However, surpassing the private collections just mentioned, the novelty of
the eighteenth century was the opening of theWrst public museums men-
tioned above. They were a clear indication that, at a civil level, something
very important was beginning to change. Antiquities were not the exclusive
province of the highest elites in society. The need for them to be located in a
designated place was beginning to be felt, where well-oVindividuals mainly
from the growing middle classes and adequately vetted by the museum
bureaucrats could take pleasure from them and, more importantly, learn
from them. It is, however, revealing that the antiquities in these museums
were in their majority classical objects. This is the type of archaeology that
was also taught in universities sometimes by philologists such as Christian
Gotlob Heyne (1729–1812) in Go ̈ttingen (state of Hanover), and by Profes-
sor Georg Zoe ̈ga (1755–1809) in Kiel (then belonging to Denmark) from
1802, who had a chair of archaeology (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 115; Schiering
1969).
In between neoclassicism and pre-romanticism: philhellenism
and the mysticism of Egyptian archaeologyIn between neoclassicism and pre-romanticism lay philhellenism and Egyp-
tian archaeology. Philhellenism was born in the eighteenth century, when the
enlightened elites associated ancient Greece with nature, genius and freedom
in contrast to the unnatural, overspecialized and even tyrannical ways of their
own modern world. In Greece itself, it led to scholars’ perception of them-
selves as the descendants and heirs of the ancients (Kitromilides 1994: 58–9).
Greek art was promoted and interest in it would reach a peak in Western
Europe with the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, especially after his
Geschichte der Kunst der Alterthums(1764) (translated asThe History of
Ancient Art among the Greeks). With his interest in the mechanics of beauty,
this work imposed a new vision of Greece based on the sublime and on the
notion of freedom. He was among theWrst in claiming the right of Greece to
be independent, a wish that would become a reality a few decades later
(Chapter 4). As he argued:
The independence of Greece is to be regarded as the most prominent of the causes,
originating in its constitution and government, of its superiority in art... The free-
dom which gave birth to great events, political changes, and jealousy among the
Greeks, planted, as it were in the very production of these eVects, the germ of noble
and elevated sentiments.
(Winckelmann in Schnapp 1993: 262–3).Antiquities and Political Prestige 49