GREEK MYTHS and METANARRATIVES from Winckelmann to Bernal
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GREEK MYTHS AND METANARRATIVES From Winckelmann to Bernal COLLECTORS AND ANTIQUARIANS It is often held that the 'rediscovery'' of Greece came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, it is true that until the late eighteenth century most educated west Europeans probably regarded their cultural origins as Roman and Christian. Language (Latin) was an important factor in this. An earlier rediscovery of Roman roots had occurred with Renaissance Italian artists drawing inspiration from Roman art. Yet, as studies like Richard Stoneman's show (and in a different way that of Alain Schnapp: see Biblio- graphy), there is a continuity in the reception of the remains of the past and those of Greece in particular. One manifestation of this is Classicism, In the 1500s Francois I of France was collecting Roman statues and Roman copies of Greek (as especially did Louis X1V1 as part of a French claim to be the new Rome. A great collection of bronze copies was formed at Fontainebleau (marble at Versailles). To own a cabinet of medals became popular In the same century. By 1550 there were 380 collections in Italy alone, 200 in the Low Countries, 200 in France and 175 in Germany. Collections too were started of drawings of antiquities and inscriptions. Two famous rival collectors in England of the seventeenth century were die Earl of Arundel (died 1646) and the Duke of Buckingham (assassinated 1628). Charles I was another. At his death Arundel had 37 statues. 128 busts and 250 inscriptions as well as sarcophagi, altars, fragments, coins, books and manuscripts. Neglected on his death, some of the collection eventually reached the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in the nineteenth century. Mention has already been made of Louis XIV (1638-1715)- During his reign a series of agents were sent out by Chief Minister Colbert to Greece and die Levant to collect books, manuscripts, medals and inscriptions. This French interest in Classical antiquities continued past the death of Louis. The Abbe* Michel Fourmont notoriously claimed the discovery of many important historical inscriptions at Sparta. They were later realised as forgeries at the end of the eighteenth century. 53 CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF GREECE Fourmont records in 1730: For a month now, despite illness, I have been engaged with thirty workmen in the entire destruction of Sparta; not a day passes but I find something, and on some I have found up to twenty inscriptions. You understand, Monsieur, with what great joy, and with what fatigue, I have recovered such a great quantity of marbles. .. If by overturning its walls and temples, if by not leaving one stone on another in the smallest of its sacella, its place will be unknown in the future, 1 at least have something by which to recognise it, and that is something. I have only this means to render my voyage in the Morea illustrious, which otherwise would have been entirely useless, which would have suited neither France, nor me. I am becoming a barbarian in the midst of Greece; this place is not the abode of the Muses, ignorance has driven them out, and it is that which makes me regret France, whither they have retreated. I should have liked to have more time to bring them at least more than bare nourishment, but the orders 1 have just received oblige me to finish. Edward Dodwell on his later visit to Sparta in 1801 reported that Fourmont was still remembered as ordering the defacement of inscriptions he had just recorded. Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741) was part of the great tradition of the Benedictine monks of Saint-Maur. His L'Antiquite expliquee et representee en figures compiled 30,000 pieces of antique art. It reveals something of a funerary obsession, but also an extraordinary and systematic collection of material to do with the life of antiquity. In it the image plays a fundamental role, but as a complement to the text. Schnapp contrasts this with the work of Francesco Bianchini, working in the Vatican, at the end of the seventeenth century. He treated the image as of a separate order of perception and knowl- edge and opened a new route to the past, that of comparative iconography. Through close scrutiny of imagery, Bianchini presented the decisive role of figuration in antiquity, with historical periods represented by particular emblematic images. Instead Schnapp detects in Montfaucon a Platonic element, a distinction between the world of ideas (represented by text and the subject of history) and that of the senses {images, the subject of archaeology): each object was connected to a body of text which gave it meaning. Thomas Carlyle was not impressed by Montfaucon's project, calling it 'mere classical ore and slag1. Anne Claude Philippe de Turbieres de Grimoard de Pestels de Levis, comte de Caylus, spent three years travelling in the eastern Mediterranean from 1714-17. Active member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (an antiquarian and historical association founded in 1701), he built up a large collection, becoming a leading antiquarian of his time. From 1752-67 appeared the seven volumes of his Receuil d'Antiquites egyptiennes, 54 GREEK MYTHS AND METANARRATIVES etrusques, grecques et romaines. This was not just a monument to antiquarian relics; as well as the aft of the ancient world, contemporary art interested Caylus. The key point for Schnapp is Caylus's project of replacing the philo- logical model of antiquarian or archaeological studies, which assumed the priority and metaphor of textual interpretation. For Caylus the antiquary was a sort of physician of the past with an experimental paradigm. In criti- cising the textual model of interpretation applied to monuments, he asserted the priority of observation and insisted on the positive experience of the artefact, that it was not just a supplement to history or something like an isolated text to be deciphered. Objects were clues or symptoms, diagnostic tools for recognising cultural and geographic origins, and for establishing sequences of change. In Caylus can be found a cultural determinism founded on observation and quantification, the basis or typology, TRAVELLERS By the 1670s English and French travellers were visiting Greece. The country had largely been ignored apart from Ciriaco Pizzicolli, known as Cyriac of Ancona, who, with antiquarian interests, had made several journeys from Italy in the fifteenth century and brought back many drawings of temples and reliefs. Jacques Spon and George Wheler became travelling companions in 1675-6. The former's authoritative account of their travels became a bench- mark for a century. For Spon, the past was a book to be read. This active metaphor, according to Schnapp, laid emphasis on medals and inscriptions; Spon can be created as the inventor of numismatics and epigraphy, applying a philological model to the past. George Wheler in the Preface to his account of their travels, dedicated to Charles II, wrote the following: A country once mistress of the civil world, and a most famous nursery both of arms and sciences; but now a lamentable example of the in- stability of human things, wherein your majesty's discontented and factious subjects, if their own late calamities will not sufficiently instruct them, may see the miseries that other nations are reduced to, and behold, as in a picture, the natural fruits of schism, rebellion, and civil discord. There are several elements present here of a nascent set of attitudes towards die Classical Greek past: time and the past; order and disorder; state unity versus political diversity; Greece as the ideal of liberty and excellence lost and crushed. More will be made of this chroughout this chapter. Spon and Wheler were among the last to see the Parthenon in Athens relatively undamaged. In 1669 Pope Clement IX gave his blessing to the fleet which sailed against the Ottoman Empire. As pan of the campaigns the Doge of Venice, Motosini, moved against Athens. The Acropolis was bombarded, 55 CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF GREECE with the Parthenon, at that time a mosque, being used as a powder magazine .. bits were blown hundreds of metres. JOHANN JOACHIM WINCKELMANN AND GREEK ART Johann Joachim Winckelmann, born at Stendal near Berlin in 1717, was a main figure in an eighteenth-century revolution in attitude towards the ancient Greek past: an attitude which still has effect today. His Gedanken of 1755 was translated by Fuseli into English (as Reflections on the Imitation of Nature in Greek Art) in 1765. He became Librarian and President of Antiquities at the Vatican, and in 1764 was published his two-volume work Geschichte der Kunst des Atterthums. This was a chronological account of antique art which had never before been attempted; Winckelmann produced a stylistic chronology where others had only undertaken iconographic commentary. For example, the most celebrated ancient statues in the Belvedere courtyard in the Vatican or Florence's Tribuna had been considered simply as being of the 'best period'. A four-stage scheme, adopted from Scaliger's for poetry (1608), was proposed for Greek sculpture: pre- and early Classical was straight and hard; the High Classical of Phidias was grand and square; that of fourth-century Praxiteles was beautiful and flowing; then art was imititative. Winckelmann's stylistic analysis was not, as for Caylus, a technical instrument, though both, according to Schnapp, stood for an evolutionary model of art. Winckelmann certainly describes an evolution from primitive beginnings to perfection. The scheme derives ultimately from theories of rhetoric and had been applied to the arts by Vasari in the Italian Renaissance. For Winckelmann, stylistic analysis was the key to aesthetic understanding. So rather than just explain works of art as artefacts, Winckelmann sought to explain a culture by its works of art.