Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, and the Aesthetic Life

Abstract

Walter Pater’s essay on Winckelmann appeared in the Westminster Review in January 1867 and was reprinted six years later, with slight alterations, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Far from being an incongruous addition to his studies of Renaissance artists, which mainly deal with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy and France, ‘Winckelmann’ should be read as the foundation of Pater’s first book: it contains the original formulation of his concept of renaissance as, in Pater’s words in ‘Two Early French Stories’, ‘the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life’ (I: 2). It is easy to see how the young Pater of 1867, interested in aesthetics, classical culture, German letters, and Greek love, should become fascinated by the figure of the German classicist, and why he should choose him as the subject of his second publication.1 ‘Winckelmann’ is a virtuoso piece. It is ostensibly a review of wo recently published volumes, Heniy Lodge’s 1850 translation of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art among the Greeks and Otto Hahn’s Biographische Aufsatze (1866); but it is also a biographical study of Winckelmann in its own right; it is a critique of ancient Greek art and a critique of Winckelmann’s critique of ancient Greek art; it is itself written in the style of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art among the Greeks, using the study of aesthetics in order to create a vivid sketch of the culture of a past age (in this case the German eighteenth century); and it constructs a sustained intertextuality with Goethe’s essay ‘Skizzen zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns’ (1805) and therefore contains a hidden portrait of Goethe and a reflection on the uses of classicism in Romantic and modem cultures.