German Philhellenism

The Pathos of the Historical Imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe

D. Valdez

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137293152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Philhellenism the fascination with the art, politics, religion and society of ancient Greece- is a powerful and compelling phenomenon in German culture and intellectual history, creating a language and a series of key ideas that were to exert a continuous influence on German thought, aesthetics and politics well into the twentieth century. In this book Valdez examines the first generation of German Philhellenes from Winckelmann to Goethe. He shows how German Philhellenism was torn between the search for a historical whole which could explain and encompass Greek excellence, and the desire to incorporate individual aspects of Greece in a wider ethical and artistic enterprise, and finally, to give it a place in the history of freedom itself. Valdez also shows that German philhellenic ideas grew out of a dialogue with French and British ideas and historiography. He charts how the fascination with Greek antiquity was reflected in theatre and literature and how the longings and idealisation of Philhellenes clashed with the more critical and sober historians of the Enlightenment. The book also explains how the search for the historical reality of philhellenic ideals created intense emotional and ideological conflicts about the unique nature of male friendship in ancient Greece and about the position of women in ancient Athens.

C H A P T E R 1

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The Age of Winckelmann and the Young Herder I: Encounters

Seen in both their German and wider European contexts, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Gottfried Herder’s relationship with ancient Greece represented a break with contemporary ideas. In Walther Rehm’s view, author of Greekdom and the Age Goethe, published in 1936, the break was fundamentally aesthetic: Winckelmann’s admiration of Greece was the rejection of the baroque taste in art and architecture and of the dominant French appropriation of Rome in both politics and art.¹ For Erich Aron, whose short treatise on Herder and Winckelmann was published in 1929, Herder was reacting against the quaint and facile evocations of Greek idylls that appeared in contemporary German literature in the mid eighteenth century.² Yet what makes it meaningful to speak of Philhellenism, as opposed to a cheerful evocation of Greek themes, is the fact that Winckelmann and Herder articulated a deeply ethical engagement with Greece. It embodied a variety of ethical values and aspirations with unequaled beauty. This recognition was consummated with pedagogical fervor and accompanied by the pathos of a profound rupture with modern life. All of these features of their relation to Greece lent distinctive tones to the conversation that became German Philhellenism.³

The ideals discerned by them in ancient Greece were of two kinds. The first, weighted toward the earlier, Homeric, and more archaic period of Greek life, celebrated a raw, tumultuous humanity, in harmony with nature, reveling in the primitive and natural poetry that was also law, dance that was also social order, and epic verse that flowed out of immediate feeling and lived experience. The unity of poetry, law, dance, epic, and life was uncontrived. This was the Greece of the young Herder, enmeshed in and drawing upon his understanding of a wider antiquity. The second ideal was a feeling that gravitated toward a summit, and sought to fix there the boundaries of a perennial beauty. That summit was Greek bodily form, captured for posterity in the outstanding examples of sculpture and embodying not only the highest conception of beauty but also bearing witness to the noblest and happiest condition of mankind. This was the Greece of Winckelmann, raised above and separated from a wider antiquity that shone much less brightly.

Both ideals converged on the celebration of a manly youth, naïve and natural for Herder, noble and heroic for Winckelmann. Youth was understood both as the prime of the life of an individual and in terms of the place of the Hellenic world in the philosophy of history: Greece was the youth of mankind. And yet, for them, Greece was not only an ideal, but again, a rich historical formation, a complex of histories and institutions, possessed of fragility and subject to the vicissitudes of history. The philhellenic conversation initiated by Winckelmann and Herder was thus also a confrontation between two powerful impulses: the idealizing and the historicizing. The dialectic of ideal and historicity at the heart of German Philhellenism engendered significant problems and aporias that, as we shall see, disturbed and enriched that conversation.

WINCKELMANN AND THE PRIMACY OF VISUAL ART

“To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.”⁴ With these words in the famous Discourse on the Origins of Inequality of 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed to the perils of the sense of sight, the sense through which, as Michael Sonenscher pointed out, Kant would later interpret Rousseau’s account of corruption.⁵ Since the high point of Winckelmann’s encounter with Greece took place through the medium of sight, and since first Denis Diderot in 1765 and then the art historian Ernst Gombrich in 1971, as well as other scholars since, asserted the proximity of Winckelmann’s style and aims to those of the Genevan philosopher, it is worth beginning with an examination of this issue.⁶ Winckelmann, the cobbler’s son, wrote Wolfgang Schadewaldt in 1941, saw with new eyes. Think of the miracle of this man, who had spent his life in unspeakable hardship, until he came to Dresden and Rome, and, seemingly without any prior “schooling of the eyes, suddenly he commanded that deep seeing and contemplating, with which he became for us Germans the discoverer of a new reality.”⁷ That reality consisted for Winckelmann in images; his imagination always returned to a visual representation as the most compelling embodiment of the qualities and ideas that attracted and moved him. Yet the first images that fascinated him were not those of sculpture, to which at first he had no access, but rather those drawn from Homer’s epic poetry.

Sitting in his modest rooms in Seehausen in the hours of night, reading the Iliad, he was captivated by the verses, Schadewaldt tells us, where the strength of the body in combat or competition come to the fore. Most of his excerpts concern the “higher dispositions”: courage, unbending toughness, unshakeable loyalty, generosity in taking back a harsh word, exuberance in proclaiming one’s own excellence, and finally, friendship.⁸ The speed and vivacity of the narrative, the deep impression made on him by the Greek language, with which he was intimately familiar, and the sanctuary that this heroic world offered to an impoverished North German schoolteacher in those sleepless nights, marked the beginning of an encounter that would take him to Rome and to international fame. Out of the pages of the Iliad appeared to flow an exhilarating and beautiful negation not only of his adversity but of the world of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, of its taste and attitudes. Winckelmann yearned above all to conquer the heart of contemporary German youth. Yet it was not by means of Homeric verses that this beautiful negation was to be instilled in the hearts of northern youth. It was visual allegory that instead had the ultimate sanction of eternity for Winckelmann and offered the means of recuperating and emulating, so far as anyone was able, the virtue and nobility of the epic. Sight, therefore, and not language, was the primary means of invoking the redemptive power of Homeric Greece. This distinction lies at the root of the divergent philhellenic wholes alluded to by Winckelmann and Herder. It also reverses the trajectory of corruption attributed by Rousseau to sight.

To understand how this came about we must bear in mind, ironically enough, that quality of Winckelmann’s mind that rendered him most Rousseauian in the eyes of subsequent commentators: the preference for nature over artifice and for simplicity over elaboration. Through the Essay on Allegory, published in 1766 and regarded by Winckelmann’s contemporaries as his least successful work, he set out to provide an instructive manual for artists.⁹ “Every allegorical sign,” he admonished, “should contain within itself the most diverse characteristics of the represented thing, and the simpler it is, the more easily it will be grasped,” it should not require explanatory text. The essay was also a sustained reflection on the relationship between concept and image, between language and idea. “Nature itself,” he continued, “has been the teacher of allegory and this language appears more proper to it than the subsequently invented signs of our ideas: for it is fundamental and gives a true image of things, which are found in few words of the oldest languages, and to paint thoughts is undoubtedly older than the writing of the same, as we know from the poetry of the peoples of the ancient and modern world.”¹⁰ The ideal situation always at the forefront of his mind posited a youthful and impressionable seer confronted with the purest, simplest, and thus most compelling representation of nobleness and beauty. To evoke and instill in others the will to recreate this ideal situation was at the heart of all Winckelmann’s writings as well as at the heart of his own experiences in Dresden and Rome.

Homer, his first sustained encounter with the Greek world, was in any case a herald of images: “he turned the reflections of wisdom concerning human passions into sensual images and thereby gave his concepts at the same time a body, which he enlivened with enticing images.”¹¹ And the very limitations of language in Homeric Greece lay at the root of that heroic ethic Winckelmann ardently admired. General ideas of virtue and vice could hardly be represented visually in those days, he explained, and in the times of this poet, the universal concept of virtue was not known, the Greek word that subsequently had that meaning, then referred only to courage. In the best times of the ancients only the heroic virtues, those that raise human dignity, were practiced. Ideas that had the opposite effect were not represented in public monuments. While modern education concentrated on the purity of manners and external duties, the ancients sought to make hearts responsive to true honor and to accustom the youth to a masculine and magnanimous virtue, which disdained all petty schemes and even life itself, when the result of an enterprise did not correspond to the greatness of its idea.¹² The ancient world itself, therefore, retained Homeric virtue, with its simplicity, its linguistic humility and unity, in public visual representations.

But before these mature reflections and just prior to his departure for Rome, Winckelmann wrote his famous manifesto, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Sculpture and Painting, published in Dresden the same year as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.¹³ Winckelmann’s historic deed, wrote Walther Rehm, was the discovery and awakening of Greekdom from within the German mind. It was first of all a reaction against the Roman world and its baroque successor. Rehm cited Giambattista Vico’s view of 1725 that the Romans and not the Greeks were the heroes of the ancient world. In Piranesi’s work the baroque-classical pathos of Roman-heroic majesty and the monumentality of its historical past were emphatically expressed.¹⁴ The 1755 essay has thus come to be seen as the first salvo of anti-Roman revolt, a paean to an antibaroque aesthetic.

The only way for us to become great, the essay stated, is to imitate the ancients. This injunction was followed by a speculative reflection on the causes of ancient Greek beauty and the means by which it was harnessed. The first models of beauty Winckelmann mentioned were Spartan youths. They were made to do bodily exercises from the age of seven; they slept on the bare earth and were trained in wrestling and swimming. In the exercises, he said, the great games were a powerful incentive for young Greeks, and the laws prescribed a ten-month preparation period for the Olympic Games, preparations that should take place at Elis itself. The greatest prizes were more often given to youths than men, as Pindar’s odes told us. The highest longing of youth was to emulate the divine Diagoras of Rhodes a famous Olympic victor. The schools of the artists were therefore the gymnasia. And not only the artists but the wise went there too, including Socrates. It was there that sculptors like Phidias studied the imprint that young wrestlers had made on the sand.¹⁵ Thus for Winckelmann, there was a direct causal link between the competitive exercises done in preparation for Olympic contests and the masculine form with which artists approximated divine beauty.

The frequent opportunities for the observation of nature, he explained, made the Greek artists go even further. They began to imagine certain universal ideas of beauties, both of individual parts and of whole bodily proportions, which should surpass even nature itself: their original idea was a nature created in the very understanding of the mind. This is how the Greeks fashioned gods and men.¹⁶ It was at this point that the differences with Bernini, renowned sculptor of the baroque, came to the fore. Unlike the baroque, the Greeks creatively synthesized what different parts of nature offered in order to surpass it. To imitate nature in a single object, as Bernini advocated, was to make a copy or a portrait; it was the path to “Dutch figures and forms,” whereas the Greeks took the path of universal beauty. “Our nature,” Winckelmann asserted, “will not easily create for itself so perfect a body as that of Antinous Admirantus and the idea will never imagine the more than human attributes of a beautiful deity in the Vatican Apollo.” Thus the imitation of the ancients, he confidently concluded, will teach us to become clever more speedily, because it finds in one single concept that which is scattered in the whole of nature.¹⁷

Alongside this idea of ideal beauty, this essay expressed what was to become a fundamental philhellenic trope in Germany. This was a twofold affirmation of the peculiarly Greek sense of measure and proportion. The line that separates the full from the superfluous of nature is very small, Winckelmann explained, and the greatest masters have deviated on both sides from its not always discernible border. He who wanted to avoid an emaciated contour has fallen into voluptuousness and he who wanted to avoid the latter has fallen into the opposite.¹⁸ Winckelmann’s great biographer Carl Justi explained how his idea of beauty and proportion was derived from ideas about drawing advanced by the painters Anton Raphael Mengs and Hogarth. Winckelmann, he explained, whose only attempts in art consisted of drawing, could not conceive of be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   The Age of Winckelmann and the Young Herder I: Encounters
• 2   Winckelmann and the Young Herder II: Historicity and Symbols
• 3   The Women of Athens I: The Varieties of Enlightenment History
• 4   The Women of Athens II: Courtesans, Heroines, and the Greek Polis
• 5   Iphigenie auf Tauris: German Theatre and Philhellenism
• 6   The Legacies of Iphigenie auf Tauris
• 7   From Sturm und Drang to Italy
• 8   The Loss of Paradise and the History of Freedom: German Philhellenism in the 1790s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index