A History of Art History

1790–1810

On August 10, 1792, several thousand volunteer militiamen and insurgents drawn mostly from the Jacobin political club of Paris, radical republicans frustrated by the failure of the Legislative Assembly to broker a royal abdication, attacked the Tuileries Palace. Louis XVI abandoned the palace of his own volition, walked straight through the crowd, and presented himself to the Assembly at the Salle du Manège, the royal equestrian academy commandeered by the legislature in 1789 and located only a few yards from the palace. The king was made a prisoner and the Revolution entered into its most radical and bloody phase.

On August 19, 1792, only nine days after the effective fall of the monarchy, and in the midst of political chaos, the Assembly recognized “the importance of bringing together at the museum”—a museum that did not yet exist—“the paintings and other works of art that are at present to be found dispersed in many locations.” A commission of five artists and a mathematician was given the task of gathering paintings and preparing the Grande Galerie of the Palais du Louvre, the former royal residence, for their display. This was to be the museum of the French people. It is hard to believe that in these weeks and months of turmoil, when state and nation were being ripped apart and stitched together again at the cost of thousands of lives, an art museum could assume such significance. And yet on August 10, 1793, on the first anniversary of the assault on the Tuileries, on the occasion of the first of the great revolutionary festivals, the Muséum Français, also called the Muséum Central des Arts de la République, opened its doors to the people.

At that festival the people beheld the statue of an Egyptian goddess of nature whose breasts spouted the regenerative water that washed away the shameful history of aristocratic entitlement, arbitrary royal authority, and religious superstition. But were not the 537 paintings and 124 sculptures and other objects now on display in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, drawn from the royal collection and confiscated from noble private collections, the most conspicuous souvenirs of privilege and luxury and the most eloquent testimonies to the vitality of religious faith? The roster included all the approved masters of the Italian and French schools, beginning with Perugino and Raphael and extending to Rubens and Rembrandt, and not excluding Pieter Bruegel the Elder. There were many French painters including Pierre Subleyras and Claude-Joseph Vernet. Both Boucher and Greuze were excluded, however. Three paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger made the selection as well as one by Dürer and two works attributed to the Limburg brothers, the Netherlandish minaturists who worked for the French crown in the early fifteenth century. These works, too, betokened the entitlements of the ancien régime. Why were they exempt from the Revolutionary cleansing of the Augean stables? Some commentators did worry that images of the frolics of the pagan gods or the spiritual intoxication of the saints would corrupt the public. The painter Jacques-Louis David, a Jacobin, questioned the value of paintings that “could only encourage bad taste and error.” Casimir Varon, author of the 1794 report of the Conservatoire, as the arts commission was known, admitted the temptation to destroy the tokens of “superstition, flattery, and debauchery,” products of “long centuries of slavery and shame.” Medieval art, too, the product of the darkest superstition—and rightly absent from the Grande Galerie—was vulnerable to revolutionary resentment, as were the statues on church façades that Montfaucon had identified as portraits of French kings. Many were destroyed in 1792 and 1793.

The museum commission ignored these concerns and offered the works not as negative but as positive examples. The arts would edify the nation. The paintings of Raphael, Guido Reni, and even Holbein were unassailable, like household gods rescued from the catastrophe, carried over the threshold of the Revolution and into modernity.

The paradox is easy to explain: the five artists on the commission were academic painters. They believed that the arts flourished through continuity, skills and sensibility passed down from master to pupil. The works themselves, however, grounded in but improving upon nature through convergence on ideal beauty and expression of abstract ideas, overcame the local circumstances of their making. The lessons of the greatest works of art, according to academic theory, were eternally valid. It did not matter that the paintings had been paid for by pampered noblemen and clerics and had adorned salons and churches. As works of art they dominated the world around them, even after they had been translated from the spaces they were made for and into the public domain. And this remains the principal thesis sustaining the public art museum to this day.

The display of Holbein and the Limburg brothers in the Muséum Français suggests, however, that the content of the story told by the career of form, the mythos that painting itself wrote, was unclear.

Although the idea of the public museum was realized in the regicidal passions of 1792 and 1793, already between 1750 and 1779 royal paintings had been on display in two galleries of the Luxembourg Palace. There was no admission fee, though in practice visitors were well-informed insiders, not a general public. For decades there had been discussion of what form a permanent royal museum would take. Other European princely collections offered semipublic access, sometimes to buildings constructed as picture galleries, such as Frederick the Great’s picture gallery at Potsdam (1755–1763). The more comprehensive Fridericianum in Kassel, meanwhile, housing the collections of the Landgrave Frederick II of Hesse-Kassel (1779), was the first building ever conceived as a public museum. The Muséum Français did not represent new thinking about art. What was new was unrestricted public access. The social range of the visitors to the Grande Galerie of the Louvre was immediately remarked upon. Middle-class families from the provinces came to Paris and admired the spaces and the canvases just as they do today. The key to the experience of the museum is freedom of movement. In a museum you are not a participant in a ritual and you are not a guest.

On the walls of the museum at the Louvre hung the products of a continuous modernity that had begun shortly before 1500 and extended in an unbroken chain of adaptations to the present day. The royal and noble collections were not mired in the past but had long since been admitting the most innovative art of the present: Greuze’s Accordée du Village, praised by Diderot; David’s Oath of the Horatii; the genre paintings of Chardin, all eventually absorbed into the national art museum.

Some artists and writers were dissatisfied with the image of continuity between past and present that the museum projected. The Revolution, after all, had proved that it was possible to “correct” history. The Jacobins had disrupted the orderly handing down of values that knit the generations together. The Revolution altered everyone’s sense of their own place in time, and not least the poets and artists born around 1770, who experienced the Revolution in their youth. The Revolution had failed to disrupt the story of form, so encouraging art’s recoil from politics.

In 1802 the critic and poet Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) visited Paris, now accessible to foreigners after the fires of the first Napoleonic wars had cooled, though not the memories of the Revolution itself. He spent days in the galleries of the Louvre, renamed in November of that year the Musée Napoléon, and now stocked with the spoils of victory, paintings and statuary confiscated from the collections and churches of the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy by the armies of the Directory. Schlegel published his impressions in his quarterly, Europa. “I am sensible only to the old painting,” he confessed; “only this I understand and grasp, and only about this can I speak.” He refused to write about the French school or the more recent Italians. Even the Carracci, Guido Reni, and Domenichino left him unmoved. Who could linger over these cold, too-perfect works with the paintings of the early Italian and German schools hanging so close at hand? Schlegel describes what he is seeking:

Not confused piles of people, but rather few and isolated figures, and accomplished with that assiduous study to which the feeling of the value and sanctity of that highest of all hieroglyphs, the human body, is natural.

He is speaking about bodies—soon exclusively about form:

rigorous, even lean forms with sharp contours, which stand out decisively, no grimy chiaroscuro painting in darkness and shadow, but pure relations and masses of colors in clear harmonies.

Nearly everything painted in the previous two and a half centuries is dead to Schlegel. Only ten years after it had opened, the Louvre was already a morgue.

Some few foreign artists working in Italy in the 1790s, outside the academic system, for the first time began to make drawn copies of medieval works, and not for antiquarian purposes. William Young Ottley (1771–1836) came to Rome in 1791. Ottley purchased the Mystic Nativity by Botticelli and in 1798 sent it to London; it was the first painting by Botticelli to leave Italy. Ottley made drawings after still earlier works, such as the thirteenth-century sculpture of the Pisani or the fourteenth-century frescoes at Assisi and Pisa. Ottley was allied with David Pierre Humbert de Superville (1770–1849), a Dutch artist of Swiss origin who had arrived in Rome in 1789 and whose infatuation with the fourteenth-century painters earned him the sobriquet Giottino. Ottley and Super-ville made outline drawings in a spare, clean style meant to capture the simplicity and gravity of the forms. This flouted the drawing manner taught in the academies, which was designed to capture the volumes and masses of the nude human body, and especially the body in tension. The new linear drawing manner had nothing to do with life drawing. Ottley and Superville learned it from older artists in Rome such as the sculptors Antonio Canova, who also made drawings after fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works, and John Flaxman, who copied the frescoes at Orvieto and the Camposanto at Pisa. They had studied the publications of William Hamilton’s collection of vases, and they knew the pottery of Josiah Wedgwood. The new reproductions of antiquity—not Winckelmann’s three-dimensional, desire-generating antiquity but flat images—taught them to see medieval art. They knew the many antiquarian publications from Montfaucon on, including the facsimiles of manuscripts, that reproduced medieval art in linear engravings.

The young artists may have been reading the appendix to the Florentine edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s notes on the art of painting, the so-called Treatise on Painting (1792): this was the Dissertazione of the Florentine antiquarian Giovanni Lami (1697–1770), a short essay defending the reputations of the Italian painters of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. This text had been written in 1757, ahead of its time. Here Lami ignored the technical deficiencies of medieval art in hopes of detecting some quality proof against invidious narratives of progress. In his Dissertazione Lami criticizes Cennino Cennini’s statement that Giotto “translated painting from Greek into Latin.” The rebirth of painting in Florence, Lami is convinced, was a myth invented by the early followers and admirers of Giotto. Lami himself finds that the painters before Giotto, the so-called Greeks, were “relatively praiseworthy from the point of view of disegno or the vivacity and nobility of the colors.” He mentions some eleventh-century miniatures in Florentine libraries that are possibly better than those by the two miniaturists praised by Dante in the Divine Comedy, Oderisi da Gubbio and Franco Bolognese. He invokes ivories, icons, the Crucifix from the church of San Miniato al Monte, the mosaics by Jacopo Torriti in the Lateran Basilica, and many other works and artists who rose above the rough, ungainly manners of the time. Admittedly he has little to say about these works except that Cimabue must have envied them. Lami has no language at his disposal to express his intuitions. He grasps that technical accomplishment is the collective achievement of a society and cannot be held against the individual artist, who floats on a rising or falling tide of technical capacity.

The prolific historian and collector of medieval paintings Alexis-François Artaud de Montor (1772–1849) published a catalogue in 1808 of his collection of 110 panels attributed to thirty-eight different artists, the Considérations sur l’état de la peinture en Italie, dans les quatre siècles qui ont précédé celui de Raphael. Remarkably, forty-five of the pictures were thought to predate 1300. In the accompanying essay he says, for example, about the thirteenth-century master Guido da Siena that “the attitudes of his heads, especially of his saints and bishops, are very noble.” Artaud de Montor considered the two Guidos in his collection—as did some well-known Florentine experts—preferable or at least equal to the works of Cimabue, their style “as frank, as determined” as that of the latter’s Madonna at S. Maria Novella (presumably he meant the Madonna Rucellai by Duccio).

Ottley and Superville aimed to escape the recent history of art as it had been packaged for them by the academies. One might point out that the academic program, through the practice of life drawing, did after all route art through observation of a real fact in the world, whereas the exponents of the new outline drawing manner were turning their eyes away from the world. Ironically it was they who began to produce the most purely art-historical art. Their line drawings sought to recover the unself-consciousness ascribed to early classical or medieval art. The thirteenth-century sculptures of the Pisani were, in truth, anything but naïve. They were the products of an intense synthesis of local traditions of stone carving with careful study of the Roman sarcophagi in Pisa. Giotto, too, achieved miraculous effects of simplicity and necessity but only by deflecting a native tradition of mural painting that reached back into Carolingian times, through study of ancient and modern sculpture. The line draughtsmen of the 1790s hoped to find their way somatically back to a state of oneness with the world, contriving their own naturalness. The poet, playwright, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) expressed this paradox in his influential essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795). Here Schiller described art as a contrivance that is put to shame by the necessity, autonomy, and nontemporality of nature. Schiller then claims that the ancient poets enjoyed such intimacy with nature that their works are for us moderns like nature itself. We can only envy the capacity of the ancients to extend nature:

Poets have at all times … been the keepers (Bewahrer) of Nature. When they can no longer entirely be such and already experience in themselves the destructive influence of arbitrary and artificial forms …, then they become the witnesses and the avengers of Nature. They will either be Nature or they will seek the lost Nature.

Today, Schiller says, we can only behold nature as an object and as the exemplar of a moral idea. The relation to nature of the witnesses and the avengers is no longer naïve but sentimental.

Ready to dream his way back into the envied state of naïveté was the youthful author of a bouquet of essays and poems published anonymously in 1796 under the title Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar). Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) was a law student who had visited not Italy but Nuremberg, where he fell under the spell of the art of Albrecht Dürer. Wackenroder studied with the artist and art historian J. D. Fiorillo at the university of Göttingen and was exposed to the history of early German art written by Matthias Quad von Kinckelbach. In the preface of the Outpourings, Wackenroder, a Protestant from Berlin, assumes the voice of a (modern-day) cleric who once practiced art but now has retreated to a monastery. He professes tearful admiration for the great painters of the past, who are as saints to him. The next section, entitled “Raphael’s Vision,” is Wackenroder’s attempt to invent a language adequate to his impressions of that painter’s art, which he knew only from reproductive engravings. He had been disappointed by all previous writing on art, and with some justification. For as Wackenroder points out, “The so-called theorists and systematizers describe to us the inspiration of the artist from hearsay. … They speak about the artist’s inspiration as if it were something right before their eyes; they explain it and tell us a great deal about it; and they should rightly blush to pronounce the holy word, for they do not know what they are expressing by it.” Many writers before Wackenroder had recognized that artistic creation is a mystery. The confession of the inability to account for a judgment complements the connoisseur’s mute gesture of discrimination or approval. Friedrich Schlegel noted as much, with shrewd ambivalence, in one of his Critical Fragments (1797): “If some mystical amateurs of art who take every critique to be a dismemberment, and every dismemberment to be a destruction of pleasure, were to think the problem through to its logical conclusion, then the best judgment of the most worthy work would have to be ‘upon my soul!’ (Potztausend). There are in fact critiques that say nothing more than this, but take longer to say it.”

Wackenroder is not content with the laconic ejaculation—“wow,” as we might say today—and turns to the language of revelation. He quotes the famous passage in the letter supposedly written by Raphael to Baldassare Castiglione where the painter explains that, because he cannot always find in nature the ideal models he needs, he relies instead on una certa idea, a kind of idea. Wackenroder then interprets this principle through a fictional text by the architect Donato Bramante which he, the art-loving friar, had found among the papers of his monastery. Here Bramante recounts that Raphael had told him in confidence that his image of the Madonna had appeared to him in a dream, sent by God and projected as if by a magic lantern onto the wall. Wackenroder deduces that art, which appears to come from nowhere, and whose provenance Raphael himself had declined to guess at, is sent to us by God.

In the next section Wackenroder writes of Italy as a new Holy Land, a pilgrimage destination. He relates the anecdote, found in Vasari, about the death of the Bolognese painter Francesco Francia, where the older artist dies of grief when he beholds the beauty of Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia. Wackenroder then offers fictional exchanges of letters between Raphael and his (fictional) pupil Antonio, and between Antonio and his friend Jacopo in Rome. And so on, in a series of biographies of artists and brief essays on art.

In 1798 Wackenroder’s friend Ludwig Tieck published Franz Stern-balds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Travels), an historical novel and art-historical fantasy. Franz Sternbald is an imaginary pupil of Dürer who leaves Nuremberg and sets out first to the Netherlands and eventually to Italy in search of the new, sincere mode of painting. Dürer writes him a letter, urging him to spend time with peasants and children as an antidote to pedantry and manner. Though convinced that a new age of art is dawning, Franz nonetheless catches himself admiring the old paintings he finds in out-of-the-way chapels:

Whether it is my inexperience or my predilection for the old times, I rarely see a really bad painting. Before I discover the faults, I see the merits. … I often feel a pious reverence for our honest ancestors, who now and again expressed really beautiful and elevated thoughts in such uncomplicated ways.

Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s fictional letters and romanticized biographies are more sincere and searching versions of the invented lives of artists published by the Orientalist and collector William Beckford in 1780, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters. Beckford claimed that he produced these pseudoscholarly and somewhat hysterical sketches after having overheard the tales told by his own housekeeper to visitors to his own house. Beckford gives us the life of Aldrovandus Magnus, for example, born in Bruges in 1473, who painted the Apotheosis of the Princess of Bohemia, draped in a saffron stole. This master’s pupils, Andrew Guelph and Og of Basan, held a public debate in Venice with the Viennese painters Sucrewasser and Soorcrout about the comparative merits of egg-based and oil-based paint. And so on.

In his “Description of Two Paintings,” meanwhile, Wackenroder observes that the old chroniclers were perhaps wise not to try to describe paintings, instead simply characterizing them as “excellent” or “incomparable.” He offers a pair of poems about paintings, like little plays. These poems, and the theory of divine inspiration that lies behind them, may or may not be a satisfying account of the mystery of creativity. This is how Wackenroder escapes the dogma of academic theory and instead rehearses finally a poetic mode of address comparable to what we have long since found in the Chinese and Safavid traditions.

Poetic here is to be understood as the opposite of prosaic. Friedrich Schlegel develops the same thought in his essay of 1803 on Italian paintings at the Louvre. “Poetry” is the criterion of great art, he writes, and the example of the older painters best reveals this to us. “Admittedly if we limit ourselves to poetry in the sense of words and poets, then only a few paintings of old times are ‘poetic,’ and these few are actually rather thoughtless and not the loftiest. Instead we mean the poetic view of things, and the old masters had this view, and had it closer to the source.” After contemplating the early German panel paintings in Cologne, Schlegel wonders whether the present day is capable of producing another “true” painter. Probably not, he concludes, because “the deep and inward feeling” (das innige and tiefe Gefühl) is wanting.

The poetic theory of art—art as authentic expression—bears on the historicist project developed by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Herder. The latter had written in “Conclusions Drawn from the Comparison of the Poetry of Diverse Peoples of Ancient and Modern Times” (1796):

In poetry’s gallery of diverse ways of thinking, diverse aspirations, and diverse desires, we come to know periods and nations far more intimately than we can through the misleading and pathetic method of studying their political and military history. From this latter kind of history, we rarely learn more about a people than how it was ruled and how it was wiped out. From its poetry, we learn about its way of thinking, its desires and wants, the ways it rejoiced, and the ways it was guided either by its principles or its inclinations.

The Revolutionary Louvre, by this measure, was antihistoricist: the great art of the past was carried forward into modernity precisely because it did not merely express the desires and rejoicings of a corrupted aristocracy and clergy.

Wackenroder and Schlegel altered the shape of history by at once de-objectifying the past (again, Schlegel builds on Winckelmann) and defamiliarizing the present. The aim was to enter into a more confidential relation with the past. Schlegel warned: “One should never appeal to the spirit of antiquity as if to an authority. It’s a peculiar thing with spirits: they don’t let themselves be seized and shown to others. Spirits reveal themselves only to other spirits.”

Wackenroder’s intuition was that the subjectivized piety of the late Middle Ages provided a working model for a new approach to art. And yet he could find no words of praise for any artist older than Dürer and Raphael—the mirror image of Schlegel’s unwillingness to praise artists younger than Dürer and Raphael. Despite all the accumulating scholarship on medieval art since the late sixteenth century, no one, it seems, apart from Félibien, as well as Mancini, Muratori, Lami, and a few others, each in a few phrases, had found a way to express admiration for medieval art. The most eloquent critical passages to this date are found in Schlegel’s reports from Paris. We recall that Schlegel in 1802 had praised the “Egyptian sublimity and constraint,” the “forbidding sobriety,” of the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Lamb by Jan van Eyck. One may or may not agree with Schlegel that van Eyck’s world was greater and stronger than the modern world. Still, it is the case that he was the first writer not only to assign van Eyck’s work to the towering, indeed nonpareil, status it enjoys to the present day but also to try to explain why it deserves that status.

In a further essay on the art treasures of Paris, published in 1805, Schlegel describes works he saw in the Musée des Monuments français assembled by Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir, erstwhile painter, had been put in charge by the National Assembly of the depot of medieval sculpture and other artifacts confiscated from churches and monasteries. The depot was located at the former convent of the Petits-Augustins, today the site of the École des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank. By 1795 Lenoir had imaginatively transformed his depot into a museum of medieval French art and culture. Lenoir himself was interested in medieval artworks mainly as historical documents. Scholarship, however, even of a nationalist orientation, can serve as the matrix for poetry. Schlegel was impressed by Lenoir’s specimens of thirteenth-century glass painting with their “burning” colors. “Just as grating dissonances in music are often momentously used by the greatest masters as the expression of the highest passion, almost approaching despair, so are the nearly screaming colors of glass painting ideally suited to impress the whole profundity of the highest passion and passion-stories with full force into the eyes and hearts of the beholders.”

Herder had recommended the study of folk ballads. Here the English antiquarians had preceded him. Thomas Percy had published a collection of ballads as Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765; Robert Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786; in 1798 appeared Coleridge and Wordsworth’s collection of modern artificial folk poetry, the Lyrical Ballads. The Germans soon followed. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published a volume of discreetly improved folk poetry as Des Knaben Wunderhorn in 1805. Yet writers on art were unable to follow them. Even Schlegel seeks not simplicity but sublimity, awe, and powerful expression. He is listening not for the collective voice of the common people but for the distinctive tones of the strong author, even if he is able to praise the anonymous painter of the altarpiece of the cathedral of Cologne (the very altar Dürer had visited) because he was not driven by vanity but only by devotion or love (Liebe zum Werk). No one at the time had an eye for what later came to be called folk art. The churches were still full of simple paintings and wood carvings, but not a word is written about them.

The key to a total expansion of the horizons of criticism, to the very edges of space and time, is already at hand. It is the doctrine of the subjective response as the basis for judgment, already formulated by Roger de Piles. Wackenroder expressed this in his section entitled “A Few Words on Universality, Tolerance, and Human Love in Art.” Here he adopts a celestial point of view. God hears the Babel of languages and sees the strife and misunderstanding, but

He knows that each person speaks the language which He has created in him, that each expresses his inner feelings as he can and should;—if in their blindness they dispute with each other, then He knows and recognizes that each is, for himself, in the right.

Wackenroder has solved an historicist riddle by positing that the late Middle Ages, now accessible to the sympathetic historian, was itself the epoch par excellence of subjective feeling. As the not yet institutionalized art of subjectivity, late medieval art could be grasped both as timeless and historical at once. It is the same move that Winckelmann made, with the values switched. This does not quite match Herder’s purer doctrine of relativism. Herder in his “Conclusions Drawn from the Comparison of the Poetry of Diverse Peoples of Ancient and Modern Times” wrote: “Poetry meant something very different to the Roman and the monk; to the Arab and the crusader; to the scholar who uncovers other ages and to the poet and the people in diverse periods of diverse nations. … This is why the quarrel about the superiority of either ancient or modern literature was meaningless.” Herder is saying that poetry serves different purposes to different people and that there is no platform outside the human sphere, no perspective beyond perspective.

And yet a little later in the same text Herder takes up a botanical metaphor, envisioning the artwork as fragile, self-contained: the “natural” approach to poetry is “to leave each flower in its own context and from here to study it from its roots to its top just as it is, in reference to its own time and nature. The truly humble genius hates ranking and comparison. Genius prefers to be first in the village rather than the second in rank behind Caesar. Lichen, moss, fern—each plant flourishes in its own context in the divine order.” In his “Yet Another Philosophy of History” (1774) Herder had already written: “Each nation has its own center of happiness within itself (Mittelpunkt ihrer Glückseligkeit), just as every sphere has its own center of gravity.”

Wackenroder also thinks perspectivally, imaging an angelic point of view from which judgment is unthinkable:

Stupid people cannot grasp that on our globe there are antipodes and that they are themselves antipodes. They think of the place where they are standing as the center of gravity of the universe,—and their minds lack the wings to fly around the whole earth and take in with a single glance the integrated totality.

In approaching art emotionally, they fail to recognize their bias:

They regard their own emotion as the center of everything beautiful in art and they pronounce the final verdict on everything as if from the judge’s bench, without considering that no one has appointed them judges and that those who are condemned by them could just as well set themselves up as judges.

Wackenroder draws out the implications for art history:

Why do you now condemn the American Indian, that he speaks his own Indian language and not our language? —

And yet you want to condemn the middle ages for not building such temples as they did in Greece? —

O, find a way through intuition into these foreign souls and note that you have received the gifts of the spirit from the same hand as your misunderstood brothers! Understand, too, that every being can only create things out of himself with the capacities which he has received from heaven and that each person’s creative works are in proportion to his talents. And if you are not capable of feeling your way into all unfamiliar beings and experiencing their works in your soul; then try, at least, to arrive at this conviction indirectly, through the intellect’s chains of reasoning. —

There was no more vivid way of expressing such paradoxes than by invoking the most remote art conceivable to a European:

If your soul had arisen several hundred miles further to the East, on the soil of India, then you would feel the secret spirit which exists, concealed from our senses, in the little, strangely shaped idols with many arms and, if you were to see the statue of the Venus of Medici, you would not know what you should think of it. And had it pleased that One, under whose power you stood and are standing, to cast you into the multitudes of southern island dwellers, then you would find in every wild drumbeat and in the crude, shrill shocks of the melody a deep significance, of which you now comprehend not a syllable.

Although Wackenroder arrives at the conviction of the relativity of customs and beliefs by reasoning, he implies that there is also an inner route to this insight: a sympathetic participation in the feelings of the unfamiliar ones. One ought to be able to enter into the mentality of the other and at that point the once-rebarbative idol or melody will be reborn into beauty. The capacity to feel overcomes all the possible uses of image, effigy, and melody and overcomes class, for he is describing a new nobility of soul. The image of the god had once been the focus of a collective ritual. The votive image had been a token in an exchange. The temple had framed a real or symbolic sacrifice. The music had generated a second state of collective emotion, inviting the revisitation of the ancestors. The European artist of 1800, the receptive soul, has no desire to participate in any of these rituals. He is drawn to the prelapsarian sincerity of the late fifteenth-century painters, and he is mesmerized by the image of the many-armed Hindu god. In his fascination he retains his sovereignty.

Wackenroder’s fantasies of sympathy remind us that European knowledge of South Asian art and religion was accumulating at a rapid rate. Notable publications were Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine (Paris, 1782), with engraved renderings of the Hindu deities, and William Hodges, Select Views in India (London, 1786), an album of aquatints after Hodges’s own drawings of Indian monuments. The Society of Antiquaries of London, an entity dedicated since its establishment in 1707 to the antiquities of Britain, turned its attention to the monuments of South Asia. Joshua Reynolds and John Flaxman took an interest in Indian art. The retired military officer Edward Moor published a handbook to the deities of South Asia, The Hindu Pantheon (London, 1810), supplemented by 105 engravings based on lucid line drawings by an academic artist, one Haughton, after pictures, sculpted reliefs, and bronze figurines. Moor had no Sanskrit but he gathered intelligence from many sources, structuring his account of Hindu myth and symbolism around an iconography, the images of the gods. His image of the goddess Devi, an avatar of Parvati, is typical.

The engraving is based on a marble sculpture. Moor tells us how deeply cut the relief is and how worn the ornament is; he says the work is painted and gilt; he compares the illustration to the original. Although he is somewhat baffled by the image, he provides clues to its meaning by comparing its elements to other works.

The “Orient”—a cluster of half-understood but passionately clutched forms and ideas—had come to stand for a state of poetic suspension, a state of creative readiness. Schlegel addressed these words to the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, in 1800:

To Novalis: You don’t hover on the margins, but rather in your spirit poetry and philosophy inwardly pervade one another. In these images of the uncomprehended truth your mind stood closest to me. What you have thought, I think; what I have thought, you will think, or have already thought. There are misunderstandings that only confirm the highest agreement. Every doctrine of the eternal Orient belongs to all artists. I name you instead of all the others.

The phrase “images of the uncomprehended truth” could also describe the harvest of the new outward-directed scholarship. Angelic relativism does not always sponsor historicist piety for the humble native flower. Not every scholar and artist was committed to protecting the local, irreducible characters of Hindu art or medieval Christian art. Some translated images of those art worlds into their own sphere. History writing fashions a reality, remote in time or space, as a world, and then inserts that world into another world, my world. The scholarly study of medieval art extracted a reality from oblivion and gave it a shape, propelling medieval art into a second life, now embedded within the modern world. The antiquarian scholars of the eighteenth century who collected and published material, like Montfaucon, entertained no particularly vivid fantasies of fusion with the past. The mind of the scholar may well be prosaic. But the products of prosaic scholarship, even archeological data, can be fed into a picturesque dream machine. The lush views of Indian monuments, color aquatints, published by Thomas and William Daniell as Oriental Scenery (in six parts, from 1795–1808), which for many Britons fixed the image of the Hindu monuments, may be compared in their holistic and atmospheric approach with the color engravings of the rooms of Alexandre Lenoir’s museum. The European recovery of European medieval art was both a sympathetic rapprochement with a half-forgotten world and a misreading of that world. The abuse was as it were self-inflicted. The European misreadings of Indian art, Japanese art, African art, no matter how attentive and well-intentioned the scholarship, were another matter.

In 1805 Goethe together with the painter Johann Heinrich Meyer and the philologist Friedrich August Wolf published a volume entitled Winkelmann [sic] und sein Jahrhundert, comprising a selection of Winckelmann’s letters, biographical notes by Goethe, an essay on the art of the eighteenth century by Meyer, and an essay on Winckelmann as philologist by Wolf. Meyer’s views on the revival of the arts around 1500 were anti-academic. He considers the high point of art the religious art of the years around 1500; after that, art declines into the secular. “To the Catholic religious zeal of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries we owe the foundation and the growth of the visual arts. “Obscure monkish ideas seem to have little hindered the artist, for he adapts, brightens, and beautifies them.” Once arrived at the beautiful level of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the arts could have continued progressing indefinitely, were it not for the intervention of the great worldly patrons, who desired but did not urgently need the arts. Instead of the “stillness and freedom” of altarpieces, Raphael found himself painting halls and rooms, Michelangelo the sculptor squandered his genius on tombs.

Goethe, independent-minded, his youthful enthusiasms cooled, is by now already a step or two beyond the progressive view. Now he is orienting everyone once again to the classical. Goethe, impressed by the undivided quality of Winckelmann’s antiquity, says that modern man heads off in reflection toward infinity, whereas the ancients remained within the actual. Goethe says contemplation of the extrahuman world brings the “division of our powers and capacities, a fragmentation of the previous unity.” Winckelmann had avoided all this, remaining centered and earthbound: “An antique nature of this kind … appeared once more in Winckelmann. … From the very moment when he won the freedom he required, he appeared whole and complete, entirely in the spirit of antiquity.” Goethe envied Winckelmann his capacity to escape his time and Christianity and to become pagan: a delayed fulfillment of the Renaissance project.

Schlegel in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798) had already credited Winckelmann with the recognition of the integrity of antiquity: “The systematic Winckelmann, who read all the ancients as if they were a single author, who saw everything as a whole and concentrated all his powers on the Greeks, laid the foundations, through his perception of the absolute difference between the ancients and the moderns, of a material doctrine of antiquity.” But this was only a foundation. Scholarship requires a fusion of horizons: “Only when we discover the attitude and the conditions of an absolute identity of ancient and modern, as it was, is, and will be, will one be able to say that at least the contours of such a course of study have been sketched and one can now contemplate carrying it out in a methodical way.”

Goethe’s reflections laid the groundwork for the cult of Winckel-mann in the nineteenth century. Since Winckelmann was neither a philologist nor a university professor, it is unclear why he was celebrated in the nineteenth century as the patron saint of Altertumswissenschaft, or the scholarly study of antiquity. The custom of marking Winckelmann’s birthday, December 9, with festivities and speeches began in the 1820s and is recorded over the course of the century at the universities of Kiel, Bonn, Berlin, Greifswald, Göttingen (and even today in Salzburg and Graz). Yet already Friedrich August Wolf—notwithstanding his own involvement in the volume—wondered why Goethe and his Weimar circle were so taken by Winckelmann, given that he made few significant contributions to philology. But the Weimar classicists, despite Wolf’s involvement, were not so impressed by philology. They were also antiphilosophical, and here Winckelmann seemed an ally. Goethe and his colleagues were not convinced by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who had proposed in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) that it is the artist who makes us aware of the Absolute. What is the Absolute? The Absolute is the universe as whole; it is one substance; it is dynamic and developing; it is rational and teleological, that is, it is governed by an archetype or primal idea. Schelling was not satisfied with Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, which arrived at a compromise between the challenge of the world to resist our efforts to know it and the power of the mind to construct reality. Schelling’s speculation was that the mind, or the I, was finally one with the world, or nature, and that our destiny was to intuit that oneness, so dissolving the subject into its object. He was led to this by his insistence on the freedom of the subject, which he saw as the key to politics and art. If the subject will be free, then it must either deny the reality of the external world, or become or fuse with that world. Only artistic genius can bring us there. The product of genius flows both from conscious activity and from something beyond consciousness, something unknown:

This unknown, however, whereby the objective and the conscious activities are here brought into unexpected harmony, is none other than that absolute which contains the common ground of the preestablished harmony between the conscious and the unconscious.

Art is where freedom and necessity (i.e., the Absolute) are resolved:

That incomprehensible agency which supplies objectivity to the conscious, without the cooperation of freedom, and to some extent in opposition to freedom (wherein is eternally dispersed what in this production is united), is denominated by means of the obscure concept of genius.

The product we postulate is none other than the product of genius, or, since genius is possible only in the arts, the product of art.

Goethe said that the Altertumsforscher, the scholars of antiquity, were the only ones who ignored the Kantian revolution—which laid the groundwork for Schelling—and got away with it. He meant that Winckelmann’s real contribution was not to have secured the metaphysical credentials of ideal form but rather to have anchored ideal form in ancient life. The presence of Winckelmann’s person in his own writing, as well as his insistence that all involvement in art is framed by desire, is exactly what proposed him as a countermodel to the objective scholarship developed in the nineteenth century. The Winckelmannians could not quite say this, could not recognize the nature of their own fascination, could also not acknowledge that antiquity for its modern votaries is not an historical epoch but a form of life, thus both very near and very far. “Antiquity” is a project of self-cultivation and exceeds any role it may play within historiography.

In a brooding passage in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the colleague of Schelling, assigned to his own post-Winckelmannian contemporaries the subordinate task of tending to the works of historical art:

The works of the Muse now lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained its certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and men. They have become what they are for us now—beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly fate has offered us, as a girl might set the fruit before us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed, not the tree that bore them, not the earth and the elements which constituted their substance, not the climate which gave them their peculiar character, nor the cycle of the changing seasons that governed the process of their growth. So Fate does not restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives not the spring and the summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actual world.

This confutes any confidence in the reinhabitation of ancient paganism. The sculptures in the museums are not delivering their “world.” Historical scholarship, Hegel believed, cannot revivify but only at best provide pictures of lost worlds. We cannot “worship” those sculptures, he will say, implying that our modern cult of art has no proper object, no plenitude to meet its cravings:

Our active enjoyment of them is therefore not an act of divine worship through which our consciousness might come to its perfect truth and fulfilment; it is an external activity—the wiping-off of some drops of rain or specks of dust from these fruits, so to speak—one which erects an intricate scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence—the language, the historical circumstances, etc., in place of the inner elements of the ethical life which environed, created, and inspired them. And all this we do, not in order to enter into their very life but only to possess an idea of them in our imagination (in sich vorzustellen).

Hegel describes an historical scholarship whose purpose is deferred, and is perhaps still unknown to us; whose discoveries are not in themselves significant. A shadow of inadequacy falls on modern art history at the moment of its birth.