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Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation

1986; The MIT Press; Volume: 37; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/778521

1536-013X

Michael Fried,

Historical and Literary Studies

In an essay that has long been recognized as perhaps the founding statement of international neoclassicism as well as one of the key early instances of modern thinking about the arts, Johann Winckelmann's Reflections on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Ancient Greeks (1755),' a desire not only to locate but actually to renew a lost origin is everywhere in play. But throughout that essay Winckelmann's first published work originality and repetition turn out to be implicated in one another in ways that threaten to derail, and in fact significantly reroute, the ostensible argument on which the successful realization of the desire for renewal is held to depend. Obviously no interpretation of the whole of the Reflections is feasible in the short space available here, but by making just a few points in some detail I hope at least to demonstrate both the complexity and the interest of a text that, in a certain sense, we may only now be learning how to read. My first point concerns the contrast Winckelmann repeatedly draws between the greatness of the ancient Greek artists and the inferiority of the moderns. More precisely, it concerns his attempt partly to account for that contrast by pursuing the implications of what he takes to be the historical truth that the ancient Greeks actually possessed an all but unimaginable degree of bodily beauty. The most beautiful body among us [among the moderns], he writes, would perhaps be as much inferior to the most beautiful Greek body, as