ART HISTORICAL THINKING • Winckelmann: Style and the Origins of Art History

Art history, as an academic discipline that studies the historical development, style, and cultural context of works of art, was established in the nineteenth century, building on the work of earlier writers. One such writer, sometimes identified as the father of art history, was Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). The son of German craftspeople, Winckelmann received an excellent education and in 1755 he moved to Rome, where he obtained high positions in major art collections and had exceptional access to some of the most significant Classical art known in the period.

As a result, Winckelmann was uniquely qualified to write about Classical art. His book The History of Art in Antiquity (1764) was the first attempt to categorize art stylistically, defining the early, high, and late stages of a style’s development. He linked these artistic features to what he knew of the politics and literature of the artists’ time, introducing the notion that works of art are related to their cultural context. Though modern art historians have revised many of Winckelmann’s specific observations about ancient art, his method of stylistic classification and evaluation of art in relation to its culture is still a fundamental practice of art history today.

Though the goal of Winckelmann’s work was to categorize works of art systematically, his writing style was also eloquently descriptive. In his book Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755), Winckelmann rhapsodized about what he believed to be the supremacy of early Classical Greek art of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, which he saw as a high point of artistic creativity because it embodied “noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” This description of artistic perfection had a major influence on Neoclassicism and art theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Winckelmann’s writing is also notable for its particular interest in male figures. While it was common for scholars (at this time, mostly male) to discuss beauty in terms of the female form, Winckelmann focused on the male nude as the ideal of beauty. Modern scholars have linked his aesthetic assessment to his homosexuality, which was known but never discussed in public during his life. By considering the gender and sexuality of the writer, scholars today recognize that art history has always been written from a subjective point of view. Beauty, truth, elegance, and grace are not universal concepts, but rather are connected to the tastes, experiences, cultural ideologies, and education of the person applying them.