Unpublished Antique Monuments: A faun's head in the Villa Albani

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 …