Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) was not a philosopher. In fact, Winckelmann had a strong interest in distancing himself from academic philosophy as he knew it. As Goethe reports, Winckelmann “complained bitterly about the philosophers of his time and about their extensive influence.” Still less was Winckelmann a Kantian philosopher; the first edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason did not appear until 1781, thirteen years after the fifty-year-old Winckelmann was shockingly murdered in Trieste. Nevertheless, (...) many of Winckelmann’s ideas were philosophically rich and suggestive and interestingly relevant to the philosophical problems that were later to be addressed by Kant and his philosophical contemporaries. It is no wonder, then, that Winckelmann’s influence can be detected in the works of some of the most important philosophically oriented thinkers of Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to Kant himself, these thinkers included Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). (shrink)

According to some critics, the putative superficiality of Winckelmann's appropriation of the Greek legacy is just one instance of the emptiness that characterizes the appropriation of the Greeks by the Germans in general. Thus Eliza Maria Butler has spoken of the 'tyranny of Greece over Germany': 'If the Greeks are tyrants, the Germans are predestined slaves ... The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly; they have been obsessed by them more utterly, and they have assimilated them less than (...) any other race.” Not coincidentally, the putative freedom or unfreedom of one's appropriation of the Greek ideal is one of the basic problems at issue in this chapter. In the following pages, I argue that Winckelmann not only understood this basic problem but also touched on its actual solution, albeit in an inadequate, aesthetic manner. I go on to suggest that Hegel articulated this solution in an adequate and properly philosophical manner. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) shared with Hegel a profound admiration for the art and culture of ancient Greece. Both viewed ancient Greece as, in some sense, an ideal to which the modern world might aspire—a pinnacle of spiritual perfection and originality that contemporary civilization might, through an understanding of ancient Greek culture, one day equal or surpass. This rather competitive form of nostalgia suggests a paradoxical demand to produce an original and higher state of culture through (...) the imitation of another. In Hegel’s writings, this paradox goes beyond the relation of the modern world to the ancient world—he exposes the same paradox in ancient Greece’s relation to its own predecessors. The solution to the latter paradox—the possibility of the realization of ancient Greece as an original and self-contained civilization despite its cultural debts—would also, then, be the key to repeating the success of the ancient world in the modern, the overcoming of modern Europe’s cultural debt to the ancient world. The present essay examines how this paradox is revealed and resolved in the writings of Winckelmann and Hegel, and shows how this strategy of culture production—as imputed to the ancient world and aspired to in the modern—simultaneously attempts to justify and conceal a self-deceptive practice of cultural and political conquest. My focus will be on the two writers’ interpretations of ancient Greek art since, as I will suggest, their solution to the paradox of culture production turns out to be modeled upon the role of ancient Greek art in the invention and actualization of a cultural ideal of beauty, unity, and self-containment. (shrink)

The article examines the collaborations between the pensionnaires of the Villa Medici in Rome and the members of the French School of Athens, shedding light on the complex relationships between architecture, art, and archeology. The second half of the 19th century was a period during which the exchanges and collaborations between archaeologists, artists, and architects acquired a reinvented role and a dominant place. Within such a context, Athens was the place par excellence, where the encounter between these three disciplines took (...) place. The main objective of the article is to render explicit how the revelations of archeology, actively disseminated by the members of the French School of Athens—the “Athéniens”—had an important impact on the approach of certain pensionnaires of the Villa Medici in Rome. Particular emphasis is placed on certain pensionnaires, who decided to devote their envois to ancient monuments of Greece. In parallel, the article intends to shed light on the methods that helped the pensionnaires-architects of the Villa Medici in Rome appropriate archaeological discoveries concerning Greek antiquities. The article takes, as a starting point, the following hypothesis: to better understand the figure of the architect-archaeologist, of whom Jacques Ignace Hittorff is an emblematic example, it is pivotal to bear in mind that before the second half of the 19th century neither the figure of Hellenic archeology nor the figure of the architect had yet acquired their autonomy. Taking into account that Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in the middle of the 18th century, forged an ideal Greek model, which was criticized during the second half of the 19th century, the article also sheds light on the fact that the revelations of archaeologists have called into question the Winckelmannian image of Greece. Another aspect that is explored in the article is Jacques Ignace Hittorff’s studies concerning the polychromy of ancient Greek monuments, paying special attention to his Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte ou l’Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs. The article also explores how the shifts of the status of philhellenism are related to the mutations of the meaning of travel to Greece. In parallel, it investigates the impact of Greek independence on the ideals of beauty and nature in arts, as well as how Greek independence is related to the intensification of the interest in the excavations of Greek antiquities. (shrink)

El capítulo expone el lugar dialéctico-sistemático de la escultura clásica en las Lecciones de estética de Hegel, poniendo de relieve su afinidad con las descripciones de Winckelmann, como interpretación moderna, del arte griego de los siglos IV y V.