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This chapter focuses on Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a student of Baumgarten who later became one of the most celebrated writers of his day. Winckelmann is generally regarded as the father of art history. Winckelmann's influence on his age was by all accounts enormous, and he became almost a cult figure in his own lifetime. With the possible exception of Klopstock, no German writer was held in such high regard. Winckelmann was admired by every major thinker of his generation — Lessing, Abbt, Nicolai, Mendelssohn, and Herder — and he was virtually canonized in the Goethezeit. In the early 1800s Goethe made him the patron saint of his own paganism and neo-classicism, invoking his memory to taunt the emerging Romantic movement. But the romantics too sanctified him. Even after his rebellion against neo-classicism, Friedrich Schlegel still revered ‘der heilige Winckelmann’.

This chapter complicates the received notion of the Magna Graecia's modern discovery during the 'Hellenic turn’ of eighteenth-century Europe. The historical geography of Leandro Alberti and others shows earlier Renaissance antiquarianism's perceptions of Greek South Italy as a place of picturesque natural beauty and lost antiquity, seemingly irreconcilable with the wider Italian classical past. The eighteenth-century rediscovery of Paestum is examined within its Neapolitan intellectual context, which includes the figures of Giambattista Vico, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi and even J.J. Winckelmann, and in relation to the emergence of vase studies analysis that reveals the differential investment of Italian and foreign scholars in Magna Graecia, with latter bent on a search for an ideal conception of classical Greece that would effectively relegate Magna Graecia to the margins of classical study.

This chapter provides background on the collaborators involved in Perséphone by recreating from archival sources their meeting at Ida Rubinstein’s house on 20 October 1933, about six months before the premiere. It provides a historical account of each collaborator’s negotiations with Rubinstein and involvement in the production, before then describing the theatrical context in which the performance took place. Both the collaborators themselves and danced productions in France in this period (after the death of Diaghilev and demise of his Ballets Russes) were plagued by melancholia. This backdrop serves as a point of departure for a theoretical discussion of the connections between neoclassicism, melancholia, Antigone, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century classicist aesthetics, and Walter Benjamin’s notion of Baroque allegory, which grounds the arguments presented in this book.

Chapter two takes account for the significance of German historical thought in Oxford in the second half of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek, helped to re‐organise the Classics curriculum at the University, by implanting and centralizing Plato's dialogues on the syllabus. His tutorials were designed to mimic Socratic elenchus. But the issue of Greek pederasty troubled this issue of Greek exemplarity over the making of the Victorian man, an issue Jowett pondered in his translations of Plato, as explored in this chapter. Walter Pater came to be one of the Professor's most famous pupils, re‐directing Jowett's interpretations for his own ends. The issue of ancient homoerotics, as this chapter continues to examine, offered Pater an alternative way into thinking about the relationship between ancient and modern histories, between ancient and modern masculinities.

With the mind serving as fertile ground for person-centric as well as others' ideas and insights, reading becomes a strong avenue for creating, shaping, and altering perspectives. Decoding the multifaceted dynamics of reading and measuring how it enriches or influences the lives of readers necessitate a contextual distinction between novel (i.e., book) reading and literary reading. This chapter elucidates the relevance and influence of poems, ancient mythology, and modern reading in evaluating the impact of reading and that of actual text on readers' understanding. It details the ideologies purported by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Friedrich Schlegel. Moreover, the chapter discusses the nature and repercussions of esoteric interests rooted in literature against those of contemporary communicative reading strategies with which the readership may more liberally associate.

The first chapter seeks to redirects classicists’ attention to Winckelmann by examining the tradition of panegyric of him that played a central role in the self-representation of German classical philology from the 1830s until the end of the Second World War. This tradition, the roots of which can be traced back to the 1790s, resulted in a picture of Winckelmann as a founding hero of the modern study of antiquity and as an inspirational figure whose remarkable life and character were held up as an example to future generations. It traces the vicissitudes of this picture, explores its role in helping to ground the disciplinary and scholarly community of Altertumswissenschaft, and considers how its persistence has obscured reflection upon how Winckelmann’s ideas and arguments contributed to the disciplinization of the classical scholarship in previous centuries.

Chapter 4 develops an analysis of Winckelmann’s most famous work: the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. The first two sections consider its sources and structure, seeking to account for its bipartite division and for Winckelmann’s claim to have provided a ‘system’ (Lehrgebäude). Intellectual antecedents (ancient sources, Vasari, Caylus, and Enlightenment philosophic historians such as Voltaire and Montesquieu) are discussed, and it is argued that the historical narrative of Greek art provided in Part 2 is intended to support the causal analysis of Part 1 by demonstrating its validity for a period from which relatively rich source material survives. The final section discusses selected responses to the Geschichte from the 1760s, in order to demonstrate that their reaction to the Geschichte was consistent with the connoisseurial expectations established by his earlier writings.

This chapter locates the original impulse of Britain’s love-affair with Greek epigram at the start of the nineteenth century, in a collaborative miscellany which naturalized the genre within British literary tradition and laid the groundwork for a modern critical language of epigram-connoisseurship, founded on ancient practice. Its editors, Bland and Merivale, eulogized the Hellenistic poet and prototypical anthologist Meleager as a Romantic poet, establishing his predominance within the history of his genre by extending to epigram Johann Winckelmann's ideas of rise, peak, and decline.An important context is identified in a new kind of quarterly literary-political periodical which turned collective into cultural memory within a newly concretized public sphere. The Reviews are where Greek epigram got its first foothold in public print, and remained a hotbed of Anthology translation for much of the century

Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art offer a veritable ‘world history of art’, and have led to his being called the real ‘father of art history’, but at their heart is a close identification of beauty with ‘the ideal’ and of art with ‘the classical’—and hence with (Greek) antiquity. With reference to the legacies of Winckelmann and Kantian aesthetic theory, this chapter begins by explicating the main features of Hegel’s aesthetics: the notion of ‘the ideal’ and of art’s vocation to reveal ‘the truth’ sensuously; the classification of artistic styles into Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic; and the division of basic art forms into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. The chapter tackles each of these art forms in turn, focusing on Hegel’s sources and understanding of their role in Greek and Roman civilizations. His discussions of the Greek temple, Greek sculpture, epic, lyric, and comedy are relatively neglected, but all contribute as much as tragedy to his Winckelmannian understanding of the Greeks as ‘the people of art’ and of the ‘sculptural’ nature of the Greek mind. Here his Romans play counterpoint, as a derivative and aesthetically uncreative people—except in the genre of satire, which also fills out Hegel’s portrait of Roman ‘prose’, alienation, and increasing self-awareness. Though each of the art-forms peaks in a certain historical period, Hegel tends to associate each peak with the ‘classical’ ideal—an association that may help to illuminate his controversial statements about the ‘end of art’ in the modern, Romantic style.

An examination of the influences of German thought on French dance theory, an area of scholarship that has been neglected, but is beginning to emerge in the interest in Nietzsche’s influence on Valéry. Lifar epitomized the idea of the dancer as animated marble figure sculpture, an idea traced back to Winkelmann and Hegel’s Lectures on the Fine Arts. Lifar operates in a triangle of cultural influences including France, Germany, and Russia. This chapter thus reveals the influence of eighteenth-century German aesthetics on the Russo-French theory of ballet neoclassicism. Particular attention is paid to Lifar’s interpretation of Apollo in George Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète in its first years.