36 research outputs found
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Sympathy, tragedy and the morality of sentiment in Lessing's Laocoon
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Allusion and ekphrasis in Winckelmann's Paris description of the Apollo Belvedere
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Christian Gottlob Heyne and the changing fortunes of the commentary in the age of Altertumswissenschaft
This chapter discusses the pedagogic and scholarly priorities that informed Heyne’s commentaries on Tibullus (1755), Virgil (1767-75) and Homer (1802), as well as their initial critical reception. Like those of his teachers, Gesner and Ernesti, Heyne’s works eschew detailed textual scholarship in favour of aesthetic and historicizing appreciation of literary works as wholes. Their formal innovations – most notably the relegation of advanced philological discussions to endnotes and the inclusion of excursuses on significant historical and cultural questions – are an attempt to tailor a traditional format to the demands of an Enlightened age and the cultural-historical interests of the new Altertumswissenschaft. The chapter discusses their contrasting critical receptions in order to raise questions about the viability of Heyne’s endeavours to make a traditional medium fit new concerns
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Philosophers and kings: response to William Bridges
This article responds to Bridges’ call to rethink the character of the humanities in the face of their record of inhumanity by interrogating the fitness of means proposed to end desired. If Bridges’ narrative of the inhumanities is to be accepted, this leaves little reason to hope that the cycle could be broken by any new, substantive account of the human. Instead it locates hope in the potential for critical correction and enlarging of perspective exemplified in Bridges’ examples, proposing a hybrid account of the humanities’ value that combines Bridges’ ‘epistemological’ argument about the power of the humanities to generate innovative solutions to real-world problems with an ‘existential’ argument about the epistemic limitations of human nature
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Winckelmania: Hellenomania between ideal and experience
If Hellenomania was not entirely an invention of the mid-eighteenth century, it certainly took on a particular colour during that period. The Grand Tour and other forms of travel, Enlightened curiosity, the antiquarian and scholarly exploration of non-Christian pasts, and ancien régime artistic patronage, all contributed to Neoclassicism and the Greek Revival. The forms of Hellenomania erected on these foundations exhibit certain paradoxes: focused as it often was on Italy rather than Greece and predetermined in its judgements by literary texts, mid-eighteenth-century encounters with ‘Grecian’ were also frequently characterised by an ardent and ecstatic idealism Diderot satirised as ‘fanatic’. This paper explores some aspects eighteenth-century Hellenomania through the case of Winckelmann and his reception. Though Winckelmann is principally remembered today for having produced a new, comprehensive and historical account of Greek and Roman art and culture in his History of Ancient Art (1764), in the 1760s-70s it was his descriptions of individual objects and sites that caused the greatest stir in northern Europe, as is shown by their early translation into French and English, publication in periodicals, and circulation through correspondence networks. I suggest that these writings provide the template of more widespread, eighteenth-century ‘Hellenomaniac’ experience, and examine the travel narrative of Charles Burney in order to pose questions about the processes of transmission of and initiation into such ‘Hellenomania’
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Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’: aesthetic criticism and classical reception
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Life and (love) letters: looking in on Winckelmann's correspondence
Over the 250 years since his death, Winckelmann’s posthumously published ’private’ correspondence has shaped understandings of his life and work just as much as his aesthetic and antiquarian writings. While editions appeared as early as the 1770s, the publication of Goethe’s Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert and the inclusion of two volumes of ’freundschaftliche Briefe’ within Josef Eiselein’s Sämtliche Werke (1825-) marked a new role for the correspondence in the nineteenth-century monumentalising of Winckelmann as a German ’classic’. We suggest that this tradition has generated a distanced, even voyeuristic, perspective on the letters, treating them as windows onto biographical scenes of emotional, and sometimes erotic, intimacy and expression. We criticise some examples of this tendency in recent Winckelmann scholarship, explore the often adventitious steps by which it arose, and, using examples of particular letters, suggest some alternative interpretations