Johann Joachim Winckelmann

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Johann Joachim Winckelmann : biography

December 9, 1717 – June 8, 1768

Winckelmann arrived in Rome in November 1755. His first task there was to describe the statues in the Cortile del Belvedere—the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the so-called Antinous, and the Belvedere Torso—which represented to him the "utmost perfection of ancient sculpture."

Originally, Winckelmann planned to stay in Italy only two years with the help of the grant from Dresden, but the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) changed his plans. He was named librarian to Cardinal Passionei, who was impressed by Winckelmann’s beautiful Greek writing. Winckelmann also became librarian to Cardinal Archinto, and received much kindness from Cardinal Passionei. After their deaths, Winckelmann was hired as librarian in the house of Alessandro Cardinal Albani, who was forming his magnificent collection of antiquities in the villa at Porta Salaria.

In 1768 Winckelmann journeyed north over the Alps, but the Tyrol depressed him and he decided to return to Italy. However, his friend, the sculptor and restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi managed to persuade him to travel to Munich and Vienna, where he was received with honor by Maria Theresa. On his way back, he was murdered at Trieste on June 8, 1768, in a hotel bed by a fellow traveller, a man named Francesco Arcangeli, for medals that Maria Theresa had given him. Arcangeli had thought that he was only "un uomo di poco conto" ("a man of little account").

Winckelmann was buried in the churchyard of Trieste Cathedral. Domenico Rosetti and Cesare Pagnini documented the last week of Winckelmann’s life; Heinrich Alexander Stoll translated the Italian document, the so-called "Mordakte Winckelmann", into German.

Critical response and influence

Winckelmann’s writings are key to understanding the modern European discovery of: ancient (sometimes idealized) Greece;See Philhellenism neoclassicism; and the doctrine of art as imitation (Nachahmung). The mimetic character of art that imitates but does not simply copy, as Winckelmann restated it,The earlier conflict posed as an antithesis between imitation and invention, was a major theme in the seventeenth century Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which was fought, however, in the field of literature rather than the arts. is central to any interpretation of Enlightenment classical idealism.James L. Larson, "Winckelmann’s Essay on Imitation" Eighteenth-Century Studies 9.3 (Spring 1976:390-405). Winckelmann stands at an early stage of the transformation of taste in the late 18th century.Rudolf Wittkower, "Imitation, eclecticism, and genius" in Earl R. Wasserman, ed. Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Penguin) 1965.

Winckelmann’s study Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen ("Letter about the Discoveries at Herculaneum") was published in 1762, and two years later Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen ("Report on the Latest Discoveries at Herculaneum"). From these, scholars obtained their first real information about the excavations at Pompeii.

His major work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, "The History of Ancient Art"), deeply influenced contemporary views of the superiority of Greek art. It was translated into French in 1766 and later into English and Italian. Among others, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing based many of the ideas in his ‘Laocoon’ (1766) on Winckelmann’s views on harmony and expression in the visual arts.

In the historical portions of his writings, Winckelmann used not only the works of art he himself had studied but the scattered notices on the subject to be found in ancient writers; and his wide knowledge and active imagination enabled him to offer many fruitful suggestions as to periods about which he had little direct information. To the still existing works of art, he applied a minute empirical scrutiny. Many of his conclusions, based on inadequate evidence of Roman copies, would be modified or reversed by subsequent researchers. Nonetheless, the fervid descriptive enthusiasm of passages in his work, its strong and yet graceful style, and its vivid descriptions of works of art gave it a most immediate appeal. It marked an epoch by indicating the spirit in which the study of Greek art and of ancient civilization should be approached, and the methods by which investigators might hope to attain solid results. To Winckelmann’s contemporaries it came as a revelation, and it exercised a profound influence on the best minds of the age. It was read with intense interest by Lessing, who found in the earliest of Winckelmann’s works the starting-point for his Laocoon, and by Herder, Goethe and Kant.In the English language, translation of Winckelmann’s major writings was slow: Henry Fuseli translated some minor writings, but Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums was not translated into English until 1849 by G. Henry Lodge.