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Johann Joachim Winckelmann

The German archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) redefined archeology asa history of ancient art. His high regard for Greek art greatly influenced German classical literature and stimulated classicism.

The only son of a cobbler, Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born on Dec. 9, 1717, in Stendal, Prussia, and grew up in modest circumstances. From 1738 he studied theology and medicine, then taught in Salzwedel from 1743 to 1748, and from 1748 until 1754 he was librarian for the Count of Bühnau in Nöthnitz near Dresden. Here, in addition to his historical studies, he turned to the fine arts and prepared a description of the paintings in the Dresden Gallery.

In 1754-1755 Winckelmann studied art in Dresden with the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser and came in contact with Italian artists. A result of his studies was his essay "Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture," in which he portrayed an idealized picture of Greek art and saw its spirit as "noble simplicity and silent greatness." Since Greek art was to him the highest artistic achievement, he advocated its imitation by all later cultures. The contemporary, baroque art was to be dismissed since it had grown too remote from the Greek simplicity.

Winckelmann's essay received great acclaim and prepared his way to Rome, where he went in 1755 after becoming a Catholic. In Italy, which he called the land of humanity, he fulfilled his human and intellectual purpose. The southern freedom of mores and ideas recalled his ideal Greece and enabled him to pursue the cult of male beauty which he found embodied in Greek art. Thus Winckelmann devoted his "Dissertation on the Ability to Appreciate the Beautiful in Art and Its Instruction" to his young friend Reinhold von Berg.

As equal, Winckelmann met with Roman scholars and clerics, even lived for a time in the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo. His special friends were the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs and Cardinal Alessandro Albani, in whose palace he lived before moving with him into a newly built villa in the Via Salaria. On the outfitting of this villa with antique sculptures, Winckelmann had a decided influence.

In 1763 Winckelmann was named prefect of Roman antiquities, and he worked also in the Vatican library. In his studies he combined historical awareness with vivid feeling for the present; in his writings he was at once scholar and poet. His descriptions of the statues in the Vatican's Belvedere (only the descriptions of the Apollo and of the Torso were finished) are in their enthusiastic language genial prose poems.

Winckelmann included these descriptions in his major work, History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), the first historical overview of the entire ancient art, born of profound knowledge of the sources and his personal views. His thorough erudition is also apparent in his catalog of the gem collection of Baron Stosch (1758) and in publications on unknown antiques. Winckelmann published lively reports on the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, which he got to know on three journeys, and he wrote also about ancient architecture and allegories in art.

Most of Winckelmann's writings appeared in German, and he never relinquished his bonds with Germany. In 1765 he almost became the librarian of Frederick the Great in Berlin. But as Winckelmann traveled to Germany in April 1768, his love of Rome proved the stronger; beset with deep melancholy he interrupted his journey in Regensburg, traveled to Vienna where he was honored by Empress Maria Theresa, and arrived in Trieste in June. There he met a former-convict cook who robbed and killed him on June 8, 1768.

Further Reading

Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann (1970), is the first biography in English; it provides interesting material on life and education in 18th-century Germany, the first excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the attitude and policy of the papacy. More specialized are two studies by Henry C. Hatfield: Winckelmann and His German Critics, 1755-1781 (1943) and Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (1964).

 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Johann Joachim Winckelmann

(born Dec. 9, 1717, Stendal, Prussia — died June 8, 1768, Trieste, Austria) German archaeologist and art historian. The son of a cobbler, he studied theology and medicine before he discovered Greek art. His essay Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) became a manifesto of the Greek ideal in education and art and was soon translated into several languages. After converting to Roman Catholicism, he moved to Rome (1755) and held important posts in the Vatican. There he wrote History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), which inaugurated the study of art history as a discipline and of archaeology as a humane science. His writings reawakened the popular taste for Classical art and were instrumental in generating the Neoclassical movement in the arts.

For more information on Johann Joachim Winckelmann, visit Britannica.com.

 
Architecture and Landscaping: Johann Joachim Winckelmann

(1717–68)

German art-historian and archaeologist. He settled in Rome, became librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692–1779), and established himself as a scholar and antiquarian, advising on the acquisition of the Cardinal's great collection of Antique sculpture (many items of which are now in the Glyptothek, Munich). He was an important influence on Neo-Classicism, and especially on the Greek Revival. His two great books, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755—published in English in 1765 as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks) and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art—1764), proclaimed the superiority of Greek art and subjected it to analysis. His art-historical method and his interpretation of Classical Antiquity informed education, especially in Germany, well into the present century. His notion of the best of Classical art imbued with ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ became deeply embedded in Western thought, and he influenced many artists and architects, notably the painter Anton Raffael Mengs (1728–79—whose ceiling fresco, Parnassus, in the Villa Albani, Rome (1761), was one of the key works of Neo-Classicism), Schinkel, and von Klenze.

Bibliography

  • Chilvers, Osborne, & Farr (eds.) (1988)
  • Gaehtgens (1986)
  • Jane Turner (1996)
  • W&M (1987)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

 
German Literature Companion: Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (Stendal, Prussia, 1717-68, Trieste), born into poverty as a cobbler's son, acquired as a boy, no one knows how, a love of Greek antiquity. He pressed for and obtained first a grammar school and then a university education. After some years (1743-8) as a schoolmaster, during which he frequently sat up reading Greek into the small hours, he became in 1748 librarian to a Count von Bünau. In 1754 he was converted to Roman Catholicism, allegedly in order to facilitate a journey to Rome.

Winckelmann's first, brilliant essay on Greek and Roman classicism, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755), was written before this visit. Arriving in Rome in 1755, he quickly established himself as an authority on ancient art. He visited Naples, Herculaneum, and Paestum; and he was librarian successively to Cardinal Archinto and Cardinal Albani. The efforts of his early years in Rome were devoted to a monumental history of classical art ( Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764, repr. 1934). He then annotated his own book (Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1767) and began work on a descriptive review of newly discovered works of classical sculpture (Monumenti antichi inediti, 1767-8).

In 1768 Winckelmann went to Munich, Regensburg, and Vienna, intending to travel further in Germany. He abandoned the journey and returned to Trieste. There he was murdered in his inn by Francesco Arcangeli for the gold he was carrying. Of his other works the Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der alten Tempel zu Girgenti in Sizilien (1762), the Sendschreiben von den Herkulanischen Entdeckungen (1762), and the Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (1766) deserve mention. He was a particularly sensitive interpreter of the Greek ideal of male beauty.

Winckelmann's conception of the antique as noble, elevated, serene, and simple (‘eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe’), which was present in his work from the outset, shaped for many decades the new classicism of Europe.

A Gesamtausgabe (11 vols.) appeared 1808-25, Sämtliche Werke, ed. J. Eiselein (12 vols.) 1825-9 (re-issued, ed. O. Zeller, 1965), Kleine Schriften. Vorreden. Entwürfe, ed. W. Rehm, in 1968, and Briefe (4 vols.), ed. W. Rehm et al., 1952-7.

 
Archaeology Dictionary: Johann Joachim Winckelmann

(1717–68) [Bi]

German scholar and antiquarian who made numerous contributions to the integration of archaeology and art history, emphasizing that classical texts were not the only source of information on ancient times. Born in Stendal, Prussia, he attended the local grammar school before a brief period in Berlin and from 1737 he studied theology at the University of Halle. From 1743 he was a private tutor and school teacher until in 1748 he found a position as librarian of the collection of Imperial Count Heinrich von Bünau near Dresden. Fascinated by the library and Dresden, it was here that he developed his interest in the history of art. In 1755 he moved to Rome where he remained for thirteen years, tirelessly searching for new knowledge and working in a variety of libraries. He is best known in archaeological circles for his work on the art of Pompeii, Italy and Herculaneum, Italy.

[Bio.: M. Kunze, 1999, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In T. Murray (ed.), Encyclopedia of archaeology I. The Great Archaeologists. Oxford: ABC-Clio. 51–63]

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
('hän yōä'khĭm vĭng'kəlmän) , 1717–68, German classical archaeologist and historian of ancient art, in which field he was a noted authority. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1754, he went to Italy the following year. There he spent the rest of his life in study in the Vatican Library and in research in Rome, Florence, and Naples. His chief book was Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums [history of the art of antiquity] (1764). The first great analysis of art written from a historical perspective, the work deals mainly with Roman art. It served as the foundation for classical art history.

Bibliography

See his Writings on Art (ed. by D. Irwin, 1972); biography by W. Leppmann (1970).

 
History 1450-1789: Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–1768), German art historian, archaeologist, and philosopher of aesthetics, and one of the leading proponents of neoclassicism. Winckelmann is regarded as the first modern historian of art for his systematic treatment of ancient art as an expression of historical conditions, rather than as a tradition of artistic skills and ideas passed from one generation of artists to the next, which was the arthistorical approach practiced by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Karl van Mander (1548–1606), and Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) in their Lives of artists.

Winckelmann was born on 9 December 1717 in Stendal, a town between Hannover and Berlin. The son of an impoverished cobbler, he sought, as a young man, to better his conditions through devotion to academic study, and fell in love with the literature of classical antiquity. In hopes of securing a measure of financial security, and on the advice of his father, Winckelmann pursued a course of study in theology, mathematics, and medicine, as well as Greek and Latin, at the Universities of Jena and Halle. At Halle, Winckelmann was a student of Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762), the founder of modern aesthetics, and developed his own philosophy of beauty, involving the direct experience of beautiful objects, in reaction to Baumgarten's rather cold (in Winckelmann's own opinion) philosophical formalism.

Not finding theology or medicine his calling, Winckelmann left the university and continued to pursue the study of ancient literature and contemporary aesthetics privately, while serving in various positions as a tutor and schoolteacher. A student tutored by him, F. W. Peter Lamprecht, became one of the great loves of his life and followed him to Seehausen after Winckelmann accepted a position as a teacher of Classics there in 1743. In 1748 Winckelmann left Seehausen to work as a librarian and researcher for Count Heinrich von Bünau in Nöthnitz, near Dresden. Lamprecht did not follow, although Winckelmann would continue to lavish his affections upon his former student in private correspondence for years to come. In 1754 he moved to Dresden to work as librarian to Cardinal Passionei, a position that afforded him access to works of literature, art objects, and contemporary cultural debate previously unavailable to him in the provinces where he had been raised and schooled. It was during this period in Dresden that Winckelmann wrote what would, in retrospect, count as the manifesto for the rest of his scholarly life: the brief but powerful and influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Reflections on the imitation of the painting and sculpture of ancient Greeks). The essay took up a long-running debate in eighteenth-century European intellectual circles, called "The Battle of the Books" in London and the "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" in Paris, about which culture was superior—ancient or modern—and why. Winckelmann argued that ancient art was clearly superior and that, for the moderns, the only art worth making is the imitation of the art of the ancients, but added (in a rhetorical flourish typical of Winckelmann's style of argument) that the art of the ancients is so superior to the moderns that it is inimitable. He therefore counseled his artistic contemporaries that, since they are doomed to the ineradicable falseness of painting and sculpture in modern times, they should imitate that which is inimitable. Winckelmann reinforces his valuation of the impossible imitability of the Greeks by being the first art historian to discriminate between Greek originals and their inferior Roman copies.

Winckelmann's Reflections were quickly translated into several languages and found a wide audience. In 1755, with his intellectual reputation established, Winckelmann, encouraged by a group of Jesuit dignitaries visiting Dresden, moved to Rome, where he would be able to pursue his studies and personal inclinations more freely. By 1763, with Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692–1779), the Vatican's chief librarian and a leading patron of the arts, as his sponsor and confidant, Winckelmann became papal antiquary, a position that included escorting visiting dignitaries through Rome's art and antiquities collections. In Rome, Winckelmann set to work on his most important book, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764; The history of ancient art), an ambitious, multivolume account of the art of antiquity in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, written in a style that mixes the sentimental with the clinical and the platonic. Winckelmann narrated the course of each of these cultures as a kind of life cycle showing "the origin, progress, change and downfall of art, together with the different styles of nations, periods and artists," and drew for his studies upon the concentrations of collections of antique art and artifacts in Rome. Elaborating on the thesis first offered in his Reflections, he argued that the felicitous cultural situation of ancient Greece—including political freedoms and unfettered opportunities to view and appreciate the naked body—could not be repeated in modern times. Following a logic reminiscent of the Socratic doctrines of love and beauty, he lamented the passing of Greek art and the beautiful male bodies that inspired it, but found consolation in the historian's ambition to know about it.

Winckelmann met with an untimely death at the hands of an unemployed cook and thief, Francesco Arcangeli, in a hotel in Trieste on 8 June, 1768, while on a diplomatic mission. The motive for the murder was never determined, although speculation about this and other details of Winckelmann's very public private life has inspired numerous literary treatments and plays.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. History of Ancient Art. Translated by G. Henry Lodge. Boston, 1849; reprinted New York, 1969. Translation of Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764).

——. Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. Translated by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton. La Salle, Ill., 1987. Translation of Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755).

Secondary Sources

Fried, Michael. "Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation." October 37 (1986): 87–97.

Leppmann, Wolfgang. Winckelmann. New York, 1970.

Morrison, Jeffrey. Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education. Oxford and New York, 1996.

Parker, Kevin. "Winckelmann, Historical Difference and the Problem of the Boy." Eighteenth-Century Studies 25, no. 4 (1992): 523–544.

Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven and London, 1994; reprinted, 2000.

—KEVIN PARKER

 
Wikipedia: Johann Joachim Winckelmann


Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Portrait by Raphael Mengs, after 1755
Born: 9 December 1717(1717--)
Stendal
Died: 8 June 1768 (aged 50)
Trieste
Occupation: Art history writer
Nationality: German
Writing period: 1755 - 1768
Subjects: Art history
Literary movement: Hellenism, Greek Revival, neoclassicism
Debut works: Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst
("Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture")

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (December 9, 1717 - June 8, 1768) was German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art, which would be a decisive influence on the rise of the neoclassical movement during the late 18th century. Winckelmann was also one of the founders of modern scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him to be the father of art history.[1]

Biography

Early life

Johann Joachim Winkelmann was born in Stendal, Prussia, into poverty. His father, Martin Winckelmann, was a cobbler, and mother, Anna Maria Meyer, a daughter of a weaver. Winckelmann's early years were full of hardships but his thirst for learning pushed him forward. Later in Rome, when he was a famous scholar, he wrote: "One gets spoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much."

He attended the Coellnische Gymnasium in Berlin and the school at Salzwedel and, in 1738, at 21, was induced to go as a student of theology to the University of Halle. However, Winckelmann was no theologian - he had become interested in Greek classics already in his youth, but he soon realized that teachers in Halle could not satisfy his intellectual pursuits in this field and he soon devoted himself enthusiastically to Greek art and literature. He followed the lectures of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who coined the term "aesthetics".

Later, with the intention of becoming a physician, in 1740 he attended medical classes at Jena. Between the terms and sometimes during them he worked as a tutor of languages. In 1743 he became the deputy head master of the gymnasium of Seehausen. Winckelmann felt that his work with children was not his true calling. Moreover, his salary was so low that he had to rely on his students' parents to have free meals; overall his means were insufficient. He was obliged to accept a tutorship near Magdeburg. From 1743 to 1748, he was associate-rector of a school at Seehausen in the Altmark.

Bünau's librarian

In 1748 he wrote to Count Henry von Bünau: "... little value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books are so scarce and expensive." In the same year Winckelmann was appointed secretary of his library at Nöthnitz, near Dresden. The library contained some 40,000 volumes. Winckelmann had read Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Xenophon, and Plato, but now he found the works of such famous Enlightenment writers as Voltaire and Montesquieu. To leave behind the spartan atmosphere of Prussia was a great relief for him. Winckelmann's major duty was to assist von Bünau to write a book on the German-Roman or Holy Roman Empire and collect materials for it. During this period he made several visits to the collection of antiquities at Dresden, but his description of its best paintings was left unfinished. The treasures there nevertheless awakened in Winckelmann an intense interest in art, which was deepened by association with various artists, particularly the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799), Goethe's future friend and influence, who encouraged him in his aesthetic studies. - Winckelmann too exercised a powerful influence over Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (see Goethe's Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, 1805). Winckelmann's study of ancient literature had inspired Oeser with a desire to visit Rome, and he became librarian to Cardinal Passionei, in 1754. This compelled him reluctantly to join the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1755, Winckelmann published his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst ("Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture"), followed by a feigned attack on the work, and a defence of its principles, ostensibly by an impartial critic. The Gedanken contains the first statement of the doctrines he afterwards developed, and was warmly admired not only for the ideas it contained but for its style. It made Winckelmann famous and was reprinted several times and soon translated into French. In England, Winkelmann's views stirred discussion in the 1760s and 1770s. Henry Fuseli's translation of his book, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, was published in 1765, but the translation was not well received.

Rome

In 1751 the papal nuncio, Archinto, visited Nothenitz, and in 1754 Winckelmann joined the Roman Catholic Church. Goethe stated that Winckelmann was a pagan, but his conversion finally opened the doors of the Pope's library to him. He was named librarian to Domenico Cardinal Passionei, who was impressed by Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing. After publishing Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildbauer-Kunst, Winckelmann moved to Rome. Augustus III, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, granted him a pension of 200 thalers, so that he might continue his studies in Rome.

He arrived in Rome in November 1755. His first task in Rome was to describe the statues in the Cortile del Belvedere — the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the so-called Antinous, and the Belvedere Torso — which represented to him the "utmost perfection of ancient sculpture." He became librarian to Cardinal Archinto, and received much kindness from Cardinal Passionei. After their deaths, Winckelmann was received as librarian and as a friend into the house of Cardinal Albani, who was forming his magnificent collection of antiquities at Porta Salara, and became his patron. Originally Winckelmann planned to stay in Italy only two years with the help of a grant from Dresden, but the outbreak of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) changed his plans.

He devoted himself earnestly, at first with the aid of his new friend, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-79), whom he first met in Rome, to the study of Roman antiquities and gradually acquired an unrivalled knowledge of ancient art. Mengs became the channel through which Winkelmann's ideas were realized in art and spread around Europe. "The only way for us to become great, yes, inimitable, if it is possible, is the imitation of the Greeks," Winckelmann declared. With imitation he did not mean slavish copying: "... what is imitated, if handled with reason, may assume another nature, as it were, and become one's own." Winckelmann discredited Roman art, which was unusual at that time — Roman culture was considered the ultimate achievement of Antiquity. Neoclassical artists attempted to revive the spirit as well as the forms of ancient Greece and Rome. Mengs's contribution in this was considerable — he was in his day widely regarded as the greatest living painter. The French painter Jacques-Louis David met Mengs in Rome (1775-80) and was introduced to the artistic theories of Winckelmann.

In 1760 his Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch appeared, followed by his Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der Alten ("Observations on the Architecture of the Ancients") in 1762, which included an account of the temples at Paestum. In 1758 and 1762, he visited Naples to observe the archaeological excavations being conducted there. Usually the excavations of Pompeii (1748) have been considered the decisive stimulus to the new archaeological classicism, but the excavation of Herculaneum took place much earlier. These two cities had been buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

In 1762 appeared Winkelmann's study Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Letter About the Herculanean Discoveries) and two years later Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Report About the Latest Herculanean Discoveries). From these scholars obtained their first real information about the treasures excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

His major work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, The History of Ancient Art), deeply influenced contemporary views of the superiority of Greek art. It was translated into French in 1766 and later into English and Italian. Among others, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing based much of the ideas in his 'Laokoon' (1766) on Winckelmann's views on harmony and expression in the visual arts. Lessing also stated that painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, which depicts progressive action rather than the visible and stationary.

From 1763, while retaining his position with Albani, Winckelmann worked as a prefect of antiquities (Prefetto delle Antichità) and scriptor (Scriptor linguae teutonicae) of the Vatican. Winckelmann again visited Naples, in 1765 and 1767, and wrote for the use of the electoral prince and princess of Saxony his Briefe an Bianconi, which were published eleven years after his death, in the Antologia romana.

Masterwork

His masterpiece, the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums ("History of Ancient Art"), issued in 1764, was soon recognized as a permanent contribution to European literature. In this work Winckelmann sets forth both the history of Greek art and the principles on which it seemed to him to be based. He also presents a glowing picture of the political, social, and intellectual conditions which he believed tended to foster creative activity in ancient Greece. The fundamental idea of his theories are that the end of art is beauty and that this end can be attained only when individual and characteristic features are strictly subordinated to an artist's general scheme. The true artist, selecting from nature the phenomena fitted for his purpose, and combining them through the imagination, creates an ideal type marked in action by "edle Einfalt und stille Größe" ("noble simplicity and quiet grandeur") —an ideal type in which normal proportions are maintained, and particular parts, such as muscles and veins, are not permitted to break the harmony of the general outlines.

Later works

Portrait by Anton von Maron, 1768
Enlarge
Portrait by Anton von Maron, 1768

Winckelmann contributed various essays to the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften; and, in 1766, he published his Versuch einer Allegorie. Of far greater importance was the work entitled Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished monuments of antiquity) (1767-1768), prefaced by a Trattato preliminare, which presented a general sketch of the history of art. The plates in this work are representations of objects which had either been falsely explained or not explained at all. Winckelmann's explanations were of the highest service to archaeology, by showing that in the case of many works of art supposed to be connected with Roman history the ultimate sources of inspiration were to be found in Homer.

Death

In 1768 he started his journey over the Alps to the North, but Tyrol depressed him and he decided to return back to Italy. However, his friend, the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi managed to persuade him into travel to Munich and Vienna, where he was received with honour by Maria Theresa. On his way back he was murdered at Trieste on June 8, 1768 in a hotel bed by a fellow traveller, a man named Francesco Arcangeli for medals that Maria Theresa had given him. Arcangeli had thought that he was only "un uomo di poco conto" ("a man of little account").

He was buried in the churchyard of the cathedral of St. Giusto at Trieste. Domenico Rosetti and Cesare Pagnini documented the last week of Winckelmann's life. Heinrich Alexander Stoll translated the Italian document, the so-called "Mordakte Winckelmann", into German.

Critical response

In the historical portion of his writings he used not only the works of art he himself had studied but the scattered notices on the subject to be found in ancient writers; and his wide knowledge and active imagination enabled him to offer many fruitful suggestions as to periods about which he had little direct information. Many of his conclusions, based on inadequate evidence of Roman copies, would be modified or reversed by his subsequent research. The enthusiasm of his work, its strong and yet graceful style, and its vivid descriptions of works of art give it enduring value and interest, even though some particulars that led to his conclusions are false. It marked an epoch by indicating the spirit in which the study of Greek art should be approached, and the methods by which investigators might hope to attain solid results. To Winckelmann's contemporaries it came as a revelation, and it exercised a profound influence on the best minds of the age. It was read with intense interest by Lessing, who found in the earliest of Winckelmann's works the starting-point for his Laocoon.

Works

  1. Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst ("Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture"), followed by a feigned attack on the work, and a defence of its principles, nominally by an impartial critic. (1st ed of only 50 copies 1755, 2nd ed 1756)
  2. Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch (1760)
  3. Anmerkungen über die Baukunst der Alten ("Observations on the Architecture of the Ancients"), including an account of the temples at Paestum (1762)
  4. Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Letter About the Herculanean Discoveries) (1762)
  5. Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Report About the Latest Herculanean Discoveries) (1764)
  6. Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums ("History of Ancient Art") (1764)
  7. Versuch einer Allegorie (1766), which, although containing the results of much thought and reading, is not conceived in a thoroughly critical spirit.
  8. Monumenti antichi inediti (1767-1768), prefaced by a Trattato preliminare, presenting a general sketch of the history of art. The plates in this work are representations of objects which had either been falsely explained or not explained at all.
  9. Poshtumously published - Briefe an Bianconi, which were published eleven years after his death, in the Antologia romana.

His sexuality and lifestyle

Winckelmann never learned to master Italian perfectly. He lived simply on bread and wine, but partly his asceticism and loneliness were increased by his homosexuality. At the age of 45 he fell in love with a young nobleman, Friedrich von Berg, and wrote for him Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen (1763). When von Berg had left Rome for Paris, Winckelmann wrote him, “The genius of our friendship will follow you from afar to Paris, and there, at the seat of idle lust, he will leave you, but here your image will be my saint.”[2]

References

  1. ^ Robinson, Walter [February 1995]. "Introduction", Instant Art History (in English). Random House Publishing Group, 240. ISBN 0-449-90698-1. “The father of official art history was a German named Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68).” 
  2. ^ Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The World History of Male Love. Retrieved on 2007-06-09.

See also

External links

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Persondata
NAME Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION German archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1717
PLACE OF BIRTH Stendal, Prussia
DATE OF DEATH June 8, 1768
PLACE OF DEATH Trieste, Italy

 
 

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Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
German Literature Companion. The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Archaeology Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
History 1450-1789. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Johann Joachim Winckelmann" Read more

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