Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Potts, Alex

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Description: Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

BOOKFlesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Alex Potts

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14690

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century.

Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann's writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals—such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann's historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.

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Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date August 1994 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300087369

EISBN 9780300229608

Illustrations 46

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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Contents

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Contents

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14691

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Acknowledgements

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

I wish to acknowledge a number of people for the role they played, sometimes unwittingly, in the shaping of this book. The names that follow trace important encounters that helped me rethink and give substance to what I was doing—some shedding new light on problems over which I kept stumbling or offering me fresh perspectives when I seemed stuck in a blind alley, others prompting me to spell out my preoccupations and prevent these from becoming merely private obsessions. The stimulus often came …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14692

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Introduction

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Winckelmann’s writing particularly repays a close reading now because of his unusually eloquent account of the imaginative charge of the Greek ideal in art. In his impassioned attempt to reconstitute it, he invoked not just the utopian aspirations but also the darker anxieties that made it so compelling. He showed an unusually acute awareness of the psychic and ideological tensions inherent in its image of an impossibly whole and fully embodied human subjectivity. In other words, he took the …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.1-10

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14693

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art--HistoriographyAestheticsSculpture, GreekMale nude in art

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I. Inventing a History of Art

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity soon acquired an international reputation after it was published in German in 1764. Initially it reached a non-German public by way of extracts and summaries in literary journals such as the Journal Encyclopédique and then by a succession of Italian and French translations, the first of which appeared in French in 1766. The book originated from and spoke eloquently to a cosmopolitan European community for which ancient Rome was a crucial point of …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.11-46

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14694

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art--HistoriographyInfluence (Literary, artistic, etc.)Art criticism--History

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II. Fact and Fantasy

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Under the grip of deconstructionist thought, we are perhaps inordinately aware of the gap separating the fictional coherence of master narratives and the disparate bits and pieces that make up the facts of history. On this basis, Winckelmann’s ambition to create a new systematic history of Greek art, encompassing its fragmentary remains in a single coherent narrative of rise and decline, might seem quite alien. He if anyone is the patriarch of modern art-historical story-telling. But this, as we …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.47-66

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14695

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art--HistoriographyArt criticism--HistoryGreece--CivilizationSculpture, Classical

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III. Style

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

The novelty of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art did not just consist of his representing the entire history of the ancient Greek and Roman tradition in terms of a systematic pattern of rise and decline. He also gave this bare schema a more richly articulated, specifically visual character by tracing the evolution of ancient Greek art through an archaic, a high, a beautiful, and an imitative phase. The crucial distinction he introduced between the high and the beautiful, as two equally valid …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.67-112

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.006

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14696

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art--HistoriographyHistory--MethodologyAestheticsSculpture, Greek

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IV. Beauty and Sublimity

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

This chapter takes as its point of departure a puzzle—the apparently paradoxical gendering that occurs when Winckelmann exemplifies the sublime style by a female figure, the Niobe (Plate 15), and the beautiful style by a male one, the Laocoon (Plate 16). At one level he appears to be reversing conventional sexual paradigms. In the aesthetics of the period the sublime, with its intimations of power, elevation, or austerity, was usually associated with the masculine, and the beautiful, with its …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.113-144

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.007

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14697

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art--HistoriographyAestheticsSculpture, GreekMale nude in art

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V. Ideal Bodies

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

In theory, the Greek ideal should appear entirely whole and centred, its harmoniously poised body the very model of a similarly constituted ideal subjectivity. It still needed, however, to bear some trace of the deep-seated disturbances that motivated the fantasies of ideal oneness it embodied. It had to appear untouched by contradiction and difference even as its affective power drew upon anxieties associated with the ‘real’ divisions of the self, for only on condition that it did not entirely …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.145-181

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.008

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14698

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art--HistoriographyArt--PhilosophyAestheticsSculpture, Greek

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VI. Freedom and Desire

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

The disjunctions that occur in the utopian projections of freedom and desire in Winckelmann’s account of ancient Greek art are of interest precisely because they have a larger logic that cannot be explained in terms of his own particular predicament. The logic is one inherent in the constitution of the Greek ideal in eighteenth-century culture, and also still echoed in conceptions of art current in our own day. Nevertheless, Winckelmann’s project, the recovery of an ideal art that would embody …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.182-221

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.009

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14699

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Art historians--BiographySelf-presentationHomosexuality

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VII. Afterlife

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Among many ways in which I might have defined the historical afterlife of Winckelmann’s work, I have deliberately singled out two very loaded engagements with his image of the Greek ideal, the first connected with the politics of the 1789 French Revolution and the second with late nineteenth-century aestheticism and definitions of homosexual identity. In each instance, a distinctive combination of historical circumstances made Winckelmann’s conception of Greek art particularly compelling as the …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.222-253

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14700

Chapter subject tags:Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1717-1768Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)AestheticsDavid, Jacques Louis, 1748-1825Pater, Walter, 1839-1894

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