Winckelmann's Essay on Imitation

Abstract

ART HISTORIANS AND LITERARY SCHOLARS have long considered the Dresden essay, Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst (1755), a key, not only to Winckelmann's later scholarly production, but to German classicism as well. Scholars have also agreed that an understanding of the doctrine of imitation stated in the essay is central to any interpretation of classicist idealism; Winckelmann's distinction between imitating and copying is generally regarded as a crucial reformulation of the older academic doctrine of the beau ide'al. Unfortunately, received opinions of this sort are not much more than translations from a language grown partially incomprehensible into our own thoroughly familiar conceptual terms. In such retrospective summations it is fatally easy to classify the aesthetic and historic movement of which Winckelmann's essay is a part: the rise of historicism, the German discovery of Greece, the founding of aesthetic humanism. These characterizations have long since proved inadequate to the art theory of the late eighteenth century, and the reader who turns to Winckelmann's essay with such tags in mind will find it difficult or impossible to follow Winckelmann's arguments. What does Winckelmann mean, for example, by the term Nachahmung, imitation, beyond the distinction of imitation and copy? After two centuries of discussion German specialists still have not agreed; some equate imitation with a program of cultural renewal; others regard it as a slavish re-creation of antique forms; and others read it as a return to the spirit, not the letter, of antiquity. Further, the very obscurity of Winckelmann's doctrine seems in some perverse way to have incited scholarly dogmatism.' Unlike