Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 - 1768) can be regarded as the founder of the Histoire of art and the Archéologie as modern disciplines. It was the precursor of the Néo-classicisme German and European and there remains the author of a work of reference and a correspondence very often quoted.

Years of training

Born with Stendal in the east from the Germany, of modest milieu (his/her father is shoe-maker), it was to become the world expert in architecture of the Antiquité and the principal theorist of the movement Néoclassique of the 18th century.

After having undertaken studies of Protestant theology unwillingly at the University of Market (Saxony-Anhalt), and to have done what one named then his Humanités, it lived modestly like tutor near noble children of families.

Then, in 1748, it was made engage like Bibliothécaire near large the Historien, the count Heinrich von Bünau, in Nöthnitz close to Dresden. After it had converted with Catholicism, in 1754, this last, made him open the doors of the fabulous collection of art of the Cour of Saxony and that of the fame.

Works

It then publishes in 1755 its work: Gedanken über die Nachahmung DER griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst , Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in painting and the sculpture which will have an international repercussion.

Auguste III, voter of Saxony and king de Pologne, grant a consequent pension to him to continue his studies in Rome, and to study the works of art of Antiquity in situ .

It is invited to work at the pontifical court as Bibliothécaire of the cardinal Albani, then Prélat of Antiquities and Scripteur of the Bibliothèque vaticane.

During following years, it will publish:

a fictitious counterpart of its first test of 1755: Sendschreiben über die Gedanken ( Epistle on the Reflections ), and of an answer to this counterpart: Erlaüterung der Gedanken , Explanation of the reflections )

in French: Description of the engraved stones of fire Baron de Stosch .

in German, with the address of his benefactors: Über die Baukunst der Alten (1762, Remarks on the architecture of Old the ), increased by a report on the temples of Paestum.

the Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung of Schönen in der Kunst und dem Unterrichte in derselben , 1769 ( Of the reflections on the feeling of beautiful in the structures and on the means of acquiring it, first French translation , 1786).

in Italian: Monumenti antichi inediti, spiegati ED illustrati (1767), its history of art, model of encyclopedic work during more than one century, which was very often quoted and which contributed to educate the taste of the intellectual elite.

Unconditional defender of the Greek Art, it sees there the absolute characteristics of the Beau, it thus seems an adversary of the Baroque and Rococo.

Its intimate and extraordinary knowledge of works, acquired in particular when he worked with the the Vatican and at the time of the excavations of Herculanum, is put at the service of what he regards as his mission: to form the taste of the intellectual elite of the Occident. The formula which it finds to characterize the gasoline of Greek art, “ noble simplicity and calm size ”, will inspire by the generations of artists and architects after him like Benjamin West and Jacques-Louis David, without forgetting the theorists of art and writers German like Lessing, Goethe and Schiller.

J.J. Winckelmann rejects the sensual nature of art, manifestation of passions of the heart, and invents the “beautiful white marble antique” (being unaware of as its contemporaries that it was covered with polychromy), whose esthetics is founded on the idealization of the reality and conditioned by political freedom, the democracy.

Basing itself on work of the Count de Caylus in which it recognized an important influence, it contributed to make archeology rather a science than a rich person collector pastime. Its principal work is the Histoire of the Art of the Antiquity (1764), in which it distinguishes four phases: the old style , the high style , the beautiful style and the time of the imitateurs , who always have course today (“antiquated style”, “first classicism of the 5th century”, then “second classicism of IVè”, finally “style hellenistic”). It conceives this succession with the image of the biological evolution of a living organism.

These two fundamental works were immediately translated into French.

In addition he wrote for the young Baltic aristocrat Friedrich von Berg the Traité on the capacity to feel the Beautiful (1763), where one can read: “As the human beauty must be conceived, to be included/understood, in only one general idea, I noticed that those which are attentive only with the beauties of the female sex and which are not or hardly moved by those by ours seldom have innate faculty, total and sharp to feel the beauty in Article This beauty will seem to them imperfect in the art of the Greeks, considering the greatest beauties of this one raise more of our sex other. ” This enthusiasm for the male beauty is undoubtedly revealing of its homosexual leanings.

The “novel” of its death

Whereas it made stage with Trieste, on June 8th 1768, Winckelmann was assassinated in its room by Francesco Arcangeli, taken again justice remaining in the same inn, with which it had shown ancient medals that the empress Marie-Therese had offered to him. It was buried in the cathedral of Trieste.

An important lawsuit took place, at the conclusion which the murderer was condemned to the torture of the wheel. In spite of more or less oiseuses speculations on the motive for the crime (homosexual crime passionnel, murder financed by a competitor archeologist, diplomatic circles, the Jesuits, etc), the version the most probable residence that of the foul crime. It is however not interdict with the novelists and amateurs of crusty various facts to embroider around this " mystère".

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