Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity

Ein Versuch eines Lehrgebäudes (‘an attempt at a systematic framework’): that is the professed aim of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums , inscribed in the opening paragraph of his ‘history of ancient art’. More than any other Enlightenment writer, Winckelmann has been hailed the Enlightened founder of Altertumswissenschaft —that is, of the complete and holistic historical study of Greek and Roman antiquity. At the same time, Winckelmann’s Geschichte would exert a profound influence on Enlightenment aesthetics: this German thinker, as Christian Felix Weisse declared already in 1764, ‘was the first man to provide something systematic from the art of the ancients [ etwas systematisches von der Kunst der Alten ]’ ( Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste 11: 41–86, at 41–2). In her meticulously researched monograph on Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity , Katherine Harloe provides a stimulating re-appraisal of Winckelmann and his intellectual Nachleben between 1764 and 1800 (xvi). While Harloe argues that ‘the most important context for the production and early reception of his work was perhaps not classics or ancient history..., but rather eighteenth-century ideas and practices of connoisseurship or aesthetic criticism’ (xxi–xxii), the book’s primary purpose is to explore Winckelmann in light of subsequent Altertumswissenschaft paradigms. On the one hand, Harloe shows how Winckelmann provided different methodological models for approaching antiquity, thereby defining the disciplinary parameters of an emerging scholarly field. On the other, she relates Winckelmann’s critical reception to his own historicizing approach to ancient Greek and Roman art. Winckelmann’s monumental edifice may have been built from painstaking historicist enquiry, the book argues. Yet it is aesthetic conjecture that ultimately holds this Lehrgebäude together: as their early reception demonstrates, Winckelmann’s works are premised on both historicism and subjective imagination

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