The German Genius

brand-new University of Berlin (founded in 1810), were to be the clearest embodiment of the German idea of humanism (all of which are discussed below).
    Just as, in the Italian Renaissance, Pope Leo X reorganized La Sapienza in Rome, so in Germany a completely new idea of learning, which fundamentally shaped the modern world, was evolved. There were new forms of literature and new forms of inquiry, in which philology once again formed the core. Archaeology—the modern equivalent of antiquarianism—underwent its heroic age. This third renaissance was without question primarily German.
    T HE F ATHER OF C LASSICAL A RCHAEOLOGY AND THE F OUNDER OF A RT H ISTORY
     
    If the Aristotelian renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of Arabic translations of his masterpieces in Toledo, Lisbon, Segovia, and Cordoba, after the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christians, and if the Platonic revival owed a great deal to scholars such as Giovanni Aurispa, who brought back from just one visit to Constantinople on the eve of the Turkish conquest no fewer than 238 Greek manuscripts, the same honor in the eighteenth century goes to Karl Weber (1767–1832) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). Winckelmann is the better-known figure but recent scholarship credits Weber, a military engineer in the Swiss guard, with being the man whose great efficiency and devotion to detail ensured that the excavations south of Naples—at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae, in particular the Villa dei Papiri—were actually carried out in a workmanlike way, and thus enabled the groundwork to be completed on which Winckelmann would base his groundbreaking survey of classical art. 4
    Born in Stendal in Prussia in 1717, the son of a cobbler, Winckelmann grew up in a house with just one room, which was also his father’s workshop. He pestered his parents to give him an education that was beyond their means and, in one way and another, found his way to Berlin, to study under Christian Tobias Damm, “one of the few men then alive in Germany who exalted Greek above Latin at a time when the study of the Greek language was almost entirely neglected.” 5 After Berlin, Winckelmann transferred to the universities of Halle and Jena, where he studied medicine, philosophy, and mathematics, supporting himself as a tutor. 6 He would read Greek till midnight, sleep in an old coat in an armchair until four in the morning, when he would resume reading. 7 In the summer months he slept on a bench with a block of wood tied to his foot which fell down at the slightest movement and wakened him.
    Winckelmann’s interest in art and antiquities was nurtured after he obtained employment as a research assistant (as we would say) to Count Bünau near Dresden (which boasted more art than did any other city in Germany), but the crucial episode was his meeting with the papal nuncio in the city, who offered Winckelmann the opportunity to work in Rome—provided he convert to Catholicism. 8
    Winckelmann arrived in Rome in 1755. For him and others like him, the statues in Rome were invariably regarded as the most important masterpieces of ancient art. 9 He began in the service of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who had a villa just outside Rome, where he was made librarian and given charge of the antiquities collection. But the fame he would soon acquire had much more to do with several visits he made to Herculaneum and Pompeii, just then attracting widespread interest.
    They had been “rediscovered” in 1738 when the Spanish military engineer Rocque Joachin Alcubierre was ordered to survey a site and prepare plans for a new summer palace for King Charles VII of Bourbon at Portici, on the Italian coast south of Naples. This was not entirely accidental. Local residents in the nearby town of Resina had long obtained their water by drilling artesian wells and were fully aware that there were ruins underground—chance finds of antiquities had been occurring since Renaissance times. Alcubierre was instructed by the king to “make some grottoes and see what might be discovered.” 10
    Excavations began in October 1738. In some places the volcanic lava was fifty feet thick and it was not until November that a marble Hercules was recovered, and it was the middle of January the following year before an inscription—of L. Annius Mammianus Rufus—revealed that a structure originally believed to be a temple was in fact a theater. 11 This reorientation was important, for a