Civilisations / Civilisation – and J J Winckelmann

I was recently given a copy of Mary Beard’s book “Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith” (Profile Books, 2018), which accompanies two episodes of a BBC TV 2018 series. I have no idea when free-to-air television in New Zealand will show us this series. [It was shown in 2020] The other presenters in this nine-episode series are Simon Schama, and David Olusoga. The book issued to accompany Olusoga’s episodes is called: “Civilisations: First Contact / The Cult of Progress.”[1]

As Beard says in her introduction “’Civilisation’ has always been contested, argued over and impossible to pin down. In 1969 Kenneth Clark opened his BBC series Civilisation by reflecting on the concept itself” ‘What is civilisation?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms – yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it.’ This betrayed a certain lofty confidence in his own cultural judgement; but Clark was also acknowledging the ragged and shifting edges of the category.” (p. 11) But she also notes in her afterword: “For all the disagreements and frustrations with him that I have now, I have also come to appreciate more clearly what I owe to Kenneth Clark. I can remember watching his television series when I was fourteen…. The idea that ‘civilisation’ in Clark’s sense, even restricted to Europe, had a history that could be told and analysed was something that had never struck me in quite that way.” (p.208)

The Wikipedia entry (footnote 1) also summarises some of the reviews of the series, and a few compared it with Kenneth Clark’s 1969 13-episode series “Civilisation”. Last evening I re-watched three of these episodes that I happened to have recorded from days when our free-to-air TV channels showed some useful programmes! Clark’s three episodes were on the Gothic (called ‘Romance and Reality’); the Renaissance (called ‘Man the Measure of All Things’) and the High Renaissance (called ‘The Hero as Artist’). As most commentators have noted, Clark’s series was mostly focussed on Europe (and not even all of Europe), he has a narrative often focussed on great artists (the High Renaissance episode ‘heroes’ are Michaelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.) He is also free with his opinions – of Urbino Palace he says it is ‘calm and timeless’. It’s perfectly proportioned rooms make the “interior the most beautiful in the world”. I was also very impressed with Urbino Palace but I would struggle to make such a statement! Here is a small selection of my photos of Urbino Palace from my 2014 trip.

Clark believes the Sistine Chapel is ‘one of the greatest works of man’. Raphael was a ‘supreme harmoniser – why he’s out of favour today.’ Although he admires Raphael he believes his tendency in later works to present his people as noble and handsome ‘went on for too long – up to the 19^th century – with a few exceptions such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt. It deadened our sense of reality and led in modern art to a hideous reaction’.

A few stills from the Kenneth Clark series. He is always in a suit and tie – brown or grey – usually walking & talking with one hand in his pocket:

In contrast, and in keeping with our times, Beard (and I presume the other series’ presenters) range widely over time and the world. She is particularly interested in how viewers saw the works, not so much in their making (we often don’t know who the makers were of some of the objects she looks at). Her ‘how do we look’ episode focuses on the human body. She begins with a Mexican Olmec head of about 3000 years old. She covers Egypt (through the eyes of visiting Roman Emperor Hadrian and his entourage), Greek, Roman, Chinese (terracotta warriors) sculptures and paintings, and also the views of librarian/antiquarian/art historian Johann Winkelmann (1717-1768). I wrote an essay about him in my art history study days (see below)! Beard says: “He was a man who had enthused over any number of Greco-Roman bodies, but the Apollo Belvedere really tipped him over the edge.”(p.96). He put it at the very pinnacle of classical art and has influenced our views ever since. Even though Clark’s 1969 series “did not specifically cover the art of the ancient world, Clark visited the Apollo Belvedere [in the Vatican] and spoke of it in terms that were not far short of the extravagance of Winckelmann….’The Apollo surely embodies a higher state of civilisation’ (pp. 101-102)

Her second episode covers depictions of God and gods (‘The eye of faith’) and here she begins with Angkor Wat in Cambodia. ‘[Religious art] has given us some of the most majestic and affecting visual images ever made… But the story of religious art is about more than this: it is about human controversy and conflict, peril and risk… there are dilemmas that all religions face when they try to make the other-worldly gods, saints or prophets, visible in the here and now.” (pp. 116-117).

Her first chapter on the cave art at Ajanta (India) and the English woman Christiana Herringham who drew the images in an effort to save them for posterity was particularly interesting. She is sometimes thought to be the model for E M Forster’s Mrs Moore in a “Passage to India”. (p.122). However, her view is coloured by her knowledge of Western art and she re-interpreted what she saw through that lens. “In order to understand how these images worked religiously, we need to imagine them back in their original context… they are not an easy read. Many of the details must have always been lost in the darkness… and they offer a fragmentary and disjointed narrative.” (pp. 126-127).

She also has chapters on depicting Jesus, Islamic calligraphy, iconoclasm, India again, and ending with the Parthenon. “However secular we might feel when we gaze at the ruins of the Parthenon, when we admire its art and engage with its mythology, many of us are reflecting on questions that religions have often helped us face. Where do I come from? Where do I belong? What’s my place in human history? There is a modern faith here, even if we do not recognise it as such. It is one we call ‘civilisation’. It is an idea that behaves very much like a religion, offering grand narratives about our origins and our destiny, bringing people together in shared belief. And the Parthenon has become its icon.

So if you ask me what is civilisation, I say it’s little more than an act of faith”. (pp. 202-203)

I recommend the book, although it’s well illustrated I would also like to see the accompanying TV series – hopefully, one day in New Zealand!

Clark in the forward to the book that accompanied his 1969 series, explained some of his omissions: “Obviously I could not include the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Syria, Greece an Rome, because to have done so would have meant another ten programmes at least; and the same was true of China, Persia, India and the world of Islam. … Moreover I have the feeling that one should not try to assess a culture without knowing its language… and unfortunately I do not know any Oriental languages. Should I then have dropped the title ‘Civilisation’? I didn’t want to, because the word had triggered me off, and remained a kind of stimulus; and I didn’t suppose that anyone would be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.” (Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A personal view, BBC & John Murray, p. xvii).

In his first chapter he also explains a little more of what he means by civilisation. “Civilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power… How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence…. Civilised man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back. And for this purpose it is a great convenience to be able to read and write.” (pp. 14, 17).

Coincidentally,  a recent issue of the New Zealand Listener (the journal that includes TV programming) has an article called “Civilisation” reviewing Yuval Noah Harari’s book “21 lessons for the 21st century”.

And for anyone interested, here is my essay on Winckelmann.

The inimitable Greeks: an art to be imitated

 

Art history is one of a network of interrelated institutions and professions whose overall function has been to fabricate a historical past that could be placed under systematic observation for use in the present (Donald Preziosi, p13)

Assess the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in light of this statement.

‘Johann Joachim Winckelmann’ (1768) by Anton von Maron © Alamy

From: https://www.ft.com/content/05961d66-f552-11e7-8715-e94187b3017e

Winckelmann: There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean by imitating the ancients. (Quoted in Irwin, p61)

In 1969 the historian J H Plumb remarked that ‘the past is always a created ideology with a purpose, designed to control individuals, or motivate societies, or inspire classes…History, however, is not the past’.[2] This is similar to Donald Preziosi’s comment about fabricating ‘a historical past…for use in the present’, but whereas Plumb saw the historian’s function as different from this, thirty years later, Preziosi sees the ‘institutions’ of art history as doing the fabrication. Preziosi emphasises that art history from its beginnings has worked to make the past visible – to frame it as an object of historical desire: figured as that from which a modern citizen might desire descent.[3] Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) was one of the early modern art historians. This essay argues that one of his main objectives in constructing a past – his ‘object of historical desire’ – was to figure that past as one from which contemporary artists would desire descent, in fact could learn from, and thereby bring about a revival in the art of his day.

Winckelmann was one of the main writers to influence the development of neoclassicism in the mid to late eighteenth century. For him ancient Greece was both a model for criticising the present and provided the example of what contemporary artists should strive for.[4]  Winckelmann’s first essay on Greek art – Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) – was written while he still lived in Germany. In this essay he states his central idea: ‘There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean by imitating the ancients’.[5] The didactic intent is clear – to influence the art of his time, which he felt was in need of reviving.

In the mid-eighteenth century the artistic and decorative style subsequently called rococo was at its height. Based on natural organic forms, asymmetry, unusual perspectives, and playfulness, it was the antithesis of classical order and harmony. Winckelmann wrote in the preface to a later work that from his youth a love for art had been his strongest passion (though education and circumstances had led him initially in another direction).[6] This passion was not for the art of his own time. He criticised rococo art as ‘paintings that mean nothing’ and Dutch art for its ‘merely sensory air’.[7] His interest was in classical, especially Greek, art.

But how did someone from his poor origins study art? There were no major public museums on the continent until towards the end of the eighteenth century. However, a person with the right connections could visit many private collections. Someone from Winckelmann’s background (the son of a cobbler) who wanted to study antiquities needed somehow to form the connections and attract private patronage. There were then three career avenues open to the sons of the poor who had higher aspirations – preacher, tutor, or librarian.[8] Winckelmann began with theological studies, became a teacher and later a librarian. He at least had the advantage of living during the period known as the Enlightenment, which encouraged learning based on reason and empirical evidence. An ‘antiquarian culture’ engaged in the excavation of ancient sites, such as at Herculaneum and Pompeii, thus contributing to knowledge of ancient art. The publications of The Antiquities of Herculaneum began in 1757. The ‘grand’ tourists to Italy – mostly wealthy young men from Northern Europe – were encouraged to ‘take notice of monuments of Antiquity’.[9] Many had their portraits painted, with suitable antiquities included, as souvenirs of their tour.

At the time Winckelmann wrote Thoughts on Imitation, most of his knowledge of Greek art came from books, illustrations or plaster casts, rather than actual antique objects. In the essay he expressed his belief that the Greeks had an advantage over modern Europeans in their climate and culture:

“The forms of the Greeks, prepared to beauty by the influence of the mildest and purest sky, became perfectly elegant by their early exercises…by these exercises the bodies of the Greeks got the great and manly contour observed in their statues“[10]

Yet despite these beautiful bodies, far superior to modern bodies, the Greeks were still ‘obliged’ to go a step further and form ‘general concepts of beauties more elevated than those of nature herself’.[11] He compares Greek ideal beauty with the works of contemporary artists, to the detriment of the latter:

“The bodies of the Greeks, as well as the works of their artists, were framed with more unity of system, a nobler harmony of parts, and a completeness of the whole, above our lean tensions and hollow wrinkles.”[12]

Winckelmann particularly criticised the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) for following nature too closely rather than the ancient statues that he should have learnt from. Young artists should be wary of following Bernini in this – ‘nothing earns their applause but exaggerated poses and actions’.[13] This contrasts with the Greeks: ‘The last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate [calm, still] grandeur in gesture and expression’.[14]  What might seem surprising to us is that Winckelmann finds this particularly in the Laocoon sculptural group:

Laocoon, Vatican (seen on my 2017 trip)

“Despite his violent suffering…the physical pain and the nobility of soul are distributed with equal strength over the entire body and are, as it were, held in balance with one another…His pain touches our very souls, but we wish we could bear misery like this great man.”[15]

So how does he suggest modern artists should imitate the ancients? Imitating did not mean copying:

“The imitation of beauty is either reduced to a single object, and is individual, or gathering observations from single ones, composes of these one whole. The former we call copying, drawing a portrait; ‘tis the straight way to Dutch forms and figures; whereas the other leads to general beauty, and its ideal images, and is the way the Greeks took…The ideas of unity and perfection, which he [the modern artist] acquired in meditating on antiquity, will help him to combine, and to ennoble the more scattered and weaker beauties of our nature.”[16]

Villa Farnesina, Raphael ‘Galatea’ (seen on my 2017 trip)

But instead of giving an example of ancient art to illustrate this point, he uses Raphael and his fresco Galatea (Villa Farnesina, Rome, 1511-12) and quotes Raphael as writing: ‘Beauty being so seldom found among women I avail myself of a certain idea in my imagination’.[17]  Thus the artists of the High Renaissance are also held up as examples of what Winckelmann wants for modern artists – having ‘imitated’ the ancients, they become worthy of imitation.[18]

This essay also had the very practical use for Winckelmann of gaining him recognition, and enabling his move in 1755 to Rome where he could study examples of ancient works. For three years he received a small pension from the Dresden court. In Rome he collaborated with the German artist, Anton Raphael Mengs, on descriptions of famous antique statues. Although they did not publish anything jointly from this project, Winckelmann published at least one of these descriptions as a separate essay and also later added them to his History of Ancient Art (1764). Mengs also published his opinions and theories on art, for example in Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762), which was dedicated to Winckelmann. Mengs describes various styles but does not arrange them chronologically or attempt to show how one might lead to another.[19] Nevertheless, it was Mengs who later took Winckelmann’s ideas further, concluding in 1779 that many of the major statues that had been so praised by Winckelmann were generally copies or imitations rather than the careful work one would expect of original Greek works.[20]

In 1758 Winckelmann began working for Cardinal Alessandro Albani, one of the pre-eminent collectors of antiquities in Rome. Mengs painted his Parnassus ceiling fresco in 1761 in Cardinal Albani’s villa. This depicts Apollo and the muses on Mount Parnassus, with the pose of Apollo modelled on the Apollo Belvedere statue, then so universally admired. Both Mengs and Winckelmann were living at Villa Albani at the time and it is likely each influenced the other. Mengs was the only contemporary artist that got Winckelmann’s full praise and an informal dedication in his History.[21] According to Winckelmann, Mengs was the ‘greatest painter of his time, and perhaps of all time following. He is risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the first Raphael to teach the world the path to beauty in the arts’.[22] Winckelmann also praised the painting by Gavin Hamilton, Andromache bewailing the death of Hector (1761, lost) for its style, but not for its colour.

In 1764 Winckelmann published The History of Ancient Art. He constructed or ‘fabricated’ this from both ancient written sources (in particular Pliny) and from examining surviving art works (in particular sculptures, except most of those he thought were Greek were actually from a later Greco-Roman period). He attempted to link the two into a ‘system’ for analysing the ‘origin, progress, change and downfall’ of ancient art, together with the different styles of nations, periods and artists. He outlines a cyclical view of growth and subsequent decline of art:

“The arts which derive from drawing, like all inventions, began with the necessary, afterwards people sought beauty, and eventually superfluity ensued. These are the three principal stages of art.”[23]

After the period of growth (‘archaic’ art) Greek art entered its ‘high’ period – an austere and pure style, which was then followed by a ‘beautiful’ style characterised by sensuousness and gracefulness. After that, art became over-elaborate, it began to reference itself, and a period of gradual decline and then decadence ensued. The greatest period of Greek art according to Winckelmann was in the fifth and fourth centuries BC – a time of ‘free’ city states between their victory over the Persians (479 BC) and the loss of independence after the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC).

As examples of the ‘high’ and ‘beautiful’ styles of Greek art Winckelmann uses the sculptural group of Niobe and her daughter to represent the high style, and the Laocoon to represent the beautiful. Educated taste at the time tended to equate beauty with the female body, and the sublime with the male (as, for example, in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin or our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757). Winckelmann, however, ‘might be said to be in the ‘avant-garde’ of a late eighteenth-century taste for male nudity’.[24] In an essay On the Beautiful in Art (1763) he had commented:

“I have observed that those who are only aware of beauty in the female sex and are hardly or not at all affected by beauty in our sex, have little innate feeling for beauty in art in a general and vital sense. The same people have an inadequate response to the art of the Greeks, since their greatest beauties are more of our sex than the other.”[25]

He also reiterates his ideas on beauty in the History. Beauty is the ‘central point of art’. Its essence consists ‘not in colour but in shape’, and beauty is heightened by ‘unity and simplicity’. In turn, unity requires an absence of individuality – the figure is neither peculiar to an individual nor expresses too much emotion. Much of this was contrary to art theory and practice of his day. But according to Winckelmann the modern artist should be ‘directed by antiquity’, with regard to forms and beauty: ‘Some in painting Venus, would give her a Frenchified air’.[26] This reflects his poor view of rococo art.

Winckelmann’s History implied that all art follows a cyclical trajectory. After the high point there can only come decline (the high point can only be seen once it no longer exists). Or as Winckelmann put it: ‘Since art cannot go any further, it must go backwards, because in art as in all workings of nature, no stationary point can be conceived’.[27] In modern terms the classic phase corresponded to the High Renaissance, the period of imitation included the Carracci, Domenichino and Guido Reni, while the complete decadence began in the late seventeenth century.[28]  He particularly praised Raphael who endowed his figures with a ‘noble contour and lofty soul’.[29]  However, Winckelmann is not entirely consistent in his views on modern art. A year before his death he wrote: ‘to the credit of our times I must recognize that the knowledge of the beautiful has gained ground to no lesser an extent than reason, and this is particularly the case with sculpture’.[30]  In On the Imitation… he had also praised some aspects of modern art above the ancient, for example in the rules of perspective and composition, and the modern painters have attained greater perfection in ‘landscapes and cattle pieces’.[31] The latter is probably no compliment.

He saw the superiority of Greek art to be due partly to the influence of climate, partly to their constitution and government, and the ‘habits of thinking which originate therefrom, and … to respect for the artist, and the use and application of art’.[32] However, climate cannot account for the decline. Freedom is the criteria Winckelmann uses to account for decline: ‘Art, which had as it were received its life from freedom, must also necessarily sink and fall with the loss of freedom in the place where it had formerly flourished.’[33] Yet art and political freedom were never entirely parallel. He can still find works beautiful that come from periods of Greece’s political decline. However, he sometimes makes tortuous claims to accommodate them – such as the Belvedere Torso statue. He believed it was of such quality that it ‘came closer to a higher period of art than even the Apollo Belvedere’. Yet the lettering of the artist’s name convinced him that it must be later and so he included it in a supposed last flowering of pure Greek culture in the mid-second century BC.[34]

Winckelmann’s idea of freedom is more associated with the individual in society, rather than political freedom per se – a type ‘of social-sexual organization possible in both democratic and authoritarian society’.[35] His view of ancient Greece is as a place where a perfect climate has given them a joyous disposition, beautiful bodies and liberty. His views on freedom are likely to be closely related to his own status and rather insecure position in Rome. He is always conscious of his relationship to patrons, often presenting himself as their friend rather than employee in his private letters. From Cardinal Albani he secures positions that never quite pay enough or have quite the status he wants. After four years as ‘scrittore’ of Teutonic languages in the Vatican library he gives up this position as it involves having to actually be in the library. He seeks, unsuccessfully, the position of keeper, which would have given him more freedom. Nevertheless, as an outsider, he experiences more personal freedom in Rome, at least in the initial years, than he could have done in Germany. In 1763 he achieved the position of Commissioner of Papal Antiquities, which he described to a friend as ‘agreeable and convenient’, which left him ‘freer and happier than a king’.[36]

His views on the Greeks and their ‘freedom’ were also shaped by his preference for men and male friendship, which is reflected in his ‘homoerotic’ writing. His descriptions of sculptures show an obsession with physical details, including about fifty pages in the History discussing body (especially facial) hair.[37] Whitney Davis uses the term ‘homotextuality’ to describe his writing.[38] In his final paragraph of the History Winckelmann describes his project in terms of loss and desire:

“I could not refrain from searching into the fate of works of art as far as my eye could reach, just as a maiden, standing on the shore of the ocean, follows with tearful eyes her departing lover with no hope of ever seeing him again…Like the loving maiden we too have, as it were, nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes, but that very indistinctness awakens only a more earnest longing for what we have lost.”[39]

The closest he came to making comments that could be construed as critical of current political structure were in relation to patronage:

“The Greek artist did not need to suit the size of the dwelling or gratify the fancy of its proprietor…The reputation and success of artists were not dependent upon the caprice of ignorance and arrogance, wretched taste or the incompetent eye of a judge set up by flattery and fawning; but the wisest of the whole nation, in the assembly of united Greece, passed judgement upon, and rewarded them and their works.”[40]

Yet he could still dedicate the History to the Elector of Saxony. Nevertheless it is easy to see how his ideas linking art with freedom could be taken up by others after his death, and related to political events particularly during the French Revolution.

For Winckelmann ancient sculpture acted as both evidence for his history and an instructive model for contemporary artists. He held up ‘classic’ Greek art as an ideal to be emulated, yet it also had an historic phase that had disappeared and, given its particularly favourable circumstances, seemed unlikely to be repeatable. These contradictions appear not to have bothered Winckelmann, but they became apparent to others after his death. It became more difficult to sustain the view that these sculptures were timeless masterpieces when Winckelmann had placed them in an historic past. The German philosopher Johann Herder pointed this out as early as 1777 in an essay he wrote for a competition held by the Kassel Academy of Antiquities to evaluate Winckelmann’s contribution (although it wasn’t published then). For Herder, an historical analysis required a perspective that allowed Egyptian art, for example, to be judged in terms of its own world view and not from the perspective of Greek culture.[41] Once this viewpoint is raised it is not difficult to apply it to modern artists who should perhaps pursue an art that is more in tune with their own times rather than try to emulate an ancient Greek one. But Winckelmann could perhaps reconcile the two by seeing the pattern of art as cyclical; once it was in a period of decadence the only way to begin the cycle again was to emulate the high point of all art – that of ancient Greece.

Winckelmann wasn’t the first to have used classical art as a timeless norm of good taste; this was a fairly common view amongst the educated classes and one reason why so many made the ‘grand tour’ to Rome. But his emphasis on Greek art did tend to go against the grain of his times, where Roman art was usually held in highest esteem (or little distinction was made between Greek and Roman). The classic phase of Greek art was the standard against which all other art could be measured, and Roman art was derivative as far as Winckelmann was concerned. This view was contested by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), for example, who published his illustrations of ancient Roman monuments around the same time that Winckelmann was writing. In Piranesi’s view, the Romans had developed sublime and grand art before they came into contact with the Greeks.

But even in his advocacy of Greek art Winckelmann was not alone – James Stuart and Nicholas Revett produced five volumes of The Antiquities of Athens beginning in 1762. The Frenchman J D LeRoy had published before them, The Ruins and Beautiful Monuments of Greece, although he made his trip to Greece after Stuart and Revett.  Sir William Hamilton, living in Naples, published illustrations of his famous collections of Greek vases (although they were commonly thought to be Etruscan at the time). Winckelmann admired the vases, although he made relatively little use of them in his writing. All these sources were other formative influences on neoclassicism. James Larson locates Winckelmann’s advocacy of Greek art as part of a more general European reaction to French taste.[42]

Art had a moral purpose for Winckelmann – it should instruct as well as delight. He produced an essay on allegory in 1766 in an attempt to provide artists with a useful catalogue of significant images.[43] But at the time Winckelmann’s views on modern art made little immediate impact. He was more admired as an authority on ancient art. His descriptions of the famous statues were the most well-known part of his writing in his own lifetime, often being extracted for use in guidebooks. It was only in the late 1780s that his views on modern art were taken up by others.[44] Particularly leading up to and during the French Revolution, his ideas on freedom and art gained new urgency, especially in the ‘moral’ art of Jacques Louis David (1748-1825). The Oath of the Horatii, (Louvre, 1784) and Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (Louvre, 1789) are about civic duty and self-sacrifice. On the other hand, conservatives sought to place his notion of freedom firmly in the past and therefore out of reach.[45]

In 1796 Giovanni Battista Cipriani published a book called ‘Rudiments of Drawing’ telling readers they should be familiar with two key publications – Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting and Winckelmann’s History.[46] It was his distilling of the essence of classic Greek art that he hoped would provide useful models for contemporary artists. His writing contributed to the revival of classical art in the later eighteenth century through his advocacy of Greek ideals of ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’.

Winckelmann’s memorial and cenotaph in Trieste (photos by Beverley Eriksen):

Bibliography

Barasch, Moshe Modern Theories of Art: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire. NY & London: NY U

Brilliant, Richard ‘Winckelmann and Warburg: Contrasting Attitudes Toward the Instrumental Authority of Ancient Art’, in Antiquity and its Interpreters, (eds) Payne, Alina, Kuttner, Ann & Smick, R, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Davis, Whitney ‘Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History’ in Preziosi, Donald (ed) The Art of Art History: A critical anthology, Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press, 1998:40-51

Eitner, Lorenz (ed) Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850: sources and documents. Volume 1: Enlightenment/Revolution, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970

Ferris, David. Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

Fried, Michael ‘Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation’ October, 37 1986:87-97

Irwin, David (ed) Winckelmann: Writings on Art, London:Phaidon, 1972

Larson, James ‘Winckelmann’s Essay on Imitation’ Eighteenth Century Studies, 9(3), Spring 1976:390-405

Myrone, Martin & Peltz, Lucy (eds) Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700-1850, Ashgate, 1999

Parker, Kevin ‘Winckelmann, Historical Difference and the Problem of the Boy’ Eighteenth Century Studies 25(4) Summer 1992:523-544

Pelzel, Thomas ‘Anton Raphael Mengs and his British Critics’, Studies in Romanticism, 15(3) 1976:405-421

Plumb, J H Death of the past, London: Macmillan, 1969

Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994

Potts, Alex ‘Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies I: Anton Raphael Mengs and the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43, 1980:150-173

Potts, Alex. ‘Political Attitudes and the Rise of Historicism in Art Theory’ Art History, 1(2) June 1978:191-214

Potts, Alex. ‘Winckelmann’s Construction of History’ Art History, 5(4) Dec 1982

Preziosi, Donald (ed) The Art of Art History: A critical anthology, Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press, 1998

Sweet, Denis ‘The Personal, the Political, and the Aesthetic: Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s German Enlightenment Life’ Journal of Homosexuality, Fall 1989:147-162

Footnotes:

[1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilisations_(TV_series) Accessed 15 Sept 2018.

[2] J H Plumb. The death of the past, London: Macmillan, 1969:17

[3] Donald Preziosi, (ed) The Art of Art History: A critical anthology, Oxford University Press, 1998:18

[4] David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity, Stanford University Press, 2000:7

[5] Winckelmann, in Lorenz Eitner (ed), Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850: sources and documents. Volume 1: Enlightenment/Revolution, Prentice Hall, 1970:6

[6] From History of Ancient Art, in David Irwin, (ed) Winckelmann: Writings on Art, London:Phaidon, 1972:105

[7] Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire. NY & London: NY University Press, 1990:226

[8] Denis Sweet, ‘The Personal, the Political, and the Aesthetic: Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s German Enlightenment Life’ Journal of Homosexuality, Fall 1989:151

[9] Quoted in Martin Myrone, & Lucy Peltz, (eds) Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700-1850, Ashgate, 1999:3

[10] Winckelmann in Eitner; Neoclassicism and Romanticism:6-7

[11] Quoted in Michael Fried, ‘Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation’ October, 37 1986:88

[12] Quoted in Eitner, Neoclassicism and Romanticism:9

[13] Quoted in Barasch, Modern Theories of Art:100

[14] Quoted in Irwin, David (ed) Winckelmann: Writings on Art, London:Phaidon, 1972, p72

[15] Quoted in Donald Preziosi, (ed) The Art of Art History:35

[16] Quoted in Eitner:10

[17] Quoted in Michael Fried, Antiquity now:90

[18] Fried, ibid: 92

[19] Barasch, Modern Theories of Art:92

[20] Alex Potts, ‘Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies I: Anton Raphael Mengs and the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43, 1980:152

[21] The History was formally dedicated to Winckelmann’s former patron, the Elector of Saxony.

[22] Thomas Pelzel, ‘Anton Raphael Mengs and his British Critics’, Studies in Romanticism, 15(3) 1976:410

[23] Quoted in Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, Yale University Press, 1994:52

[24] Alex Potts, ‘Winckelmann’s Construction of History’ Art History, 5(4) Dec 1982:389

[25] Winckelmann in Irwin:92

[26] Winckelmann in Irwin:45

[27] From History, in Ferris, Silent Urns:47

[28] Alex Potts, ‘Political Attitudes and the Rise of Historicism in Art Theory’ Art History, 1(2) June 1978:193

[29] Quoted in Barasch:119

[30] Quoted in Potts, Political Attitudes:196

[31] Winckelmann in Irwin:82

[32] Winckelmann in Irwin:113

[33] Irwin:49

[34] Potts, Winckelmann’s construction of history:391

[35] Whitney Davis, ‘Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History’ in Preziosi, Donald (ed) The Art of Art History: A critical anthology, Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press, 1998:41

[36] Potts, Flesh and the Ideal:193

[37] Kevin Parker ‘Winckelmann, Historical Difference and the Problem of the Boy’ Eighteenth Century Studies 25(4) Summer 1992:540

[38] Davis, Winckelmann divided:48

[39] Quoted in Parker, Winckelmann and the problem of the boy:527

[40] Quoted in Barasch:119-120

[41] Potts, Flesh and the Ideal:28

[42] James Larson, ‘Winckelmann’s Essay on Imitation’ Eighteenth Century Studies, 9(3), Spring 1976:398

[43] Irwin:7

[44] Potts, Political Attitudes:194

[45] Potts, Flesh and the Ideal:26

[46] Irwin:9