During Winckelmann’s time in Rome another sculpture came to rival
—or even to surpass—the Laocoön in his esteem; indeed, he frequently
mentions the Apollo Belvedere  alongside the Laocoön as contrasting
but equally compelling examples of beauty. While the Laocoön has
retained its high reputation, the Apollo has fallen from favour. In The
Nude (1956), one of the most widely read books on art of the twentieth
century, the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–83) confessed himself
mystified that so learned a connoisseur as Winckelmann could admire
the Apollo, which for Clark displayed ‘weak structure and slack surfaces
which, to the aesthetic of pure sensibility, annul its other qualities’; in
no other famous work, Clark thought, ‘are idea and execution more
distressingly divorced’.

In fact Winckelmann himself freely conceded the executive weakness of the Apollo: the sculptor of the Laocoön must, Winckelmann insisted, ‘have been a far more skilful and complete artist than it was requisite for the sculptor of the Apollo to be’.

As we have seen, he emphasized the virtuosic technique used for the surface
finish of the Laocoön, but like Clark in the twentieth century he did not
find the texture and detail of the Apollo equally fine.
But for Winckelmann beauty is not synonymous with the material
characteristics of the object, as it often became in the modernist criticism
of the twentieth century.
Indeed, Winckelmann’s descriptions of the Apollo tend to dematerialize
it, to leave behind its physical existence and to contemplate what
Clark calls the sculpture’s ‘idea’ (as distinct from its ‘execution’). Moreover
he invites us to follow him:

Let thy spirit penetrate into the kingdom of incorporeal beauties, and strive to become a creator of a heavenly nature, in order that thy mind may be filled with beauties that are elevated above nature; for there is nothing mortal here. . . . Neither blood-vessels nor sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence, diffusing itself like a gentle stream, seems to fill the whole
contour of the figure.

Winckelmann has been faithful to his own rule, not turning back until
he has found beauty. Where Clark would stop at the slick, mechanical
character of the copyist’s execution, Winckelmann sees beyond the
immediate surface texture. And as he looks, he responds corporeally:
‘In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take
a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner.’
The moral effect of the Laocoön had been to make Winckelmann conscious
of his own weakness and thus desirous of self-improvement (‘we
wish that we could bear misery like this great man’). The Apollo produces
a headier exaltation, so that the viewer’s very body seems to
expand in emulation of the statue. As he goes on looking, Winckelmann
becomes in imagination one of the ancient oracles or priestesses,
inspired by the god Apollo:
My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those
who were filled with the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to
Delos and into the Lycaean groves—places which Apollo honored by his presence,— for my image seems to receive life and motion, like the beautiful
creation of Pygmalion.
The final reference is to another ancient myth—that of the sculptor
who made a statue so beautiful that he fell in love with it; by the grace
of Venus (goddess of both beauty and love) Pygmalion’s statue was
brought to life. The aesthetic encounter as Winckelmann
imagines it is reciprocal, making the marble statue seem to come alive
at the same time as it increases the viewer’s sense of vitality. Such experiences as the latter are commonly described in clichés—powerful
works of art are said to make the pulse race, the heart beat faster, the
hairs of the neck tingle. What Winckelmann describes is like this, but
far from being conventionalized it is adapted to the particular experience
of contemplating the Apollo.
Winckelmann’s corporeal response can also be read as an erotic
experience; the Apollo conjures feelings of tumescence and of rising
excitement or exhilaration. This is a homoerotic encounter, one in
which similarity between the viewer-lover and the beloved statue is
crucial; in the consummation of the aesthetic encounter viewer and
statue become identified with one another (the description may also
imply the possibility of shifting genders, when Winckelmann imagines
himself as one of Apollo’s prophetesses and invokes the female
statue of Pygmalion). In an essay of 1805, Goethe speaks frankly of  Winckelmann’s passionate friendships with men, which he sees as
crucial to the older writer’s aesthetic sensibility.21 Subsequently Winckelmann’s
homosexuality has become inseparable from his fame, for
instance in the frequent assumption that the strange event of his
murder, in Trieste in 1768, must have had a homosexual or homophobic
motive (although there is no evidence that the murder was anything
more than a robbery that turned tragically to violence). Recent scholars
have dwelt more positively on the homoerotic resonances of Winckelmann’s
writing, and rightly so: Winckelmann initiated a practice of
homoerotic art criticism of superb quality in its own right, and which
was inspirational for later critics such as Walter Pater.

Nonetheless, there is a danger in assuming that Winckelmann’s
response to the beautiful can be explained away as the effect of his
homosexuality. The sensual element in Winckelmann’s response to the
beautiful cannot be reduced to an expression of desire for the sculptured
male body. Rather, it permeates his descriptions, for instance of
the texture of chiselled marble, of the fall of sculptured draperies, and
even of female figures. He writes of the Venus de’Medici [12], then the
most famous ancient female nude:
The Medicean Venus . . . resembles a rose which, after a lovely dawn, unfolds its leaves to the rising sun; resembles one who is passing from an age which is hard and somewhat harsh—like fruits before their perfect ripeness—into another, in which all the vessels of the animal system are beginning to dilate, and the breasts to enlarge, as her bosom indicates. . . . The attitude brings before my imagination that Laïs who instructed Apelles in love. Methinks I see her, as when, for the first time, she stood naked before the artist’s eyes.
Even without the final reference to Laïs, a famous courtesan of antiquity,
the passage clearly involves fantasies of sexual awakening,
expressed for instance in the image of the opening rose; the flower—
the rose in particular—would soon and lastingly become the most
common and efficient single symbol for pure beauty. Thus the rose,
like the sea images Winckelmann used more frequently in descriptions
of male figures, may be read either as a sexual image or as an aesthetic
one—indeed, the two cannot easily be distinguished.
Passages such as that on the Venus de’Medici, as well as that on the
Apollo Belvedere, raise urgent questions about the relationship between
the beautiful and the erotic—questions which, as we shall see, have
remained central to both aesthetic thought and art practice ever since.
It would be easy enough to resolve them by collapsing the beautiful
into the erotic. Thus in Winckelmann’s case it is tempting to avoid
difficulties by seeing his love of the beautiful simply as a disguised or
sublimated form of erotic attraction to young men. Yet that would not
only reinforce the stereotype, ingrained in modern western societies, that presumes some innate affinity between homosexual desire and
love of art; it would also reduce the theoretical question of the beautiful
to mere personal preference, something about which people of different
genders or sexualities would be unable to share ideas or opinions.
Winckelmann’s writings, however powerful their homoerotic resonances,
cannot be dismissed as merely the fantasies of an eighteenthcentury
white European homosexual.

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