Art and Archaeology

Extract

Passion. Nowadays everything must be done with passion. No ‘personal statement’ for university admission is complete without some sentiment of passionate motivation; you purchase a sandwich and learn that it has been ‘made lovingly’. So is there anything wrong with studying classical archaeology passionately – with the engagement of emotions, or ‘intensity of feeling’ (OED)? The question arises from the very title of a festal volume devoted to a (some would say, the) historical pioneer of the discipline, J. J. Winckelmann: Die Kunst der Griechen mit der Seele suchend. Since it is conventional to translate die Seele as ‘the soul’, immediately we encounter the problem of mind–body dualism, and the question of where passions are to be located in human biology. But let us accept the sense of the phrase as it is being used here. It is, as Goethe recognized in Winckelmann's work, and celebrated accordingly, an ‘awareness’ (Gewahrwerden) of Greek art that was at once intuitive and reasoned; spontaneous, yet developed by patient study (conducted with ‘true German seriousness’ – so deutsch Ernst). Pious remembrance of Winckelmann has been maintained in his homeland virtually ever since his premature death (a ‘thunderbolt’ of awful news, as Goethe described it) in 1768. This year is the 250th since that loss, and will be widely marked. Meanwhile the recent anniversary of Winckelmann's birth – 1717, as a cobbler's son, in Brandenburg – occasions fresh hagiography, and attendant exhibitions, perhaps most notably a show at the Capitoline Museums, documenting an important part of Winckelmann's intense and eventually glorious activity in Rome.