiment of the German idea of humanism (all of which are discussed below).
Just as, in the Italian Renaissance, Pope Leo X reorganized La Sapienza in Rome, so in Germany a completely new idea of learning, which fundamentally shaped the modern world, was evolved. There were new forms of literature and new forms of inquiry, in which philology once again formed the core. Archaeology—the modern equivalent of antiquarianism—underwent its heroic age. This third renaissance was without question primarily German.
THE FATHER OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE FOUNDER OF ART HISTORY
If the Aristotelian renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of Arabic translations of his masterpieces in Toledo, Lisbon, Segovia, and Cordoba, after the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christians, and if the Platonic revival owed a great deal to scholars such as Giovanni Aurispa, who brought back from just one visit to Constantinople on the eve of the Turkish conquest no fewer than 238 Greek manuscripts, the same honor in the eighteenth century goes to Karl Weber (1767–1832) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). Winckelmann is the better-known figure but recent scholarship credits Weber, a military engineer in the Swiss guard, with being the man whose great efficiency and devotion to detail ensured that the excavations south of Naples—at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae, in particular the Villa dei Papiri—were actually carried out in a workmanlike way, and thus enabled the groundwork to be completed on which Winckelmann would base his groundbreaking survey of classical art.4
Born in Stendal in Prussia in 1717, the son of a cobbler, Winckelmann grew up in a house with just one room, which was also his father’s workshop. He pestered his parents to give him an education that was beyond their means and, in one way and another, found his way to Berlin, to study under Christian Tobias Damm, “one of the few men then alive in Germany who exalted Greek above Latin at a time when the study of the Greek language was almost entirely neglected.”5 After Berlin, Winckelmann transferred to the universities of Halle and Jena, where he studied medicine, philosophy, and mathematics, supporting himself as a tutor.6 He would read Greek till midnight, sleep in an old coat in an armchair until four in the morning, when he would resume reading.7 In the summer months he slept on a bench with a block of wood tied to his foot which fell down at the slightest movement and wakened him.
Winckelmann’s interest in art and antiquities was nurtured after he obtained employment as a research assistant (as we would say) to Count Bünau near Dresden (which boasted more art than did any other city in Germany), but the crucial episode was his meeting with the papal nuncio in the city, who offered Winckelmann the opportunity to work in Rome—provided he convert to Catholicism.8
Winckelmann arrived in Rome in 1755. For him and others like him, the statues in Rome were invariably regarded as the most important masterpieces of ancient art.9 He began in the service of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who had a villa just outside Rome, where he was made librarian and given charge of the antiquities collection. But the fame he would soon acquire had much more to do with several visits he made to Herculaneum and Pompeii, just then attracting widespread interest.
They had been “rediscovered” in 1738 when the Spanish military engineer Rocque Joachin Alcubierre was ordered to survey a site and prepare plans for a new summer palace for King Charles VII of Bourbon at Portici, on the Italian coast south of Naples. This was not entirely accidental. Local residents in the nearby town of Resina had long obtained their water by drilling artesian wells and were fully aware that there were ruins underground—chance finds of antiquities had been occurring since Renaissance times. Alcubierre was instructed by the king to “make some grottoes and see what might be discovered.”10
Excavations began in October 1738. In some places the volcanic lava was fifty feet thick and it was not until November that a marble Hercules was recovered, and it was the middle of January the following year before an inscription—of L. Annius Mammianus Rufus—revealed that a structure originally believed to be a temple was in fact a theater.11 This reorientation was important, for a theater—unlike a temple—implied that the building was part of a city. It was Rufus’s name for his theater, Theatrum Herculanense, that confirmed the city as Herculaneum. Excavations at nearby Pompeii began in April 1748.
Winckelmann visited Herculaneum and Pompeii twice, and although his excursions were not popular (the excavators were worried that he would steal their thunder), Winckelmann managed to familiarize himself with the discoveries at the Vesuvian cities, with the in
ternal politics of the excavations, and with the contents of the more important finds at the Villa dei Papiri.12
It was this series of coincidences, rivalries, and sensational discoveries that provided the background to Winckelmann’s publications that would prove so important in stimulating the third Greek revival. These consisted of, first, a series of Sendschreiben, or Open Letters, on the discoveries south of Naples; second, Winckelmann’s main work, Die Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (The History of the Art of Antiquity; 1764); and third, his Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished Relics of Antiquity; 1767). As E. M. Butler, puts it, however, “His magnum opus is in a class apart, for it completely revolutionized the study of art by treating it organically (Winckelmann was the first to do so) as part of the growth of the human race.”13
The History of the Art of Antiquity is divided into two parts. The first is more conceptual, examining the phenomenon of art itself, its very “essence.” Here, in a broad way, Winckelmann compares the art of different periods and peoples. The second part concentrates particularly on the tradition of Greek art, from early times to its decline with the fall of the Roman Empire, and it was Winckelmann’s beautifully written description of this “trajectory” that had such impressive consequences.
For his argument, Winckelmann relied on the new statuary being excavated south of Naples though he did his best to amalgamate the discoveries there with the writings of Pliny (Pliny’s Natural History, completed in A.D. 79, is as much an art history of the classical world as a geography). Pliny argued that most of the famous ancient Greek artists produced their masterpieces in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. For him, Greek sculpture achieved classic perfection while Phidias was at the peak of his powers, in the mid-fifth century B.C., but Pliny also insisted, famously, that after the age of Alexander the Great “cessavit deindre ars” (art thereafter was inactive or ceased). Building on what he had seen south of Naples, Winckelmann refined Pliny’s argument, discerning, he said, a “high” austere “early classical” style, associated with artists such as Phidias, and a “beautiful or graceful late classical style associated with subsequent masters such as Praxitiles and Lysippus.” His identification of an evolution, from one style to the other, a refinement from the “hard stylized” forms of the archaic, to the “austere, early classic,” with the graceful “late classic” leading to overelaboration, and then to decline, suggested a pleasing, organic, coherent system, the sheer symmetry of which many found irresistible.14
It didn’t matter that Winckelmann used the evidence of statues that have subsequently come to be recognized as inferior Roman copies of earlier Greek masterpieces. What mattered is that, whereas classical scholars had previously speculated in a vague way about the rise and fall of art in antiquity, Winckelmann identified instead a sequence of clearly defined phases. More than this, Winckelmann also argued that the classical period of art in antiquity coincided with what other historians called the golden age of Greek culture, that period between the close of the Persian Wars in the early fifth century B.C. and the Macedonian invasion of Greece toward the end of the fourth century B.C. Whereas previously, ancient monuments had invariably been classified according to their iconography, or subject matter, following Winckelmann they were categorized stylistically, with reference to their period of origin. This transformed connoisseurship.
Winckelmann’s other innovation was his fusion of history and aesthetics, “in which the essence of a tradition would be located historically at a single privileged moment when it supposedly achieved perfection.” In linking artistic “perfection” with a particular historical period, he transformed the history of art, making it important in a sense that it had not been before. That gave it a contemporary relevance, too, suggesting that there was little prospect of any real revival in Winckelmann’s own time.15
Especially famous was his description of the Laocoön group in the Vatican. “The universal and predominant characteristic of the Greek masterpieces is a noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur, both in posture and expression. Just as the depths of the sea remain for ever calm, however much the surface may rage, so does the expression of the Greek figures, however strong their passions, reveal a great and dignified soul.”’ (Italics added.)*16 This analysis had repercussions far wider than such words—however apposite—could have now. The Laocoön’s importance lay in the fact that, having been specifically referred to by Pliny, when it was rediscovered in an excavation in Rome in 1506, it provided a direct link with the past. Now in the Vatican, this classic marble sculpture shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons being attacked by a fierce sea serpent. Whatever our reactions today to what many people think is an overwrought monument, at the time Winckelmann’s arguments had “the force of revelation.” His arguments were considered so original, and so incisive, that he became a national figure almost overnight: “Except for Frederick the Great of Prussia, he was the most renowned German between Leibniz and Goethe.” The Laocoön itself became a cult object, discussed everywhere.17
Among the implications of Winckelmann’s argument, picked up on by Herder, Goethe, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Hegel, was the notion that there is a historical divide separating ancient from modern culture, where modern culture is in fact “the antithesis of the integrated wholeness of ancient Greek culture, of its naïve simplicity and centredness, and of its unmediated relation to itself and nature.”18 Whether one agrees or not, Winckelmann’s achievement was that he took beauty seriously, as the center of existence, not as embellishment. Above all, he suggested that if we allow the Greek ideal to influence and permeate our lives, we can hope to reproduce the conditions necessary for great art; we can attain, in other words, a form of perfection.19
This was all very heady. As George Santayana was to tease: “How pure the blind eyes of statues, how chaste the white folds of the marble drapes.”20 But beyond Winckelmann’s inimitable style, beyond his idea of the ennobling power of beauty, it is possible to see an even deeper significance in his work. He ignored the other side of Greek life—the tragic suffering, the priapism, the orgiastic festivals of the wine god, everything Nietzsche was to call “Dionysian”—and this is surely because the stoicism that Winckelmann admired in the Greeks had qualities of Puritanism about it. Greek art, for Winckelmann, was the very opposite of baroque exuberance, of the “hedonism and licentiousness” of the rococo, which he and the emerging German middle classes associated with aristocratic decadence and the courtly French culture whose grip on Friedrich the Great and the ruling classes in Germany they resented. Winckelmann set an example to an entire generation of poets and thinkers of the golden age and helped them to accomplish something in the shadow of their King: the remaking of German culture and cultural institutions. The fact that Greece, a “powerless and almost extinct nation,” should have such an influential cultural legacy appealed to the German Bildungsbürger. It had parallels with their own predicament.21
“The ‘Greek Revival,’ which Winckelmann initiated,” says Henry Hatfield, “profoundly altered the course of German literature: many of its greatest writers from Lessing to our own times would have written differently without his precept and example.” It is not too much to say that it affected the entire history of Western taste, as far afield as Thomas Jefferson. Not only is Winckelmann looked upon now as the founder of classical archaeology; he may be said to be one of the fathers of historicism; he had a formative influence on Herder and through him on the writing of history. Philhellenism took over as one of the defining characteristics of the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle class, influencing not only the universities but even the state bureaucracy. To Hegel, “…Winckelmann is to be seen as one of those who managed to open up a new organ and a whole new way of looking at things for the human spirit.”22 “By 1871,” said someone else, “Graecophilia had become part of the national patrimony.”23 To Goethe, Winckelmann was like Columbus.
Winckelmann’s brutal murder by stabbing in Trieste (one of the orig
ins of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice]) shocked the educated elite across Europe, adding a final dark twist to a remarkable career.24
“THE TYRANNY OF GREECE OVER GERMANY”
Winckelmann’s reputation has lasted. He was criticized most notably during a competition organized in 1777 by the Academy of Antiquities in Kassel, which specifically examined Winckelmann’s contribution to antiquarian studies, and in which Christian Gottlob Heyne argued forcefully that Winckelmann’s claim that ancient art declined following its classical phase of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. was not supported by the available evidence. But, such criticisms notwithstanding, to underline how enduring his ideas proved to be we may say first that, in 1935, in the shadow of World War II, E. M. Butler published The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, an examination of the influence of Winckelmann—and Greece—on Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Carl Gotthard Langhans, Heinrich Schliemann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stefan George.25 “If I were constrained to write a history of German literature from 1700 onwards, I could only do so from this angle; for it seems to me that Winckelmann’s Greece was the essential factor in the development of German poetry throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth century…Greece has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisation, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly: they have been obsessed by them more utterly…” Butler did not think this obsession was entirely healthy. “Only among a people at heart tragically dissatisfied with themselves could this grim struggle with a foreign ideal have continued for so long.”26 Henry Hatfield did not agree. In Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (1964), he concluded that, from Faust to The Magic Mountain, “From Winckelmann to Rilke, from Goethe to George, the majority of the greatest German writers have been ‘Hellenists’ to some significant degree.”27
