WINCKELMANN, JOHANN JOACHIM. - Archaeologist, art historian and philosopher, b. at Stendal in Prussia on 3 Dec. 1717, d. at Trieste on 8 June 1768. Of humble origins, he studied at the Universities of Halle and Jena; he then perfected his education at Dresden, whence, having converted to Catholicism with the help of Monsignor Alberico Archinto, nuncio of Bologna, he departed for Italy.
When he arrived in Rome in Nov. 1755 he was 38 years old and already possessed an extraordinary cultural preparation, oriented in particular 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 particularly in Italy, archaeological studies were being transferred onto a genuinely scientific plane. And in Rome W. resided for the rest of his life, dedicating his activity to the study and the arrangement of the collections of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who hosted him in his villa on the Via Salaria, and of the Vatican Museums.
Nevertheless the greater significance of W.'s work is connected to his work as a writer in the field of archaeology and as a historian of ancient art, while his influence is to be considered decisive for certain aspects of the new orientation of taste. The fundamental concepts expressed by W. are all connected to the idea that he had been forming of Hellas and of Greek art. These were his dream and he had so enthusiastic and almost hallucinatory a perception of the beauty of that vanished world as to confirm himself, in his lucid visionary quality, in the idea that that beauty could and should still be pursued by systematically applying the canons of a doctrine of art. He indeed proclaimed that for an artist the study of ancient art is preferable to that of nature, because « the beauty of the Greek statues can be discovered before the beauty of nature can be discovered and consequently the former is more touching, less scattered, more gathered into a whole ». Indeed, he added, « the 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 the same ». Orientations such as these presided over the development of some of the most characteristic aspects of neoclassical taste. Important too was his activity as an archaeologist and more as a historian of ancient art, for having imagined and realized in his publications the idea of a history of art not conceived as a series of biographical or monographic essays, as had happened until then, but as a concatenation of facts and phenomena determined by their own laws, with respect to which the very personalities of the creators, that is of the artists, remain in a certain sense in the background; a history of the ideas and of the forms that those ideas came to assume in the dialectic of art, understood as the supreme activity of the spirit. This simple mention suffices to understand the extraordinary importance assumed by W.'s work for all 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 the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (ibid. 1764) and Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst (ibid. 1767), as well as the Monumenti antichi inediti spiegati e illustrati (2 vols., Rome 1767).
W.'s works have been published several times also in unified collections. Translated into Italian, they appeared for the first time in a complete edition at Prato in 1830-33. But already previously the Storia delle arti del disegno had been published at Milan in 1779 and at Rome in 1783-84.
Bibliography4 works
Emilio Lavagnino