18 The New York Review
use of “classic” to mean something es-
sential, enduring, and above reproach.
No one fell harder for the Classical
ideal than the German scholar Johann
Joachim Winckelmann, whose History
of the Art of Antiquity, published in
1764, two centuries after Vasari, con-
stituted the first systematic analysis of
style and culture. Like Vasari and de
Piles and everyone else, Winckelmann
believed there was a right and a wrong
way to make art, and that the right way
had been modeled by the ancient world.
But where other authors offered an-
ecdotal accounts of individual artists,
Winckelmann provided a taxonomy of
styles and used them to assign objects a
time and place of origin. He then went
further, linking those styles to aspects
of culture that had no necessary rela-
tion to art—literature, politics, habits of
mind. He was convinced that Greek art
was completely original, uninfluenced
by contact with Egypt or anyplace else,
and his faith in the absolute reciprocity
of nature and culture in Ancient Greece
led him to conclude that the smooth,
idealized sculptures he saw recorded the
actual perfection of real Greek bodies.
Winckelmann set in play two cru-
cial concepts for art history: style as
the basis for attribution, and art as the
reflexive representation of a people.
This, for Michaud, is where the trouble
starts. He quotes the Austrian art histo-
rian (and facilitator of Nazi art- looting
in Poland) Dagobert Frey: “It is with
Winckelmann that, for the first time,
‘national character’ was seen to lie at
the origin of differences in art.” And in
Winckelmann’s equation of real bodies
and fictive statues, Michaud identifies
a pernicious equation between biology
and culture:Once Winckelmann had estab-
lished this intimate and organic
link between a people and its art,
it became customary to see art not
simply as a social activity... , but as
a peculiarly natural function of the
body of a people: i.e., as a sort of
bodily secretion of the nation as a
whole.Winckelmann’s approach was to
prove profoundly influential, but the
hege monic hold of Classicism on the
European imagination was already
crumbling.In 1772 the twenty- three- year- old
Goethe visited Strasbourg Cathedral
and was moved to write what Wood de-
scribes as “the first modern expression
of wholehearted admiration for a me-
dieval work.” In the piled- up excess of
Gothic, disdained for so long, Goethe
claimed to recognize “the strong,
rough, German soul.” Later he con-
cluded that beauty is never universal:The man who emerges from child-
hood and raises his eyes does not
find nature, as it were, pure and
naked around him.... He is so
enclosed within imposed accli-
matizations, conventional usages,
favourite customs, venerable tradi-
tions, treasured monuments, ben-
eficial laws, and so many splendid
products of art that he never learns
to distinguish what is original and
what is derived.If this were so, then the north should not
attempt to equal the south by imitatingClassical formulae, but by embracing
its own atavistic origins. Michaud’s title
calls up the “barbarian invasions” not
because of anything that actually hap-
pened during Rome’s decline but be-
cause of the spin put on those events in
the nineteenth century, when the “Ger-
manic” hordes—broadly and imagi-
natively defined—were re envisaged as
energetic engineers of modern Chris-
tian Europe.
One consequence of this shakeup of
hierarchies was a dramatic expansion of
the types of artworks and objects that
could be considered important, mean-
ingful, and possibly even beautiful. The
crunched up, goggle- eyed figures in
Romanesque cathedrals, like the busy
and irrational illuminated manuscripts,
could now be seen as signs of a distinct
and ingenious imaginative universe,and as artifacts of two great Victorian
virtues: industriousness and Christian
thought. In 1852 John Ruskin, aptly
described by Wood as “the polymath
and barely secular preacher,” urged his
readers not to mock the Gothic’s “ugly
goblins, and formless monsters, and
stern statues, anatomiless and rigid;...
they are signs of the life and liberty of
every workman who struck the stone.”
Art history finally emerged as an
academic discipline in the nineteenth
century, with scholars studying form
and appearance as expressions of par-
ticular times and places, and plotting
them on larger historical arcs. (Hegel
helped.) Connoisseurship—the kind
of close looking that reveals the or-
igin of a watermarked paper or how
an artist habitually tapered a pencil
stroke—provided an ever- expanding
stock of forensic evidence, which could
then be yoked to much grander narra-
tives about a society’s rise and fall, and
its place in the larger realm of human
events. Public museums proliferated
across the continent, and for the first
time it became common to hang galler-
ies according to “national schools” and
eras. Baedekers began delivering art
history to the traveling middle classes.
Wood details the century’s busy bustle
of cataloging, publishing, and educat-
ing by both professionals and amateurs.
At the same time, Europe’s colonial
marauding was delivering a bounty
of curiosities from Africa and South-
east Asia, the Americas and Oceania.
The old trick of separating form and
content, so useful in adapting paganaesthetics to Christianity, now opened
the world to Western analysis and col-
lecting. Were these things art? For
Euro peans, instinct and habit pointed
one way, logic pointed another. It was
not enough to try to pare painting and
sculpture away from household goods—
Greek kraters once held water and wine,
and as Wood notes, Raphael “lived in a
world in which an altarpiece was still
essentially a supplement to a ritual sac-
rifice.” Every handmade object involves
decisions of style and form that can be
categorized and that may be meaning-
ful, and the fence posts between archae-
ology, anthropology, and art history
were never clearly marked. In 1919 the
Austrian architect Adolf Loos claimed:If nothing were left of an extinct
people but a single button, I wouldbe able to infer, from the shape
of that button, how these people
dressed, built their houses, how
they lived, what was their religion,
their art, their mentality.^2It is this sort of cultural phrenology—
measuring the lumps and ridges of ob-
jects so as to diagnose the mental and
moral characteristics of the people
behind them—that Michaud finds so
alarming. He senses the moral peril
of viewing cultural differences as he-
reditary and immutable, and of under-
standing individual makers as mere
instruments of biological destiny.
He pays close attention to the terms
used to distinguish modes of artistic
execution—from “taste” (which can
be learned), to “manner” (perhaps
innate), to “style” (a collective agree-
ment)—and he charts a similar nurture-
to- nature slide in taxonomic categories
from “school” to “nation” to “race.” He
takes us down the slippery slope from
Winckelmann’s claims about the no-
bility of Greek profiles to pro- slavery
engravings of the putative development
from apes to Africans to the Apollo
Belvedere, and from the trope of the
Jews as a people without art to that of
the Jews as the destroyers of culture.
He confirms and expands upon anThomas Struth: Pergamon Museum 1, Berlin, 2001Thomas Struth/MCAChicago/Nathan Keay(^2) Adolf Loos, “Antworten auf Fragen
aus dem Publikum” (1919), in Adolf
Loos: Sämtliche Schriften, volume 1,
edited by Franz Glück (Munich: Her-
old, 1962).
mitpress.mit.edu/nybooks
Fall Books
from the
MIT Press