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WINCKELMANN'S
CONSTRUCTION
OF HISTORY
ALEX POTTS
When Winckelmann's
History of the Art of Antiquity
appeared in 1764,
antique sculpture was central to the whole conception of art shared by artists,
patrons and connoisseurs. The most celebrated antiques stood as the very
paradigms of the classic masterpiece. They were sketched, analysed and
raptured over. Outside the world of art, too, they were widely prized as visible
relics of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. Classical scholars studied them
as visual supplements to their reading of the writings of antiquity. However,
ancient sculpture, for all the interest shown in it, was not conceiv ed as having a
history, at least not in a form that would be recognised as a history of art
today. For practical purposes, the only historical dimension to antique sculp-
ture that mattered was that it was the product of the ancient rather than the
modern world.
Winckelmann's book changed the situation by inventing a history for Greek
and Roman sculpture that had not existed before.' But the impulse for this did
not come from the discovery of any new evidence Wmckelmann only knew
what had already been available for some time - a body of Roman and Greco-
Roman antiquities, divided between representations of figures or events from
Roman history, and a miscellaneous array of mythological figures and mytho-
logical narratives which, because their subject matter was not specifically
Roman, would often be thought of as Greek rather than Roman. None of the
latter Greco-Roman pieces could be dated with any certainty, so they were
simply assigned to some broadly defined period of Greek and Roman antiquity.
On the other hand, ancient texts provided an abundance of information on the
visual arts, most notably Pliny's chapters on bronze and marble statuary and
painting. But it was in no way obvious how the historical information in these
texts could be related to the actual antiquities that had survived.
Winckelmann, preceded by a group of French antiquarians who pioneered
some of the techniques of analysis he later exploited to such good effect, was
the first to suggest how the detailed history hinted at in the texts of antiquity
might be reconstructed and illustrated by known pieces of sculpture. In doing
so, he initiated, however hypothetically and tentatively, the chronological
Art History
© RKP 1982
Vol. 5 No. 4
December 1982
$1.50/1
0141-6790/82/0504-377
WINCKELMANN'S CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY
classification of ancient statuary that prevails today. But he not only invented
a history for Greek art. He also presented a new model for conceiving the
history of any artistic tradition when he traced the entire development of
Greek sculpture from its origins to its decline through a logical sequence ot
period styles. The particular scheme he proposed bears a remarkable similarity
to the one that underpins many handbooks of Greek art today: first an archaic
period, then an early classic period (the high style) roughly corresponding to
the fifth century BC, then a late classic period (the beautiful style) roughh
corresponding to the fourth century BC, then a period of imitation and decline,
m present-day terms the Hellenistic period, beginning in the third century BC
and ending with the political demise of the Greek world and the shift of the
centre of artistic patronage to Rome: art as practised under the Romans was
conceived as a pale afterglow of the Greek achievement.
Why was it that Winckelmann felt impelled to create a history of antique
sculpture? Why was it at this particular juncture that attitudes toward the
antique were recast in a more historical mould, and it seemed necessary to
create a history where there had been none before? This is an issue that has
ramifications well beyond the small world of those who in the mid-eighteenth
century had a special interest in antique art. New more historically conscious
modes of thought were being explored by a wide variety of thinkers, particularly
towards the end of the century — interestingly it was the Germans, outsiders
to the more perceptible social and economic changes taking place in France and
England, who were the first to elaborate the new histoncism.^ I shall be concen-
trating here on the problems of defining precisely what features of Winckelmann's
history of Greek art distinguished it most clearly from earlier discussions of the
art of antiquity, and of clarifying how these features were constructed.
Defining what marked off Winckelmann's
History
as a major new departure,
of course, cannot simply be done by studying it in relation to its contemporary
context and to what came before. Any innovations that were not taken up and
developed afterwards would now appear mere historical curiosities peculiar to
the mid-eighteenth-century art world. The particular pattern of its reception
very much underlines the point that its full significance can only be appreciated
in the light of the later remtcrpretation of its contents. The book may have
been rapturously received when it was first published in 1764, but its more
conventional aspects were what struck a chord with Winckelmann's contemp-
oraries: It was much the fullest and most systematic compendium of available
information on the art of antiquity to date, and it presented the material in a
more vivid and readable manner than earlier specialised antiquarian publica-
tions. But the implications of its novel historical constructions were, with a
very few if important exceptions, widely ignored at the time. They were only
taken up by the art world at large in the 1790s and early 1800s when notions
of historical development began to play an active role in critical discussion oi
painting and sculpture: both m France and Germany, Winckelmann's theories
acquired a new immediacy once the art of the past hundred years or so came
to be perceived as one of decadence and dechne.^ The historical significance oi
Winckelmann's rather schematic picture of rise and decline, then, is that it be-
came the precursor of a view of art that played a major role in the nineteenth-
378
WINCKELMANN'S CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY
century art world. I am thinking above all of the view that the very best art
could be defined in precise historical terms as the product of a peculiarly privi-
leged culture during a period when its informing impulses were at their purest
and strongest, and that the subsequent history of art has been a sorry tale of
decline as these impulses were stifled and lost. The best period (sometimes
periods) became, with different theorists, ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, or
the Italian Renaissance.
While this model of history is hardly a serious presence in contemporary
attitudes towards art, there are important ways in which Winckelmann's enter-
prise has very real echoes in the present-day context. To start with, there is the
simple fact that modern accounts of Greek art still rely on the basic framework
provided by Winckelmann's period styles, even though some of the assumptions
that underpinned it seem to have been superseded — such as for example the
idea that archaic art is inferior to that of the classic period. More surprising
perhaps than this inertia is the fact that Winckelmann's framework has survived
the discovery of a whole new body of evidence that would seem to have de-
manded a complete lecasting of his very hypothetical picture of early Greek
art — all the documented examples of archaic and classic Greek sculpture
excavated from sites in Greece and Asia Minor upon which modern accounts of
Greek sculpture are ostensibly based came to light after Winckelmann wrote his
History.'^
The survival of Winckelmann's historical scheme in present-day handbooks
of Greek art is part of a more general phenomenon. Many modern art historians
who express doubts about such generalised schemes of historical development
will nevertheless rely on them to organise their own histories of art. Their
books still set out the history of an artistic tradition as a structured sequence of
neatly defined period styles, usually centred around a best or classic period.
Obviously the nature of the strategy has changed between the time when in the
mid-eighteenth century it was developed by Winckelmann as an exploratory
construct, and now when it survives as a stale reflex, a convenient way of
packaging past cultures which has httle to do with an active engagement in
historical understanding. But any attempt to make sense of what Winckelmann
did will inevitably be determined by present-day uses of the modes of enquiry
his
History
adumbrated. To understand the significance of his historical con-
struct is, on the one hand, to see how it arose out of ambitions to fashion a new
picture of the Greek tradition that did proper justice to its peculiarities, and to
realise how this brought into focus issues about the nature of history that had not
been confronted before; but on the other, to be aware how it has been taken
up and systematised, and has generated priorities and categories of thought
which, in the present context, run directly counter to such ambitions to re-
think and make new sense of the past.
The next section will aim to clarify the novelty of Winckelmann's history
of Greek art by comparing it with earlier studies of ancient art and by analy-
sing the differences between its construction of history and that of previous
attempts to trace the history of an artistic tradition. The following one will
focus on the feature of Winckelmann's history which proved to be of particular
importance for the development of a more historical attitude towards ancient
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WINCKELMANN'S CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY
art in the early nineteenth century — the way he drew up a systematic picture
of rise and decline where a clear qualitative distinction was made between earh
Greek work and that produced during the declining phase of ancient art under
the Romans. A third section will take up the other aspect of Wmckelmann's
history which had important implications for later conceptions of the history of
art, his picture of a systematic stylistic development within the classic penod
from a high style to a beautiful style. This construction puts
the History of the Art
of Antiquity
at the beginning of a modem tradition of art historical writing that
reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries with
Wolfflin's and Riegl's theories of style. In an epilogue I shall indicate how,
despite certain structural similarities, Winckelmann's enterprise is in reality con-
ceived on a very different and much less exclusive basis than these later stylistic
histories of art.
1. THE HISTORY OF ART BEFORE WINCKELMANN
How did Wmckelmann's conceptualisation of the history of art depart from
earher ones, and to what extent did the nature of his enterprise run against the
standard priorities and interests current in antiquarian and artistic circles at the
time he was writing? Interestingly the closest precedents for the kind of histori-
cal pattern-making one fmds m Winckelmann do not occur in the period
immediately preceding, but in the writings of Vasari. With Winckelmann and
his successors, history again became an issue for discussions of the visual arts
as It had not been since the sixteenth century.
In what sense then did ancient Greek art have a history before Winckelmann^
A specialist in the study of Greek and Roman artefacts, an antiquarian, would
have gone about producing a history of Greek art by collating the mformation
on the visual arts available in the writings of antiquity, and putting this
together in the form of a series of lives of the great artists which could be
arranged in a roughly chronological sequence. Pliny provided most of the
detailed information, so such an exercise would be tantamount to doing an
edition of Pliny's chapters on art. It is a significant indication of the literary
bias of this exercise that such histories tended to concentrate on painting
rather than sculpture, even though hardly any ancient painting had survived,^
painting attracted more general interest among art lovers, particularly in the
early eighteenth century, and it had a higher status as an art that seemed more
closely allied to poetry and literature. Antiquarians would not have seen it as
part of their brief to make specific connections between the textual evidence
on the history of the visual
aits
and the surviving visual evidence — that is,
known antique sculptures or paintings.* The clarification of passages discussing
the visual arts was approached primarily as a problem m textual analysis. At
most there might be sporadic identifications of known statues with those men-
tioned in Pliny, such as the
Laocoon
in the Vatican and the
Famese Bull,
now
in Naples, mainly because they had such unusual subjects.
Antiquarians did devote a lot of attention to analysing actual antiquities,
but this activity was quite divorced from their textual analysis of the historical
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WINCKELMANN'S CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY
information on the arts culled from the ancient writers. Faced with a particular
statue, they were above all concerned with elucidating its subject, and ancient
texts would be utilised for the lconographical information they provided on
such matters as the attributes of the gods and heroes that were represented m
statues, or the events or stories depicted in narrative work. Conversely, antiqui-
ties might be used as a means of helping to visualise the descnptions of visual
motifs in ancient texts — costumes, tools and weapons, the particular form
taken by various mythological figures, etc.^ The dating of a statue only entered
into question if it was seen to be a portrait of a known historical person; and m
the absence of theories about stylistic change in ancient Greek and Roman art
(except for the decline in the late Empire) visual features only came into play
in so much as they represented identifiable motifs — was the costume Greek or
Roman, did the face resemble this or that known portrait? To ask, say, whether
the artistic conception of a historical portrait tallied with the character of the
art produced at the time when the figure portrayed was supposed to have lived,
except perhaps in the case of very late Roman work, was just not something an
antiquarian scholar would have thought to do.* The taste for historical specifi-
city tended to manifest itself m an ingenious if fairly indiscriminate association
of obscure subjects from Roman history with narrative sculptures that admitted
of no immediate interpretation.^ At one level, Winckelmann's enterprise can be
seen as a bringing together of two previously quite separate kinds of scholarly-
activity — making sense of individual statues, and making sense of the historical
information on the visual arts found in ancient texts.
A fair measure of the low priority given to the precise dating of antique
statuary in the mid-eighteenth century can be gained from the entry under
'antique' in the first volume of the
Encyclopedic
(1751): 'Architects, sculptors
and painters use (the word antique) to denote works of architecture, sculpture
and painting which are from a period when the arts were carried to their per-
fection by the finest geniuses of ancient Greece and Rome, that is from the
century of Alexander the Great (4th century BC) to the reign of the emperor
Phocas (c 600 AD).'^°
Some refinements on the definition of the best period of ancient art were
attempted in other contexts, including the later
Encyclopedie
article on
'sculpture' published in 1765,^^ but these did not advance on the conclusions
Vasari had already reached some two centuries earlier. Vasari had made a care-
ful study of later Roman sculpture which convinced him that the decline of
ancient art had begun well before the collapse of the Roman Empire. For
example, he remarked on the very different quahty of the sculpture on the
arch of Constantine carved at the time the arch was built, and that incorpora-
ted from earlier monuments, and cited this as proof that standards of artistry
had ah"eady deteriorated noticeably by the reign of the Emperor Constantine.
He also drew attention to the fact that textual evidence — passages in Cicero,
Quintilian and Pliny — showed how ancient Greek art, like modern art, had
progressed 'step by step from modest beginnings' until it finally reached 'the
summit of perfection', which in the case of sculpture, he concluded, must first
have been achieved by Polycleitus and his generation (that is, in the fifth
century BC).'^
381

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