The German Genius

history of art, making it important in a sense that it had not been before. That gave it a contemporary relevance, too, suggesting that there was little prospect of any real revival in Winckelmann’s own time. 15
    Especially famous was his description of the Laocoön group in the Vatican. “The universal and predominant characteristic of the Greek masterpieces is a noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur , both in posture and expression. Just as the depths of the sea remain for ever calm, however much the surface may rage, so does the expression of the Greek figures, however strong their passions, reveal a great and dignified soul.”’ (Italics added.) * 16 This analysis had repercussions far wider than such words—however apposite—could have now. The Laocoön’s importance lay in the fact that, having been specifically referred to by Pliny, when it was rediscovered in an excavation in Rome in 1506, it provided a direct link with the past. Now in the Vatican, this classic marble sculpture shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons being attacked by a fierce sea serpent. Whatever our reactions today to what many people think is an overwrought monument, at the time Winckelmann’s arguments had “the force of revelation.” His arguments were considered so original, and so incisive, that he became a national figure almost overnight: “Except for Frederick the Great of Prussia, he was the most renowned German between Leibniz and Goethe.” The Laocoön itself became a cult object, discussed everywhere. 17
    Among the implications of Winckelmann’s argument, picked up on by Herder, Goethe, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Hegel, was the notion that there is a historical divide separating ancient from modern culture, where modern culture is in fact “the antithesis of the integrated wholeness of ancient Greek culture, of its naïve simplicity and centredness, and of its unmediated relation to itself and nature.” 18 Whether one agrees or not, Winckelmann’s achievement was that he took beauty seriously, as the center of existence, not as embellishment. Above all, he suggested that if we allow the Greek ideal to influence and permeate our lives, we can hope to reproduce the conditions necessary for great art; we can attain, in other words, a form of perfection. 19
    This was all very heady. As George Santayana was to tease: “How pure the blind eyes of statues, how chaste the white folds of the marble drapes.” 20 But beyond Winckelmann’s inimitable style, beyond his idea of the ennobling power of beauty, it is possible to see an even deeper significance in his work. He ignored the other side of Greek life—the tragic suffering, the priapism, the orgiastic festivals of the wine god, everything Nietzsche was to call “Dionysian”—and this is surely because the stoicism that Winckelmann admired in the Greeks had qualities of Puritanism about it. Greek art, for Winckelmann, was the very opposite of baroque exuberance, of the “hedonism and licentiousness” of the rococo, which he and the emerging German middle classes associated with aristocratic decadence and the courtly French culture whose grip on Friedrich the Great and the ruling classes in Germany they resented. Winckelmann set an example to an entire generation of poets and thinkers of the golden age and helped them to accomplish something in the shadow of their King: the remaking of German culture and cultural institutions. The fact that Greece, a “powerless and almost extinct nation,” should have such an influential cultural legacy appealed to the German Bildungsbürger . It had parallels with their own predicament. 21
    “The ‘Greek Revival,’ which Winckelmann initiated,” says Henry Hatfield, “profoundly altered the course of German literature: many of its greatest writers from Lessing to our own times would have written differently without his precept and example.” It is not too much to say that it affected the entire history of Western taste, as far afield as Thomas Jefferson. Not only is Winckelmann looked upon now as the founder of classical archaeology; he may be said to be one of the fathers of historicism; he had a formative influence on Herder and through him on the writing of history. Philhellenism took over as one of the defining characteristics of the Bildungsbürgertum , the educated middle class, influencing not only the universities but even the state bureaucracy. To Hegel, “…Winckelmann is to be