Hermes

John Singer Sargent’s Roman sketchbook of 1869 contains—besides a pale gray wash of the Colosseum and a drawing of the white oxen of the Campagna—studies by the sixteen-year-old artist of the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican ...

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 …

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 …