Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of Art before Winckelmann

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

To the Memory of Franklin LeVan Baumer.

In light ofpostmodernist and poststructuralist trends in the humanities which have contested notions of originality and of authorship, it might seem surprising that one outstanding myth of the eighteenth century has not yet been thoroughly challenged. This is the claim made by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the foreword to the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterturns, originally published in 1764, that he had created a new history of art which was distinct from a history of artists and also different fi-omwhat had previously been written about antiquities (Alterturner): The history of the art of antiquity, which I have undertaken to write, is no mere account of the chronological order and change of art, but I take the word history in the wider sense, that it has in the Greek language, and my intention is to offer an attempt at a system .... But the essence of art is in every part the most eminent aim, in which the history of artists has little influence, and this [sort of history of artists], which has been compiled by others, is therefore not to be sought here ... those who have treated antiquities, examine either only such where erudition was to be applied, or, if they speak of art, this happens in part with common eulogies, or their judgment is built on peculiar, false grounds.'

' Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterturns (Sarntliche Werke 3, ed. Joseph Eisebein) (Donaueschingen, 1825), 10-11: "Die Geschichte der Kunst des Alterturns, welche ich zu schreiben untemommen habe, ist keine blolje Erzahlung der Zeitfolge und der Veranderung in derselben, sondem ich nehme das Wort Geschichte in der weitem Bedeutung, dasselbe in der griechische Sprache hat, und meine Absicht ist, einen Versuch eines Lehrgebaudes zu liefem ...Das Wesen der Kunst aber ist in diesem sowohl, als in jedem Theile, der vomehmste Endzweck, in welches die Geschichte der Kiinstler wenig Einflulj hat, und diese, welche von anderen zusammengetragen worden, hat man also hier nicht zu suchen ... diejenigen, welche von
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Wolf Lepenies once described this claim as one of the many foundational myths of the Enlightenment and presented instead some parallels between the writing of art history and natural history in the eighteenth ~ e n t u r yAs interest .~ in the historiography of art has revived, publications have continued to pour forth on Win~kelmann.~ the critique suggested by Lepenies has largely not Yet been followed. Winckelmann's claim to originality remains a starting or major turning point for most accounts of the history of the discipline of art hist01-y.~
Altertiimern handeln, verhoren entweder nur dasjenige, wo Gelehrsamkeit anzubringen war, oder wenn sie von der Kunst reden, geschiehet es theils mit allgemeinen Lobspriichen, oder ist ihr Urtheil auf fremde falsche Griinde gebauet." All translations are the author's. See Wolf Lepenies, "Fast ein Poet: Johann Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Begriindung der Kunstgeschichte," in Autoren und Wissenschajiler im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1988), 91120, and "Der andere Fanatiker. Historisierung und Wissenschaftlichung der Kunstauffassung bei Johann Joachim Winckelmann," Ideal und Wirklichkeit der bildenden Kunst im spaten 18. Jahrhundert (FranhfiurterForschungen zur Kunst, XI), ed. Herbert Beck, Peter C. Bol, and Eva Maek-Gerard (Berlin, 1982), 21-29. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins ofArt History (New Haven, 1994), "Political Attitudes and the Rise of Historicism in Art Theory," Art History (1978), 191-213; "Winckelmann's Construction of History," Art History, 5 (1982), 377-406; "Vie et mort de l'art antique: Historicite et beau ideal chez Winckelmann," in Winckelmann: la naissance de l'histoire de l'art a I'ipoque des Lumidres. Actes du cycle de conferences prononcees a 1'Auditorium du Louvre du 11 decembre 1989 au 12fevrier 1990, ed. Edouard Pommier (Paris, 1991), 9-38; and "Winckelmann's Interpretation of the History of Art in its Eighteenth Century Context" (Ph. D. diss., Warburg Institute, University of London, 1977). See also Herbert von Einem, "Winckelmann und die Wissenschaft der Kunstgeschichte," and Max L. Baeumer, "Klassizitat und republikanische Freiheit in der auRerdeutschen Winckelmann-Rezeption des 18.Jahrhunderts," in Johann Joachim Winckelmann 171 7-1768, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Hamburg, 1986), 3 15-26, and 195-2 11; Michael Fried, "Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation," October, 37 (1986), 87-97; Francis Haskell, "Winckelmann et son influence sur les historiens," and Michel Espagne, "La diffusion de la culture allemande dans la France des Lumieres. Les amis de J.-G. Wille et l'echo de Winckelmann," in Winckelmann, ed. Pommier, 83-99 and 101-35; Maria Fancelli, "Winckelmann nel giudizio di Goethe," in J.J. Winckelmann tra letteratura e archeologia (Venice, 1993), 31-45; Whitney Davis, "Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History," in Whitney Davis et al. (ed.), Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (New York, 1994), 141-59 (originally published in Kunstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange, ed. Thomas Gaehtgens [Berlin, 19931, 673-80); I1 Manoscritto Fiorentino di J.J. Winckelmann: Das Florentiner Winckelmann-Manuskvipt, intro. Maria Fancelli, ed. Max Kunze (Florence, 1994); Heinrich Dilly, "1738: Vers une topographie de la notion d'art," Histoire de 1 'histoire de I'art de I'Antiquite au xviii' sidcle, ed. Edouard Pommier (Paris, 1995), I, 303-26; Edouard Pommier, "Winckelmann: des vies d'artistes a I'histoire de l'art," in Les Kes d'artistes, ed. Matthias Waschek (Paris, 1996), 207-36; Jeffrey Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Oxford, 1996); Barbara Steindl, "Zwischen Kennerschaft und Kunsthistoriographie. Zu den Werk-beschreibungen bei Winckelmann und Cicognara," in Johann Dominicus Fiorillo und die romantische Bewegungen von 1800 (Gottingen, 1997), 96- 113. The thesis that Winckelmann created a completely new history of art is for example restated in the most recent edition of Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte.Der Weg einer Wissenschaji (Munich, 19903), 53ff, and Germain Bazin, L'histoire de I'histoire de l'art (Paris, 1986), 94ff. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "Before Winckelmann: Towards the Origins of the History of Art," Knowledge, Science and Literature in the Early Modern Period, ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Stephan K. Schindler et al. (Chapel Hill, 1996), 71-89, and "Antiquarian Connoisseurship and Art History before Winckelmann: Some Evidence from Northern Europe,"

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It may be that Winckelmann's claim has remained largely unchallenged because his differentiation of his accomplishment from that of Gelehrsamkeit in particular coincides with and helps to support another distinction made at his time, that between "philosophy," or criticism, and erudition, the latter being at best necessary but inferi~r.~ distinction, which was fostered by the philosophes and This their counterparts in other countries, has been frequently heard in scholarly debates, and it is echoed in current discussions where empirical scholarship is disparaged in favor of what is often now called T h e ~ r yThus while in the twentieth .~ century the Enlightenment came in for heavy going starting with at least the critique of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,' this is one Enlightenment opinion which, despite the rise of critical theory among other trends in recent scholarship, has gained in fashion, especially in the English-speaking world. But the contrast between philosophy, or critique, and erudition makes a distinction that is ultimately untenable, even if it is also one that has continued to dominate many views of the history of eighteenth-century scholarship. The case at hand suggests that supposed innovations of the eighteenth century in the historiography of art, as in many other fields of study, are much more bound up with late humanism and encyclopedism than their promulgators might have wished to admit. Scholars of a number of disciplines have begun to revise interpretations of the role of the so-called antiquarians of the sixteenth to eigh.~ teenth centuries-those who dealt with A l t e r t ~ m e rSome recent studies of the historiography of art have pointed to some connections between the antiquarian tradition and that of the historiography of art.9These approaches, however, have primarily dealt with Italian and French writers and, moreover, have left Winckelmann's position largely untouched.1 Winckelmann's situation in the
in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 130-32, 340, however, offer information on Winckelmann's antecedents that support Lepenies's initial observation. The present essay utilizes some material from these essays. See Amaldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950), 307ff, and Astrid Witschi-Bernz, "Main trends in Historical-Method Literature: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," History and Theory, 12 (1972), 56ff. For earlier examples see Hans Sedlmayr, "Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft," Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, 1 (1931), reprinted as "Kunstgeschichte als Kunstgeschichte," in Hans Sedlmayr, Kunst und Wahrheit. Zur Theorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte (Mittenwald, 1978), 49-80; also Christopher S. Wood, The Renna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York, 2000). ' Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der .4ufklarung (Amsterdam, 1947). See the work of Franqoise Waquet, Gabriela Valera, Peter Miller, Anthony Grafton, among others. See Francis Haskell, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretatiorz of the Past (New Haven, 1993); Gabriele Bickendorf, Die Historisierung der italienischen Kunstbetrachtung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1998); Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archaologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1999), and Alain Schnapp, The Discovery ofthe Past, tr. Ian Kinnes and Gillian Varndell (New York, 1997). 'O Bickendorf, Historisierung, 275, credits Wincklemann with replacing series of histories (Geschichten)with a unified history and with binding art into a general cultural history. Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, 262, says that Winckelmann "destroyed the antiquarian model which

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann broader European historical and geographical context also remains relatively unclear so long as the beginnings of the historiography of art in the Germanspeaking world, in which he was born and educated, remain largely unexamined. This essay reconsiders some aspects of a large body of literature in German and, a sign of the continuation of humanist and encyclopedic traditions, in Latin, by northern European and especially German authors, that is earlier than Winckelrnann. The traditions they represent not only evolved into but may also be related to publications which specifically employed the term history of art (Geschichte der Kunst, Kunstgeschichte), in a sense not so far from Winckel-mann's before his book appeared; Winckelmann even grudgingly admitted the existence of some such writings but denied that any previous writer had said anything penetrating about art." These traditions, whose outlines have been adumbrated elsewhere, nevertheless belong to a larger group of sources for Winckelmann's work.12Indeed, they may well establish an even more direct and primary context for Wincklemann's ideas than do the more familiar French, English, and Italian sources which have been previously adduced in reference to his writings.13 A reassessment of Winckelmann's German predecessors may begin with a reconsideration of the first major book in the German language that discussed the history of art, Joachim von Sandrart's Teutsche Academie (Academia Todesca) of 1675-79. Both for its biographical contents and for its apparently antiquarian character Sandrart's work has however been contrasted with history writing of the eighteenth century. Sandrart published lives of the ancient, Italian, German, and Netherlandish artists, and it is for these that his book is largely remembered. But his three-volume opus contained much more: it was an extensive compendium of art theory and practical advice meant to aid the artist, scholar, and connoisseur, which included guides to Ovid's Metamorphoses and to artistic symbolism and descriptions and illustrations of antique sculpture and ancient and contemporary Roman buildings.14 Since Wilhelm Waetzoldt's Deutsche Kunsthistoriker (192 1) Sandrart has rightly been regarded as a forerunner of Winckelmann.15Sandrart opened the path to Winckelmann in more ways than one: he not only initiated a serious literature of art in German which provided artists' biographies, but he brought
made history subservient to object" and "set out to explain a culture by its objects." Haskell also draws Winckelmann into his account, History and its Images, 21 7 , of the "arts as an index of society." I ' Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, ed. cit., 10: "Es sind einige Schrifen unter dem Namen einer Geschichte der Kunst an das Licht getreten: aber die Kunst hat einen geringen Antheil an derselben, denn ihre Verfasser haben sich mit derselben nicht genug verkehrt, und konnten also nicht geben, als was sie aus Biichern, oder von Sagenhoren halten. An das Wesen und zu dem Innern der Kunst fiihret fast kein Scribent ...." l 2 Kaufmann, "Before Winckelmann." l 3 E.g., Potts, "Winckelmann's Interpretation"; and Haskell, History and its Images. l 4 Joachim von Sandrart, L 'Academia Todesca della Architectura, Scultura & Pittura: Oder TeutscheAcademie der Edlen Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Kiinste ( 3 vols.; Nuremberg, 1675-1679). l 5 Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker (Berlin, 19863),23-42.

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together much of the sort of material out of which a later criticism and history of art could be constituted. In gathering together an even larger amount of visual and textual information than his humanist and antiquarian predecessors had done, his effort may be related to a pattern which has become familiar from other areas of scholarship, by which an earlier generation assembles materials that are employed for later constructions. Nevertheless, Sandrart's accomplishment has been distinguished from Winckelmann's and that of his contemporaries by twentieth-century scholarship in a way that echoes what Winckelmann himself, eighteenth-centuryphilosophes, and some nineteenth-century Gelehrte might have said. Waetzoldt set the tone for subsequent interpretations when he criticized Sandrart's accomplishment. He emphasized the shortcomings of Sandrart's biographies, and distinguished Sandrart's erudition (Gelehrsamkeit) from the true Mssenschaft of art history. For Waetzoldt Sandrart's erudition represented a prescientific (vowissen-schaftlich) condition which would only change with Winckelmann.I6 Subsequently, standard works such as Udo Kultermann's Geschichte der Kunst-geschichte have thus described Sandrart as the Vasari of the north, the author of artists' biographies: the German painter-historian is noteworthy mainly as the translator of the work of Vasari and of his Netherlandish equivalent, Karel van Mander." In an important essay Roberto Salvini treated Sandrart similarly, as the third in the triad of historiographers begun by his sources, Vasari and van Mander, and Salvini also noted that Sandrart's writing was a product of the later seventeenth century.I8 Christian Klernm, author of the best monograph on Sandrart's paintings,19 has elaborated these themes in a comprehensive introduction to the first two volumes of a facsimile edition of the Teutsche Academie. Klemm recounts Sandrart's sources and his role in the continuation and translation of the tradition of artists' biographies, and he also relates him to the intellectual currents of his time. Klemm thereby recognizes some of the newer historiographical content found in Sandrart's book, including the presence of antiquarian materials not found in earlier works that may be related to the historiography of art. Klemm also traces the impact on the text of Sigismund von Birken, the Nuremberg poet and member of the order of the Pegnitzscha~er, relates the and composition of Sandrart's compendium to the tradition of the p o l y h i s t ~ r s . ~ ~ Yet like Waetzoldt's comparison of Sandrart's to other contemporary scholarly accomplishments of the seventeenth century, this is not to be regarded as a
Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 42. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte, 30-3 1. l8 Roberto Salvini, "L'eredita del Vasari storiografo in Germania: Joachim von Sandrart," in I1 Vasari storiografo e artista (Atti del congress0 internazionale nel IV centenario della morte 1974) (Florence, 1976), 759-7 1. l9 Christian Klemm, Joachim von Sandrart. Kunst Werke und Lebens Lauf (Berlin, 1986). *O Klemm, "Pfade durch Sandrarts Teutsche Academie," in Joachim von Sandrart Teutsche Academie der Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Kiinste Niirnberg 1675-1680 in urspriinglicher Form neu gedruckt mit einer Einleitung von Christian Klemm (Nordlingen, 1994), 9-32, with bibliography.
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favorable e v a l u a t i ~ nKlemrn is sympathetic neither to Sandrart's form of schol.~~ arship nor to his style of literary expression. According to Klemm, Sandrart's work is "encyclopedic" in an older sense, rather than systematic like the Encyclopidie of the eighteenth century. Klemm concludes his assessment with a negative comparison of Sandrart's historiography to the dilettantic pedantry of the polyhistors, "so we must class Sandrart as a writer of history indeed with the 'polyhistors' of his century, who half-dilettantishly pile up material, completely untouched by those currents which pointed to the future and which at that time were being prepared in Pari~."'~ Klemm's description of the "polyhistoric character, the bloated expansion of antiquarian knowledge without criticism" ("polyhistorische Charakter, das aufschwernmend Ausbreiten von antiquarischen Wissen ... ohne K~-itik")~~ of Sandrart's second volume deserves further scrutiny. Much of what has long been recognized as distinctive in Sandrart can be regarded as a positive and not negative product of his time. The relation of Sandrart's writings to learned traditions may be further amplified by other, earlier seventeenth-century works in Latin on the theory of art and the history of artists. Not just a painter, Sandrart resembles a scholar like Franciscus Junius in certain respects: he, too, was familiar with the work and persons of a variety of antiquarians, philologists, historians, and poets; and he, too, describes and utilizes contemporary collections. Like some of the antiquarian compendia on which he drew, Sandrart's work supplied visual material as illustration. He also repeated some of the themes found in other contemporaneous scholarly treatises on art.24 Sandrart's volumes thereby also provide an important foundation for future scholarship and even anticipate certain French eighteenth-century developments. While it is correct that Sandrart's book resembles that of the polyhistors as well as the antiquarians in its treatment of a variety of topics and its learned accumulation of materials, his version of polyhistoric antiquarianism can be characterized differently and more favorably than Klemm has done. Sandrart's manner of presentation may have been eclectic, but this eclectic approach was also like that of many other antiquarians in the way that Wilhelm SchrnidtBiggemann has explained. The eclecticism it represented was h o m o g e n e o u ~ . ~ ~ The method of the Teutsche Academie is not uncontrolled, but it may be considered to be restricted in the sense that the material that Sandrart gathered
Waetzoldt, 24, also compares Sandrart to Samuel von Pufendorf and Hermann Conring. Klemm, "Pfade," 12, 19: "so miissen wir denn Sandrart als Geschichtsschreiber wohl zu den halb dilettantisch Material haufenden 'Polyhistoren' seines Jahrhunderts rechnen, ganz unberiihrt von den zukunftweisenden Stromungen, die sich damals in Paris anbahnten." 23 Klemm, "Pfade," 20; also 28, n. 148, describes this genre as a "schwer verdaulichen Literaturgattung" but also establishes the direct contacts that Sandrart had with polyhistors. 24 Allan Ellenius, De Arte Pingendi: Latin Art Literature in Seventeenth-century Sweden and its International Background (Uppsala, 1960); and Klemm, "Pfade." 25 See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis. Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg, 1983).
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together pertains not to all aspects of experience or history but to the making and monuments of art. Moreover, since Sandrart was an extremely successful practicing artist and since he sets a practical aim for artists as the goal of his book, he can hardly in any instance be called a dilettante. Furthermore the TeutscheAcadernie possesses its own sort of organization. Sandrart provides an index for each of his sections. If his work does not appear to be systematic in the sense of later centuries, including that of the Encyclopidie, it has its own system. The first two books of the work deal with the theory and practice of the three arts of design (as in the arti del disegno, painting, sculpture, and architecture), the second book deals more with the antiquarian and historical origins of the arts, and the third with the symbolism of art.26 For this and further reasons Sandrart's antiquarianism cannot simply be called an uncritical piling up of facts. For example, he relates and compares theses about history, inherited from earlier literature, to empirical observation of obje~ts.~' procedure is one that can be identified with some of the pracThis tices developed by antiquarians in the early modem era. It has also been suggested that the introduction of a method employing visual materials as a touchstone for authentication and historical dating such as Sandrart utilizes was a positive product of early modem historical scholarship: it was one response to the impact of Pyrrhonism on the problem of historical credibility @des h i ~ t o r i c a ) Sandrart in fact offers a refined version of this approach: he ap.~~ plies methods to the evaluation of objects that may be compared to those of contemporaneous Kritik.29He makes frequent comments about authorship of drawings and paintings that may be described as a process of connoisseurship.30The employment of these empirical methods has furthermore usually
Waetzold, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 36. Martino Capucci, "Dalla biografia alla storia. Note sulla formazione dell storiografia artistica nel Seicento," Studi Secenteschi, 9 (1968 [1969]), 89-125, argues for "ispezione oculare" and "l'accertamento della verit8" as among the innovations of seicento historiography. Inasmuch as Sandrart also checks theses against observations of medals and of paintings, to whatever degree of consistency, as Klemm also recognizes, I disagree with Klemm's negative assessment of Capucci's observations in relation to Sandrart, "Pfade," 19. 28 See Arnaldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," 295ff, and more recently Markus Volkel, "Pyrrhonismus historicus" und 'pdes historica. " Die Entwicklung der deutschen historischen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (New York, 1987), 103-5; see also Astrid Witschi-Bernz, "Main Trends in Historical-Method Literature: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," in History and Theory, 12 (1972), 63ff. 29 See Herbert Jaumann, Critica. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Literaturkritkzwischen Quintilian und Thomasius (Leiden, 1995), and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "Juridica, historica et art: un ajout en guise de commentairel Juridica, historica und Kunst: Ein Annex in Form eines Kommentars," in Olivier Christin and Dario Gamboni (ed.), Crises de I'image religieuse/Krisen religioser Kunst (Paris, 1999), 28 1-300. 30 See Jeffrey M. Muller, "Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in Early Literature on Connoisseurship," in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions (Studies in the History ofArt, 20) (1989), 141-49; Julius Held, "The Early Appreciation of Drawings," Latin American Art and the Baroque Period in Europe (Studies in Western 1, Art, Acts of the XYth International Congress of the History ofArt) (Princeton, 1963), 1 1 93.
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been seen as essential for the development of the discipline of art history, and they were claimed by Winckelmann as his own innovations. Sandrart also describes at some length both the antiquities and contemporary art objects that were to be found in Kunstkammers, contemporary collections: this section of his book is innovative, because it includes descriptions of collections in a work that otherwise contains theoretical and historical materia l ~ . Sandrart's store of antiquarian materials, stocked further by his discus~' sion of where they can be seen in collections, not only directs readers to them but also supplies him, and them, with comparanda for a critical assessment of history.32 example, Sandrart refers his judgment of the decline of art in late For antiquity to the observation of medals, as Klemm has also noted.33This point should be emphasized, because Sandrart does not merely take over the familiar account of artistic decline setting in with the end of the Roman Empire which had been repeated since the Renaissance. Sandrart's comments on the use of medals resemble the opinions of contemporaneous antiquarians, and are worth quoting: All the famed [writers] who have experience with history have made known to the world how highly necessary is the study and knowledge of medals, because they alone give the stamp of truth in the history of the ancients, and more credence is often to be placed in a medal, than in diverse authors or books. For even though they are no doubt mute, still their forms and reverses speak with more certainty. They settle accounts in dubious matters, they light upon history with pure truth, and they never are silent. Indeed, with their temper they outlast everything imaginable, and show at the same time pure truth together with the excellence and immortality of the art of imagery in a small piece of metal. Therefore the most excellent scholars have all had recourse to lessons in metal. ...34 Sandrart's application of method here involves a fresh empirical examination of medals for the purpose of analysis of the variety of their appearance, which
Teutsche Acadernie, 11, pt. 2, 71ff. See Sandrart's procedure and his use of materials described as being in various collections for forming judgments, as in Teutsche Acadernie, 11, pt. 2, 78, 81, 83. 33 See Klemm, "Pfade," 20-22. 34 Teutsche Acadernie, 1 , pt. 2 , 81: "Es ist bey allen beriihmten Historien-Erfahmen 1 weltkiindigl wie hochnotig sey die Wissenschaft und Erkantnis der Medaglienl weil sie allein in den Historien der Alteni den Ausschlag der Warheit gebeni und ist oft einer einigen Medaglie mehr Glauben zuzusetzen 1 als unterschiedlichen Authoren oder Buchem. Dan ob sie schon stumrn sind I so reden doch ihre Ausbildungen und Riversen mit mehrer Sicherheit. Sie entrichten die zweifelhaftige Sachen1 finden die Geschichte mit der reinen Warheit 1 und schweigen nimmermehr. Ja sie dauren mit der Harte uber alles was zu ersinned und zeigen zugleich die reine Warheit/ mit dervortrefflich- und Unsterblichkeit der Bildkunsti in einem kleinen Stuck Metal1 beysammen. Dahrer dann die vortrefflichste Gelehrten alle ihre Zuflucht zu den metallinen Lehrem genommen haben ...."
"
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he here, as elsewhere in his book, utilizes to construct a fuller historical account. His interpretation of objects for a construction of cultural history is again something that is supposed to have begun only with Winckelmann and other eighteenth-century authors. Sandrart expandedthe view inherited from earlier treatments of the historiography of art. It has long been recognized that Sandrart expanded the biographical coverage of artists past Vasari and Van Mander to include many more Germans, as well as to bring the story up to date. He also expanded his account geographically, to mention the C h i n e ~ eReflecting contemporaneous Euro.~~ pean involvement not only with East Asia but also with the Near East, as exemplified by Athanasius Kircher, whom Sandrart indeed cites in this regard, Sandrart moreover includes accounts of ancient Egyptian s y m b ~ l i s mThus .~~ Sandrart seems to realize more fully than other earlier writers had done the promise that theorists of universal history had hypothesized: one could construct a history of all the arts in all times and places and thus a history of the visual arts, as they have subsequently been called.37 Sandrart's extension of previous accounts of the history of European art is also important, because in this respect he is also more far-reaching than his predecessors. Like Vasari and others Sandrart provides relatively brief accounts of the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture, independent of his accumulations of artists' lives, especially for periods before the thirteenth century, when biographical material becomes more generally available. As Klemm recognized, Sandrart's account was also novel because he traced the onset of decline of art to the second Nicaean council, not to the assaults of the Goths, basing this judgment in humanistic antiquarian manner on the study of coins.38 But Sandrart did more than that; he also expanded the treatment of medieval art in Europe. He filled in the history of medieval art and architecture up to the thirteenth century, when, as in Vasari's compendium, the lives of the known artists usually begin with the biography of C i r n a b ~ eThus before the various .~~ Parisian schools like that of St. Maur, or for that matter the Italian eruditi, had

35 TeutscheAcadernie, I , pt. 3, 1 0 0 e and see Michael Sullivan, The Meeting ofEastern and WesternArt (London, 1973), 93ff. j6 See Erik Iversen, The Myth ofEgypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Princeton, 1993*), 88fE Kircher's compendium is his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (3 vols.; Rome, 1652-54); he contributed to the study of East Asia as well, e.g., China monumentis ... illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), cited by Sandrart in Teutsche Acadernie, 11, pt. 1, 55. j7 See, e.g., Bartholomaeus Keckermann, De Natura et Proprietatibus Historiae Commentarius, in Opera Omnia (2 vols.; Genoa, 1614), 11, col. 1309-88; also Kaufmann, "Eurocentrism and Art History? Universal History and the Historiography of the Arts before Winckelmann," in Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XYIXth International Congress of the Histoiy ofArt held in Amsterdam 1-7September 1996, ed. Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel (Dordrecht, 1999), 35-42. 38 Klemm, "Pfade," 12 with reference to Teutsche Acadernie, I, pt. 1, p. 5, and pt. 2, p. 7. 39 Teutsche Acadernie, I , pt. 2, pp. 5-10.

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begun writing on such subjects, Sandrart also provided an extended, and not entirely negative, account of the Middle Ages.40 Hence far from failing to point to the future, many aspects of Sandrart's work also directly established foundations for the future literature of art. The importance of his contribution is indisputable, for example, in the establishment of criticism, theory, and prosopography of art in the vernacular, just as he played a key role in establishing the first academies of art in germ an^.^' Sandrart's impact was also felt on other late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury developments in the historiography of art. Sandrart seems not just to have preceded but also to have provided some direction and some material for the first book published on the history of architecture, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach's Entwurff einer historischen A r ~ h i t e k t u rFischer von Erlach sketches a history of architecture not accord.~~ ing to architects but by a sequence of illustrations of buildings, arranged chronologically and according to regions. In so doing Fischer also presents the recognizable pattern of a broad universal history. Fischer's universal theme, his treatment of architecture through illustrations, may be regarded, however, as having a predecessor and possibly even a direct source in Sandrart. Sandrart's treatment of China is picked up by Fischer, if turned by the Austrian architect into a more positive direction; and Sandrart's treatment of the medieval period can in a way be compared to the surprisingly tolerant comments in F i ~ c h e r . ~ ~ One detail in Fischer's book speaks not just for coincidence but for a direct use of Sandrart. This is Fischer's treatment of vases, illustrated at the end of his volume in the last book of his compendium44(Figure 1). Coming as they do after a sequence of illustrations of buildings, which culminates in the appearance of Fischer's own works, the appearance of vases at the end of a history of architecture might otherwise seem extraneous, even inexplicable. Yet in Sandrart's work there are also illustrations and discussions of antique vases: these indeed occupy a place in his opus that is similar to that found in Fischer's (Figure 2). In the Teutsche Academie the presentation of vases (and related matter) completes the second, and thus the historical section, of the text.45
40 See Bickendorf, Die Historisierung; antiquarianism and approaches to the history of medieval art are the topics of continuing research by Ingo Herklotz. 4 Klemm, "Pfade," although I am in disagreement with aspects of his account of Sandrart's ' historiography; and see Bruno Bushart, "Die Augsburger Akademien," in Academies ofArt Between Renaissance and Romanticism (Leids Kztnsthistorische Jaarboek, 5-6 [1986-87, 1989]), 332 ff; Ludwig Grote, "Joachim von Sandrart und Niirnberg," in Barock in Nurnberg (Anzeiger des Germanischen National-Museums) (Nuremberg, 1962), 14ff. 42 EntwurJf einer historischen Architektur.. (Vienna, 1721). 43 See Kaufmann, "Eurocentrism and At History? Universal History and the Historiograr phy of the Arts before Winckelmann." EntwurJf einer historischen Architektur, Bk. 5 : "Divers Vases Antiuqes Egyptiens, Grecs, Romains, & modemes: avec Quelques uns de l'invention de I'Auteur." 45 Teutsche Academie, 1 , pt. 3: "Von unterschiedlichen antiquischen oder uralten Gefassed 1 Gebauden/Ruinen/Homern u.a.d."

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It is also possible to associate Sandrart with further historiographic developments in his immediate milieu in Nuremberg, where much was later to be written on the visual arts.46Sandrart was connected with literary and learned figures in the town. In turn Altdorf, the university of Nuremberg, can be linked with artistic interests in the In Altdorf at the beginning of the eighteenth century Christoph Gottlieb Schwarz, who had written his own dissertation on manuscripts, lectured on the subject; he also acted later as the promoter of a dissertation on ivory d i p t y c h ~Schwarz and others like him handled the ob.~~ jects they discussed by describing them, in his case, manuscripts, recounting their inscriptions, handwriting, the materials with which they are made, their form, bindings, symbolism, and illuminations. Schwarz and writers on similar subjects, like Martin Schmeitzel, who wrote about crowns and described when and how objects had been made and fared through later years.49 Hence long before the establishment of the first academic chairs in art history at Gottingen and Berlin, and certainly before Winckelmann, disquisitions and dissertations on objects were in fact being written at universities in Germany. In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century theses were presented on topics including crowns, Roland statues, diptychs, and manuscripts in various faculties, not only at Altdorf, where a number of professors were involved, but also at such universities as Frankfurt an der Oder, Leipzig, and Jena. After Sandrart (and his German contemporary, D. B. Major)50even Kunstkammers could become the subject of university dissertation^.^^ Later scholarship has usually categorized the approach represented by these sorts of endeavors as antiquarian, as it has the presentation of some of the
46 Frank Wolf Eiermann, "Die Veroffentlichungen der Niimberger Mahler-Academie von Jacob von Sandrart bis Johann Justin Preisler (1662- 1771)" (M. A. thesis, Friedrich-AlexanderUniversitat Erlangen-Niimberg, 1992). 47 See Christian Klemm, "Sigmund von Birken und Joachim von Sandrart. Zur Entstehung der Teutschen Academie und zu anderen Beziehungen von Literat und Maler," in Der Franken Rom, Niirnbergs Bliitezeit in dev zweiten Halfte des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. John Roger Paas (Wiesbaden, 1995), 289-3 13; and see Frank Wolf Eiermann, "Die Niimberger Mahler-Academie und die Universitat Altdorf im 17/18. Jahrhundert," Friihneuzeit-info, 9 (1993), 97-98. 48 Schwarz's writings on manuscripts are collected in De ornamentis librorum et varia rei librariae veterum supellectile dissertationum antiquarium ..., ed. Johann Christian Leuschner (Leipzig,1756); see also Gustav Philipp Negelein, "De Vetusto Quodam Diptycho Consulari et Ecclesiastico" (Ph. D. diss., Altdorf, 1742). 49 Commentatio Historica de Coronis tam Antiquis, quam Modernis ... Speciatim de Origine et Fatis Sacrae, Angelicae et Apostolica Regni Hungariae Coronae (Jena, 1712). Another contemporary dissertation on the crown of Hungary was written at Altdorf and promoted by D. G. Moller: Conrad Deichler, "Disputatio Circularis de Corona Hungarica" (Ph. D. diss., Altdorf, 1709). 50 D. B. Major, Unvop~eiffliches edencken von Kunst- ztnd Naturalien-Kammern (Kiel, B 1674). 5 1 At Altdorf in 1704 Friedrich Sigismund Wurffbain defended a dissertation on Kunstkammers and the history of collecting that had probably been written by thepraeses, Professor D. G. Moller: "Dissertatio de Technophysiotameis-von Kunst-und Naturalien-Kammem" (Altdorf, 1704). Other dissertations are discussed in "Before Winckelmann," 76-78.

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Figure 2: Ancient Vases, from Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, Nuremberg, 1675, courtesy, Marquand Library.

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materials in Sandrart. The term antiquarian as used here describes an activity or interest that is concerned with documents and objects of the past in an effort to reconstitute their appearance and nature, not an analytical or narrative manner of procedure. Antiquarianism is thus thought to provide a basis for historical research, not to represent real historiography itself.52Sandrart is contrasted with Winckelmann, and antiquarianism with art history. Sandrart's work and the link it provides between art history and antiquarianism suggest that these distinctions are too sharply drawn. It is mistaken to dismiss too hastily his sort of scholarship and antiquarianism more generally as belonging to a type that is different in its method from Winckelmann's-that is, a concern with the visual particularities of objects of art, set into a historical framework. Although Winckelmann wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessors and his mode of presentation and literary style differ from Sandrart's and from those of other antiquarians, it is nevertheless the case that antiquarians supplied Winckelmann both with most of the matter for his books, and also with much of his method, which is now identified with that of art history. Sandrart's work further suggests that Winckelmann's relation to his antecedents can be traced not only in regard to archaeological or iconographic content, for which he drew upon material compiled by antiquarians, but also in what is often regarded as Winckelmann's special contribution to art historical method, namely, the analysis of the formal or stylistic particularities of objects in order to place them in historical context. Numerous texts reveal the existence of a host of other northern antecedents to Winckelmann in addition to Sandrart in this regard as well. For example, in one seventeenth-century publication on ivory diptychs, which has been discussed elsewhere, the Liege Jesuit Alexander Wilthelm dates them according to their stylistic qualities. In a manner that uncannily anticipates Giovanni Morelli's discussion of the connoisseur's method two centuries later, Wilthelm presents illustrations demonstrating the dating of diptychs according to details such as the shape of hands.53Furthermore, Wilthelm also dates an ivory according to assumptions of stylistic history, which are similar to those associated with Winckelmann's supposed inventions. He identifies a building represented in a diptych as Gothic. He states that he means by this not the Goths who destroyed Rome. Instead this term is to be understood as historically, we would say art-historically specific: he compares the structure on a diptych to what he calls the Gothic Cathedral of Reims. He then dates the work correctly by association with the church of St. Lambert in Liege.54
52

'' See Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," in Myths, Emblems, Clues,
tr. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990), 96-125. 54 Alexandri Wilthelmi, Diptychon Leodiense ex Consulari Factum Epicopale et in Illud Cornrnentarius(Liege, 1659), and Appendix ad Diptychon Leodiense (Likge, 1660); see Kaufinann "Antiquarian Connoisseurship and Art History before Winckelmann"; "Before Winckelmann," 76-77; and Bickendorf, Die Historisierung, 261, n. 52.

See Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian."

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Through writings such as Sandrart's and Wilthelm's methods, comparable to what later generations have called visual analysis and connoisseurship, also entered into German university education in the earlier eighteenth century.55 This sort of instruction has a direct importance for Winckelmann, because he personally encountered it at the university of Halle, where he studied in the years 1738-39. It has been known that at Halle Winckelmann met Alexander Baumgarten, the founder of philosophical aesthetics so important for the redefinition of the meaning of art, and that he attended lectures given by Johann Heinrich Schulze on numismatics and antiquities. While it has been recognized that Schulze was probably the first to have introduced Winckelmann to the study of ancient objects, the importance of this contact has until recently been ~nderestimated.~~ A posthumous publication by Schulze indicates that he taught how to distinguish copies or fakes from originals.57More important, Schulze's announcement for a seminar he offered in 1738-39 also indicates that he was then teaching how one could learn by experience to situate objects, namely, coins, in history according to the way they look, dating them not merely according to what they depict, or their inscription^.^^ Since it is known that Winckelmann studied with him at the time, Schulze thus probably taught Winckelmann how to date objects on the basis of what we would call their visual style or forms. This approach to a history of objects according to physical appearance is similar to the method that Winckelmann would later develop. Schulze indeed specifically relates his instruction in numismatics not merely to supposedly antiquarian pursuits; he uses it to construct a historical scheme like that Winckelmann was later to develop: he says that the study he teaches illuminates how there is a decline of arts in restless and suffering times and how they have soon recovered in peaceful times thereafter. It is further interesting to note that these points are also anticipated by Sandrart, just as his treatment of medals also antedates Schulze's. By the 1740s, when Winckelmann left Halle to begin his own career as a scholar, the term "history of art" (or art history, Geschichte der Kunst or Kunstgeschichte) had also become current in the German language, not just in French and English texts mentioned by Winckelmann. Winckelmann admitted
55 Cf. Bickendorf, loc. cit., who notes that the reprinting of Wilthelm's work in Thesaurus Diptychorum (Rome, 1759) made this "weitgehend vergessene Text" accessible again to the republic of letters. The existence of treatments of ivories in German dissertations, however, suggests that the text was known in the earlier eighteenth century in Germany. 56 Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1 8982),52-54, and Kaufmann, "Antiquarian Connoisseurship and Art History"; and for Baumgarten and Winckelmann see Dilly, "1738: Vers une topographie de la notion d'art." 57 Johann Heinrich Schulze, Anleitungzur altern Munmisssenschaft worin die dazu gehorigen Schriften beurtheilet und die Alterthiimer au Miinzen erleutert werden (Halle, 1766). 58 Schulze, Einladungs-Schrift zu einem Collegio Privato uber die Muntz- PV7ssenschaft und die daraus erlaiiternde Griechische und Romische Alterthiimer (Halle, 1738).

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that the term existed in foreign-language titles, which he criticized as being merely histories of artists, but in fact much before him the word Kunstgeschichte was already being used in German publications in reference to historical studies of objects. The term had been employed for the title of a periodical, Geschichte der Natur und der Kunst that had been published in Breslau (now Wroclaw) between 1717 and 1720, in which there appear several mentions of painting and porcelain production and an account of the installation of the Kunst. ~ und Naturalien-Cabinett in D r e ~ d e nA~periodical of the later 1740s, Neue Versuche nutzlichen Sammlungen zu der Natur- und Kunstgeschichte, contains accounts of artistic inventions, archival studies of some important artists, such as the architect Giovanni Maria Nosseni, and essays on "Gothic" altarpieces, such as that now attributed to Master HW (Hans Witten?) in Ehrenfriedersdorf near Leipzig.'jO Another book of the late 1740s employing the title "history of arts" also treats the history of the visual arts as part of a history of all the arts and s ~ i e n c e s . ~ ' At approximately the same time in Leipzig, then the publishing capital of Germany, commercial center of Saxony, and site of a major university, another comparatively well known author with whose work Winckelmann was familiar was also writing explicitly about a history of art as a history of genres or objects. This is Johann Friedrich Christ. It has long been known that earlier than Winckelmann, Johann Friedrich Christ envisioned what he called a history of painting based on the study of objects, including pictures, prints, and drawings; Christ's history was also to be organized according to style periods, as Winckelmann's was later.62Christ constructed the life of Lucas Cranach he published in 1726 not only on the basis of earlier biographies, but through the study of archival information and of paintings that he had actually seen and describes. Christ says that his biography of Cranach was conceived not as part of a series of artists' lives, but as an introduction to what was to be a history of painting. Although this work was never completed, Christ's statement indicates that like Winckelmann he specifically distinguished between a history of
59 Geschichte der Natur und Kunst. Sammlung von Natur- und Medicin. Wie auch hierzu gehorigen Kunst und Literatur-Geschichten, e.g., on the manufacture of paint (1718), 730. 60 Neue Versuche nutzlicher Sammlungen zu der Natur- und Kunst-geschichte sonderlich von Obersachsen,Schneeberg, 1747ff. See, for example, "Sammlung von Neuen Natur und KunstErfindungen, und andem Kunst-Stiicken," Neue Versuche, 6 (1 749), 493ff; "Kurtze Nachricht, von dem Leben, des beriihmten Johannes Mariae Nosseni, Churfirstlichen. Sachs Baumeister," Neue Versuche, 1 (1747), 25-31; "M. G. F. Miillers' Bericht, wegen derer am Altar zu Ehrenfriedersdorff befindlichen merckwiirdigen Alterthiimer. Nebst einer Figur," Neue Versuche, 5 (1748), 371-77. 61 Kern-Historie aller Freien Kunsten und Schonen Wissenschajien, Vom Anfang der Welt, bis auf unsere Zeiten (Leipzig, 1748). 62 See Kurt Karl Eberlein, Die deutsche Litterargeschichte der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kunstwissenschaft (Karlsruhe, 1919), 14, Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 45ff, and Julius von Schlosser, La Letteratura artistica (Florence, 19673),481, 491, also discuss Christ as a forerunner ofwinckelmann, and Waetzoldt also discusses his method.

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art and a history of artists. This history moreover would be organized, Christ indicates, according to a framework of schools, that were to be arranged chronologically according to a history of style, again anticipating what Winckelmann later tried to provide for ancient art. In Christ's teaching and later publications the object assumed a central role in his project. While holding a chair as professor of literature, Christ regularly lectured on aspects of sculpture and painting. In his writings he employed monuments in various ways to support historical accounts.63More significant for the construction of a history of art are Christ's comments on seals and his publication on artists' monograms, on which latter subject he published one of the earliest standard reference works.64Christ's book of 1747 on monograms was compiled from his observation of original objects, many of them found in the graphic collection that Christ had accumulated for purposes of teaching and research. The compilation of such a collection and reference text obviously served the interests of a connoisseurship concerned with the discrimination of individual works. More than that, Christ expressly states that his work on monograms was meant to provide one of the bases for the construction of what was to be a history of art based on epochs, nations, schools, and individual masters.65 Beginning in the 1740s the architect Friedrich August Krubsacius also anticipated Winckelmann's ideas in his own publications. Long ago in his magisterial study of Winckelmann and his contemporaries Carl Justi brought Krubsacius into discussions of W i n ~ k e l m a n nbut~the architect's importance ,~ can be hrther reassessed. Krubsacius's writings would probably have been noted by Winckel-mann, because when Winckelmann came to Dresden in the mid-1750s, he was a leading figure on the artistic and cultural scene in the Saxon capital. The most famous building designed by Krubsacius is the Saxon Landhaus, formerly a government building and now the museum of the history of the city of Dresden. In 1755, the year in which Winckelmann published his famous Gedanken uber die Nachahmung in Dresden, Krubsacius would have gained further attention in the city by his appointment to the position of Saxon Hofbaumeister, court architect. His opinions would therefore have been of consequence for an aspiring young critic like Winckelmann. Four years later, in 1759, Krubsacius published his Gedanken von dem Ursprung, Wachstum und Verfall der Verzierungen in den schonen Kunsten,

63 See, e.g., Noctium Academicarum libri sive specimina quattuor (Halle, 1729), e.g. Specimen I1 "quo ex antiquitate quaedam monumenta illustrantur"; Imagines Musarum ... (Leipzig, 1739); and the posthumously collected Abhandlungen iiber die Litteratur und Kunstwerke vornernlich des Altertums (Leipzig, 1776). "Johann Friedrich Christ, Arzzeige und Auslegung der Monogrammisten ... (Leipzig, 1747), page 112; also Phil. Dan. Lippert, Dactylothecae Universalis Signorum Exemplis Nitidis Redditae ... (Leipzig, 1755), intro., x-xi. Christ, Anzeige und Auslegung, page 114. 66 Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, I , 287.

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where ideas critical of certain forms of eighteenth-century decoration are to be found which resemble the anti-rococo classicizing remarks of Winckelmann's own Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke. In his own book Krubsacius repeats notions that he had apparently already expressed in the 1740s, thus independent of and antecedent to Winckelmann. The publication of Krubsacius's book on ornament, even more directly pertinent to questions of historiography, antedates the appearance of Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums by five years. Krubsacius's is the first history of the "decorative" arts. Krubsacius deals primarily with architectural ornament. While he does mention individual architects, his account is primarily of forms of decoration itself. He traces the development of ornament from its origins to the present. Krubsacius presents material found throughout the world, and often gives descriptions of individual monuments to point up the critique explicit in his history. His description of the Arch of the Goldsmiths in Rome (the Arcus Argentarii) as an example of late antique decadence in design is one characteristic example of his classicizing his to^-y.67 Krubsacius thus presents a history of objects within an argument whose aesthetic biases resemble those of Winckelmann. More significant, his account also anticipates Winckelmann's history. Krubsacius presents not only a critique of designs found in the past as well as in present-day Europe but also a chronological account of his subject established around the description of a category of objects that is accommodated to a historical schema. This is the familiar scheme of origin, rise, and fall. Like Winckelmann, Krubsacius imposes this pattern onto a universal historical scheme, one that moreover specifically adopts materials from various lands and countries, as did Winckelmann. Krubsacius also expressly cites as a source Fischer von Erlach's Entwurff einer historischen Architektur of 1721.68 Krubsacius's allusion to Fischer von Erlach is important (though hardly unique) as evidence for Fischer's reception in the eighteenth century. This is an important indication that there seems to have been an ongoing discussion of historiography of the arts in the eighteenth century, in Germany as elsewhere, that antedates Winckelmann. Fischer's visual history of architecture can thus be considered, indeed was considered, to have presented a history of objects that antedates Winckelmann's. And Fischer von Erlach also leads back to Sandrart. This essay has discussed but a few figures active in the German-speaking world, familiar as well as little known, who antedate Winckelmann in their contributions to the historiography of art. Many other writers who anticipate aspects of the approach to the study of objects in a historical manner that is
67 Gedanken von dem Ursprung, Wachstum und Verfall der Verzierungen in den schonen Kunsten (Leipzig, 1759), 2 1. Ibid., 15-16.

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associated with Winckelmann could also be named.69Enough may however already have been presented to suggest that much of the novelty attributed to Winckelmann is actually envisioned by earlier figures. The evidence presented here also suggests that a revision of interpretations which hypothesize a rupture between the supposedly modem pursuits of the eighteenth century, specifically its presumed revolution in historiography, and earlier forms of scholarship, including antiquarianism and encyclopedism, is in order.'O What then was distinctive about Winckelmann's accomplishment? Like many other apparent innovators, he created an attractive combination out of already existing concepts and methods. He provided useful compendia of monuments and objects. He offered a comprehensive account that connected them by historical narrative in a universal framework (according to the standards of the time). He set his discussion of monuments and objects under the rubric of art, according to the redefinition of the artistic and the aesthetic, as effected in the eighteenth century by such thinkers as the Abbe Dubos and Baumgarten, with whose work he was familiar. The power of Winckelmann's writing, especially in the vernacular, in comparison with other writers on similar topics has also often been acknowledged, and it would seem that his eloquence was something else that made his approach accessible. The combination of these features, rather than the originality of many of his ideas about historiography, especially in regard to method or treatment of subject matter, is among the elements which make Winckelmann distinctive. In any event, Winckelmann came on the scene at a moment that had been well prepared for him in Germany as elsewhere. This circumstance also helps account for the generally favorable reception his writings received in his own time, and that as a consequence established his fame in later ages. It is therefore not a postmodem urge to deny Winckelmann authorial originality but a desire to offer a fuller and more balanced story that calls attention to the need for further reconsideration of the significance of the so-called antiquarian tradition. Such reconsideration not only helps fill in a chapter in the history of scholarship but creates a firmer foundation on which his own contribution to the origins of discussions of the history of art, and more generally to the supposed eighteenth-century revolution in historiography, can be assessed. Princeton University.

"Before Winckelmann: Towards the Origins of the History of Art." See Henning Wrede, "Die Entstehung der Archaologie und das Einsetzen der neuzeitlichen Geschichtsbetrachtung," in Geschichtdiskurs, 2, Anfa'nge modernen historischen Denkens, ed. Wolfgang Kiittler, Jom Riisen, and Emst Schulin (Frankfurt a. M., 1994), 95-119.
69
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Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation Michael Fried October, Vol. 37. (Summer, 1986), pp. 87-97.
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Ancient History and the Antiquarian Arnaldo Momigliano Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 13, No. 3/4. (1950), pp. 285-315.
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Main Trends in Historical-Method Literature: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Astrid Witschi-Bernz History and Theory, Vol. 12, Beiheft 12: Bibliography of Works in the Philosophy of History 1500-1800. (1972), pp. 51-90.
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