The German Genius

theater—unlike a temple—implied that the building was part of a city. It was Rufus’s name for his theater, Theatrum Herculanense, that confirmed the city as Herculaneum. Excavations at nearby Pompeii began in April 1748.
    Winckelmann visited Herculaneum and Pompeii twice, and although his excursions were not popular (the excavators were worried that he would steal their thunder), Winckelmann managed to familiarize himself with the discoveries at the Vesuvian cities, with the internal politics of the excavations, and with the contents of the more important finds at the Villa dei Papiri. 12
    It was this series of coincidences, rivalries, and sensational discoveries that provided the background to Winckelmann’s publications that would prove so important in stimulating the third Greek revival. These consisted of, first, a series of Sendschreiben , or Open Letters, on the discoveries south of Naples; second, Winckelmann’s main work, Die Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums ( The History of the Art of Antiquity ; 1764); and third, his Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished Relics of Antiquity; 1767). As E. M. Butler, puts it, however, “His magnum opus is in a class apart, for it completely revolutionized the study of art by treating it organically (Winckelmann was the first to do so) as part of the growth of the human race.” 13
    The History of the Art of Antiquity is divided into two parts. The first is more conceptual, examining the phenomenon of art itself, its very “essence.” Here, in a broad way, Winckelmann compares the art of different periods and peoples. The second part concentrates particularly on the tradition of Greek art, from early times to its decline with the fall of the Roman Empire, and it was Winckelmann’s beautifully written description of this “trajectory” that had such impressive consequences.
    For his argument, Winckelmann relied on the new statuary being excavated south of Naples though he did his best to amalgamate the discoveries there with the writings of Pliny (Pliny’s Natural History , completed in A.D. 79, is as much an art history of the classical world as a geography). Pliny argued that most of the famous ancient Greek artists produced their masterpieces in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. For him, Greek sculpture achieved classic perfection while Phidias was at the peak of his powers, in the mid-fifth century B.C. , but Pliny also insisted, famously, that after the age of Alexander the Great “cessavit deindre ars” (art thereafter was inactive or ceased). Building on what he had seen south of Naples, Winckelmann refined Pliny’s argument, discerning, he said, a “high” austere “early classical” style, associated with artists such as Phidias, and a “beautiful or graceful late classical style associated with subsequent masters such as Praxitiles and Lysippus.” His identification of an evolution, from one style to the other, a refinement from the “hard stylized” forms of the archaic, to the “austere, early classic,” with the graceful “late classic” leading to overelaboration, and then to decline, suggested a pleasing, organic, coherent system, the sheer symmetry of which many found irresistible. 14
    It didn’t matter that Winckelmann used the evidence of statues that have subsequently come to be recognized as inferior Roman copies of earlier Greek masterpieces. What mattered is that, whereas classical scholars had previously speculated in a vague way about the rise and fall of art in antiquity, Winckelmann identified instead a sequence of clearly defined phases. More than this, Winckelmann also argued that the classical period of art in antiquity coincided with what other historians called the golden age of Greek culture, that period between the close of the Persian Wars in the early fifth century B.C. and the Macedonian invasion of Greece toward the end of the fourth century B.C . Whereas previously, ancient monuments had invariably been classified according to their iconography, or subject matter, following Winckelmann they were categorized stylistically, with reference to their period of origin. This transformed connoisseurship.
    Winckelmann’s other innovation was his fusion of history and aesthetics, “in which the essence of a tradition would be located historically at a single privileged moment when it supposedly achieved perfection.” In linking artistic “perfection” with a particular historical period, he transformed the