Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. - book reviews

Alex Potts's compelling work on Winckelmann might have been called "Mourning the Impossible Ideal." From its on one side and poignant choice of jacket illustrations to its Freudian speculations and daring challenges to received wisdom, it sweeps the reader ineluctably from seemingly mundane matters of antiquarian connoisseurship to fathomless questions of human consciousness, eliciting during its course the darkest doubts at the heart of art history itself. Rich and condensed in its documentation and shut analysis of text, the volume is finely wrought to coherence end the author's rigorous theoretical consistency and unflinching focus upon his thesis. Potts's deconstructive mode inspired in particular by Paul de Man, features the subdueed aspects of Winckelmann's idealism as to the full as those which are manifest; it brings on the outside its affirmations as well as its take away froms Thus, Flesh and the Ideal - a title implying the inevitable contradiction-yet-interdependence of the mortal imperfections of humanity and the grandeur of its dreams - is primarily a sophisticated reading and meditation rather than a positivist exposition or account. at the same time one emerges from it believing firmly that single such an approach can at any time do justice to a man whose ideas resonate across the centuries, from the robustness of the Apollo Belvedere (Vatican Museum) to Hollywood's slim hero of Apollo 13 If Johann Joachim is finally smiling in the grave where modernity contemplation it had dumped him, his expression is probably a bit uneasy, too, for Potts's volume is expose as much as it is apologia. nevertheless in resuscitating the anxieties and complexities that permeate Winckelmann's enterprise, Pott has done more credit to his subject's reputation than anyone had previously reflection possible.

A dialectical argument, soded in dichotomies of presence versus absence, affirmation versus repression, desire versus los aims to present to view that the effect of history is not a mimesis or description on the contrary a metaphorical representation. For like a demonstration, Winckelmann turns without to be an extraordinarily profitable example. In his first chapter, Pott demonstrates end comparison with other 18th-century writers in what way Winckelmann aimed to constitute a "system" - itself a novelty - rather than adduce a series of facts, as was the prior practice in biography-centered histories of art (eg Vasari and Bellori). That of recent origin paradigm's originality was, first, to not absent historical development in three phases going from archaism, via an ideal stage, into a decline, and, next to the first to link those periods to a historical connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts albeit considerably idealized. In historicizing the disclosure of Greek art, Winckelmann's theory gave an ostensibly empirical basis to the traditionally accepted superiority of the ancients, whose suppos political and social freedoms he admired. on the other hand in so doing, he unwittingly problematized the usefulness of the of greece model for contemporary art by means of undermining its claim to universality. Winckelmann was read enthusiastically through Johann Gottfried Herder (and Goethe by and by thereafter), but in his commentaries upon Winckelmann's writings, Herder perceptively noted this contradiction, despite their shared conviction that agriculture was rooted in values specific to historical situations. In Winckelmann's time, still dominated by dint of a centuries-old admiration for antiquity, like a paradox was not as still apparent. Indeed, Potts shows that Winckelmann's stylistic terminology derives conceptually from rhetorical manners described in the writings of the ancients. It perpetuates the links between art theory and rhetorical tradition thus clearly established as underlying the previous generation of the arts by means of Jacqueline Lichtenstein's superb discussion of the great debate upon color.(1) Thus, as Potts displays Winckelmann's claims for Greek art place into conflict sum of two units competing world views that are the two at the heart of the Enlightenment's belief in progress: a Classical persistence of static goals and transcendent values versus the Romantic view of ongoing organic evolution and historical relativism. Winckelmann's theory signals a paradigm shift that will be to the full exemplified in Goethe's grounding of art in principles of nature itself.

Another irresolvable tension dynamically informs Winckelmann's notion of ideal. For Winckelmann, there were sum of two units aspects to the ideal - the "high style" and the "beautiful": the first is an elevated form associated with manliness and the spirit of freedom; the next to the first is rooted in gracefulness and refinement, linked to humane climate and to culture:

In [Winckelmann's] scheme of greece art, as an art that look fors to convey abstract ideas by the agency of way of "beautiful" figurations of the human material part does so in two complementary styles each of their very substance incomplete: a high mode that insinuates the presence of an immaterial idea end a comparative absence of sensual refinement of form, and a beautiful way characterized by a fullness of sensuality and grace, which is more immediately attractive on the other hand can only evoke such an idea at individual remove." (p. 68)