WINCKELMANN, JOHANN JOACHIM. — Archaeologist, art historian, and philosopher, born in Stendal, Prussia, on 3 December 1717, died in Trieste on 8 June 1768. Of humble origins, he studied at the Universities of Halle and Jena; he then pursued further studies in Dresden and, having converted to Catholicism with the assistance of Monsignor Alberico Archinto, nuncio of Bologna, departed for Italy.
When he arrived in Rome in November 1755, he was thirty-eight years old and already possessed an extraordinary cultural preparation, directed especially toward the history, languages, and art of the ancients. In Rome he found an environment particularly suited to developing his interests, at a time when, throughout Europe, and especially in Italy, archaeological studies were being placed on a genuinely scientific footing. And in Rome W. resided for the rest of his life, devoting his activity to the study and arrangement of the collections of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who lodged him in his villa on the Via Salaria, and of the Vatican Museums.
Nevertheless, the greater significance of W.’s work is connected with his work as a writer in the field of archaeology and as a historian of ancient art, while his influence must be regarded as decisive in certain aspects of the new orientation of taste. The fundamental concepts expressed by W. are all connected with the idea of Hellas and of Greek art that he had gradually formed. They were his dream, and he had such an enthusiastic and almost hallucinatory perception of the beauty of that vanished world that, in his lucid visionary outlook, he became convinced that this beauty could and ought still to be pursued through the systematic application of the canons of a doctrine of art. He proclaimed, in fact, that for
an artist the study of ancient art is preferable to that of nature, because « the beauty of Greek statues can be discovered before the beauty of nature can be discovered, and consequently the former is more moving, less dispersed, more concentrated into a whole ». Indeed, he added, « connoisseurs and imitators of Greek works find in those masterpieces not only the most beautiful nature, but also more than nature, that is, certain ideal beauties of nature itself ». These orientations guided the development of some of the most characteristic aspects of neoclassical taste. His activity as an archaeologist, and even more as a historian of ancient art, was also important, because in his publications he conceived and implemented the idea of a history of art not understood as a series of biographical or monographic essays, as had been the case until then, but as a concatenation of facts and phenomena determined by their own laws, in relation to which the personalities of the creators themselves, that is, the artists, remain in a certain sense in the background; a history of ideas and of the forms that those ideas gradually assumed in the dialectic of art, understood as the supreme activity of the spirit. This brief reference alone suffices to convey the extraordinary importance assumed by W.’s work for the whole of modern art historiography.
Among W.’s principal works are remembered the essay published in Germany before his transfer to Rome: Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Dresden 1755), the subsequent Erläuterung der Gedanken etc. (ibid. 1756), and above all Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (ibid. 1764) and Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst (ibid. 1767), as well as Monumenti antichi inediti spiegati e illustrati (2 vols., Rome 1767).
W.’s works were also published several times in collected editions. Translated into Italian, they first appeared in a complete edition at Prato in 1830–33. But even earlier, the Storia delle arti del disegno had been published in Milan in 1779 and in Rome in 1783–84.