Passion. Nowadays everything must be done with passion. No ‘personal statement’ for university admission is complete without some sentiment of passionate motivation; you purchase a sandwich and learn that it has been ‘made lovingly’. So is there anything wrong with studying classical archaeology passionately – with the engagement of emotions, or ‘intensity of feeling’ (OED)? The question arises from the very title of a festal volume devoted to a (some would say, the) historical pioneer of the discipline, J. J. Winckelmann: Die Kunst der Griechen mit der Seele suchend.Footnote ¹ Since it is conventional to translate die Seele as ‘the soul’, immediately we encounter the problem of mind–body dualism, and the question of where passions are to be located in human biology. But let us accept the sense of the phrase as it is being used here. It is, as Goethe recognized in Winckelmann's work, and celebrated accordingly, an ‘awareness’ (Gewahrwerden) of Greek art that was at once intuitive and reasoned; spontaneous, yet developed by patient study (conducted with ‘true German seriousness’ – so deutsch Ernst).Footnote ² Pious remembrance of Winckelmann has been maintained in his homeland virtually ever since his premature death (a ‘thunderbolt’ of awful news, as Goethe described it) in 1768. This year is the 250th since that loss, and will be widely marked. Meanwhile the recent anniversary of Winckelmann's birth – 1717, as a cobbler's son, in Brandenburg – occasions fresh hagiography, and attendant exhibitions, perhaps most notably a show at the Capitoline Museums, documenting an important part of Winckelmann's intense and eventually glorious activity in Rome.Footnote ³

I apply the term ‘hagiography’ with regard to both the tone and content of the essays collected by von Hase. One contributor – Gabriel Zuchtriegel, evaluating Winckelmann's experience of ‘primitive’ Doric architecture at Paestum – has the candour to assert that, while many students have heard the name, hardly any of them would ever think of actually reading or even consulting the works of Winckelmann. Otherwise, nothing is said that might detract from the founding father's heroic reputation. Unfortunately, this appears to include any reference to his ‘passionate’ engagement with classical art. ‘Sexuality’ is a rather ghastly word, agreed – but let it pass as modern parlance. Can any account of Winckelmann reasonably overlook his sexuality? Even Carl Justi, establishing his three-volume biography of Winckelmann as standard in 1872, acknowledged the overt emotion that Winckelmann brought to his male friendships, such as that with the painter Anton Raphael Mengs. The notorious lothario Giacomo Casanova saw Winckelmann turning somersaults with Mengs's children, and that was testament to a pedant who preserved his joie de vivre. However, Casanova also claimed to have surprised Winckelmann in flagrante with a Roman boy, an allegation that Winckelmann apparently did not deny, but countered with a somewhat circumlocutious academic gloss (it might look like pederasty, but it was really a form of antiquarian ‘research’…). Where Winckelmann's printed exaltation of ‘liberty’ lapsed into private and self-exploratory forays of ‘libertinism’ is perhaps now an irrelevant matter of speculation, none of our business; with hindsight he might join the list of austere northern Europeans who only shed their inhibitions once south of the Alps, or at least beyond the Po. But understanding how his ‘soul’ connected with the objects of his study is a complex challenge, and one that is curiously avoided in Reinhard Stupperich's otherwise sensitive essay on the formation of Winckelmann's method. There is nothing to suggest that Wincklemann, raised as a strict Lutheran, pledged his soul to Greek art in any Christian sense. His ‘conversion to Rome’, completed in Dresden by 1754, seems to have been undertaken merely as a means of facilitating access to the city of that name (and to clerical patronage there). It is facile to conclude that Winckelmann was therefore some sort of born-again pagan, attuned to the poetics of ancient polytheism. His interpretation of the Laocoön figure as an exemplum of controlled agony may be permeated by Stoic ideals, but was more likely indebted to an Enlightenment view of the human predicament. Winckelmann's admiration for Voltaire appears transparent enough. Life is tragic by default: believe in supernatural purpose if you like; the wise man confronts the tragedy of existence in a spirit of staunch resignation.

For several hours after being violently attacked in a Trieste lodging house by one Francesco Arcangeli, Winckelmann remained conscious – sufficiently sentient to relate what had just befallen him, dictate a will, and receive last sacraments. The ill-named Arcangeli, who had criminal ‘form’, had both throttled and stabbed the victim of his intended robbery: so those final hours must have been extremely painful, testing anyone's commitment to the ‘high majesty of suffering’. Did it assist the scholar-hero to recall that he had analysed the ‘sublime’ beauty of Niobe as a sort of ‘indifference’ (Gleichgültigkeit) engendered by the mind-numbing horror of death? Did he, upon his deathbed, writhingly suppress the urge to scream? Gazing at the posthumous portrait created by Mengs – which makes the front cover of this book – we may suppose that the painter retrospectively gave his subject, an erstwhile soulmate, a certain look of doomed premonition. In any case, Winckelmann is memorialized holding a copy of the text he most cherished, the Iliad. That poem was with him to the end.

Much of what Winckelmann wrote about classical art is arguably now of only period interest. Recreating an intellectual milieu, as this volume shows, is essential to understanding his categorical preoccupations: not only, then, the contest from Lessing, but the eighteenth-century ‘science’ of aesthetics as developed by Baumgarten, J. F. Christ, Herder, Schiller et al. So much effort to establish some absolute ‘cause of beauty’ (Ursache der Schönheit); so much that has simply evaporated (or been banished) from the academic agenda. Winckelmann himself set up no school – though it was not long before followers declared themselves, for example E. Q. Visconti, saluted as the italienischen Winckelmann. For current practitioners of classical archaeology and art history, however, perhaps Winckelmann's most enduring influence lies not, as one might suppose, with the project of reconciling ancient ‘art-historical’ literature (chiefly Pliny) with what survives of the material, but rather with his conviction that Homer, ultimately, was the gran maestro of all artists in the Graeco-Roman tradition. No matter where one was in place or time, regardless of the medium, it was always the first move in trying to understand classical imagery – to reach for Homer. That principle – I dare say – still holds.

Of the art produced by Etruscans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and contingent others, Winckelmann made what (little) sense he could. Considering how restricted were his opportunities for direct observation, it is remarkable how acute he could be – a sixth sense, almost? Apart from the trip to Paestum, he spent some time in Florence, and examined what was displayed from Campanian sites in the Portici museum of Herculaneum. Though he knew of the temples at Agrigento, he never reached Sicily. He fantasized about the treasures to be retrieved from Olympia, but all Greece was only ever in his mind. Winckelmann's characteristic combination of historical scrutiny and enthused intuition told him that many of the images he saw in Italy were imported from Greek sites, or derived from Greek originals. So he was wrong about the Apollo Belvedere (following an unreliable report that it came from Anzio, Winckelmann argued that it must have been looted from Delphi by Nero). Yet archaeological error was unimportant here. No other image from classical antiquity connected so directly with his soul. Winckelmann's paean or ekphrasis of the statue is ‘purple prose’, yet not unlike passages of his personal letters, effusively confessional:

The homoerotic energy of the response has been duly recognized, and Winckelmann thus takes his place in any history of modern sexual politics. A century or so on, his fellow-countryman Wilhelm von Gloeden was exhibiting internationally (including at Dresden) his tender photographs of live Sicilian kouroi. ‘Ultimate beauty’ the Apollo might have been, yet it was not inimitable.

Less well known is the historical hinterland:

The Mantuan nobleman Nicola Maffei, writing to Isabella d'Este in 1517, may have been joking when he drew upon the language of love elegy to express his admiration for the Apollo Belvedere. Nevertheless, we value his testimony. It signals a thesis that Walter Pater understood: that Winckelmann should really be considered within the phenomenon we term the Renaissance.

Anyone who submits to the regular Vatican Museums experience today will understand that the Apollo is now virtually dislodged from his pedestal. Visitors are herded – a sub-human metaphor, but alas the verb is appropriate – through the Belvedere courtyard, as just one more obstacle en route to the Sistine Chapel. Apollo extends an arm in vain: few pay him more than a passing glance. It seems barely credible that the statue once commanded a viewer's total surrender, still less that it set the measure of physical perfection by which to judge all humanity. So far is Winckelmann part of the past. And yet, in essence, he continues to validate the practice of classical art and archaeology. Once there is nothing that we admire, like, or even adore about the objects of our study, we may as well desist. The rest is tedium.