This is an important book which fills a gap in the history of the Classical Tradition: how the figure of Winckelmann, known mainly as the founder of classical art history (less so for archaeology), played a decisive role in the shifting image of classical studies, between the Renaissance where the classical world was mainly seen as a repertory of great men to imitate and the nineteenth century for which the Altertumswissenschaft was (at least partly) used to legitimise the classics as a model of European white superiority (see now the works of H. Roche). In her acclaimed book Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (1996), S. Marchand devoted only her first chapter to the late-eighteenth century. Trained in Warwick, Oxford and Cambridge and now teaching at Bristol, patronised by no other than Antony Grafton and Quentin Skinner (an efficient reader's captatio benevolentiae), H. entirely focuses on the first decades after the publication of the Geschichte, at a time of more vibrant debates about the status of this monumental opus than what was offered by the nineteenth century, once Winckelmann had been heroised as no one else through a then vivid ritual, whose Winckelmannstage celebrated every 9th December were for a long time the most visible part.
Taking as an ending point the somehow disenchanted intellectual testament of Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorf (1921), H. offers a very convincing painting of the reasons why the cult was promoted – for offensive (a founding character of the German nation whose life ideally fits with romanticism) and defensive (a sacred stone for classicists to brandish against the fading of philhellenism due to the rise of romanticism and idealism) reasons – and became progressively meaningless.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Winckelmann in Context’, follows Winckelmann in the different phases of his life from both a practical and intellectual point of view, constantly negotiating with the constraints of the ancien régime society and the opportunities of the Gelehrtenrepublik (La République des Lettres). Among the stimulating ideas not often propounded before, it is argued that social mobility for poor boys was enhanced at the time due to the extreme militarisation of the Prussian aristocracy, whose members were ‘unwilling to fill the offices of church and state’ (p. 37). Considering the vast amount of very diverse readings made by Winckelmann and for which we still have his notes (now kept at the BnF in Paris), H. is less struck by eclecticism (as Decultot) than by some important options. Winckelmann appears as an ardent poussiniste (the line versus the colour) and well aware of the artistic debates which raged in Italy and France during the century before. He proves also to be a careful admirer since his Nöthnitz days of Jonathan Richardson and his Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725 – not quoting him as he should, using what appears as a constant strategy: to be discreet in paying his debt to his rare masters and loudly to denigrate all the others). Taken chronologically, we see from one paper to the next how his style system rapidly evolved with growing attention to technique beyond general composition. His particular acquaintance with gems, provided by the publication of the Stosch's collection, is a milestone with a possible important feedback: the idea that the contour generally and more specifically the human visage is the place par excellence for ultimate beauty (noble simplicity and calm grandeur). H. then discusses the role of the French philosophers as important sources for the genesis of Winckelmann's Lehregebäude. A tempting exercise indeed, since it certainly gives the topic some extra majesty, but not wholly convincing (a bit of Voltaire, a bit of Montesquieu, a bit of Rousseau) in the mind of this reviewer at least.
The second part deals with the controversy between Christian Gottlob Heyne and Friedrich August Wolf, and how each of them endorsed or rejected Winckelmann's method, his Lehregebäude (‘On the Contours of Das Altertum and the Possibility of its Recovery: Heyne versus Wolf’). The reputation of Heyne has faded but, operating during four decades from his chair in Göttingen and coming like Winckelmann from a modest background, he was once held as the founder of Altertumswissenschaft, being recognised as having done for philology what Winckelmann achieved for art history. This primacy was transferred from 1807 onwards to Wolf himself, who made explicit the ambitions of the newly defined science of antiquity in his Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft (and announcing bigger heroes such as August Boeckh, whose gigantic work, using inscriptions and archaeology, dwarfs in many respects both the Heyne and Wolf enterprises). H. takes the reader into the rich cognitive and non-cognitive meanders of the quarrel which emerged in the 1790s between Heyne and Wolf, the latter reproaching the former by largely diminishing the merits of his deconstruction of Homer as a myth. After having reminded us how Heyne was critical about the enthusiasm and the overactive imagination of Winckelmann, H. well argues that Heyne was more pessimistic about the ambitious goal of the newly defined science of antiquity, i.e. to recreate the Graeco-Roman civilisation ‘in its essence and in every aspect of its existence’. Far from the universal postulates of Winckelmann, Heyne professes an ‘antiquarian skepticism’, founded on his conviction that any historical fact is at least partly caused by particularism. By comparison, Wolf, whose difficult character was notorious, is much more attracted by envy to building an ambitious comprehensive narrative for which conjectural reasoning could supply the lack of evidence. This second part thus considerably refines our ideas about the two scholars: Heyne, whom Goethe asked for a biography of Winckelmann, was never his best guardian and Wolf, who is often cast as the promoter of a scientific study of the Graeco-Roman world superseding the emotional one which was the distinctive mark of the Geschichte, proves to be more Winckelmannian than originally thought.
Part 3 is about another important player, if not a classical scholar himself: Johann Gottfried Herder (‘Altertumswissenschaft and the Amateur: Johann Gottfried Herder’). An amateur with a bad reputation – now under reconsideration (he was variously taken as mentally deficient or as a forerunner of racist ideologies) – and clearly announcing Romanticism by his promotion of the feeling against cold-reasoning (as pleaded by Heyne). Herder strongly criticises Winckelmann for not having taken into account cultural transfers between ancient peoples but he shares with him the importance of feeling empathetically with the studied culture (Einfülhung), in order to get an inner understanding of the subject. Winckelmann succeeded to ‘feel like a Greek’ but he was only thinking that way. Denouncing that strong tropism as a matter of prejudice for anything non-Greek, Herder unsurprisingly does not place imitatio of the Greeks as the tragic goal of modern art. Faced with the impossibility for any historian to escape her/his personal tropism, Herder ultimately argued for collaborative works, possibly paving the way for the acclaimed great German encyclopaedia a century later.
H. deserves to be highly congratulated for her stimulating volume, which is a brilliant demonstration of how both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects intermingle to produce a much more nuanced panorama of the first reception of Winckelmann in Germany. It is a great piece of scholarship, very elegantly written, which will take its place in the broader question of the first reception tout court, a field investigated recently by several scholars and in particular by S. Ferrari (whose many studies are not quoted here, as it is the fate of much literature not in English or in German, which is alas a common modern prejudice).
