B –
Bear in mind that it’s a translation from Tahitian into Spanish, and from Spanish into French. The previous night the old man had made a visit to that same Orou to whom he called out the next day, in whose home knowledge of the Spanish language had been preserved for generations. Orou had written down the speech of the old man in Spanish, and Bougainville had a copy of it in his hand while the old man spoke.
A –
I can now understand only too well why Bougainville suppressed this fragment.
IIC10 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) from A Monument to Johann Winckelmann
Herder is best known for his contribution to the development of the philosophy of history (cf. IIIA1), and his work marked a shift away from the prevailing rationalist and universalist commitments of the Enlightenment. His encounter with Goethe in 1770 led directly to the formation of the Sturm und Drang movement in German art and literature, and indirectly to Romanticism. Another component of these changes was a scepticism about the priority of the classical Greek heritage in art, and a developing interest in non‐classical forms including the Gothic, non‐Western arts, and folk culture. In 1778, Herder wrote a tribute to Winckelmann (‘A Monument to Johann Winckelmann’), in which he took the opportunity to dissent from Winckelmann’s insistence on the autochthonous development of Greek art, and the way in which he had ahistorically applied a model of Greek art to assess Egyptian art and thereby judge it inferior. For Herder this is to fail to take account of Egyptian art’s grounding in a very different set of values than the Greek. He thus begins to open up, already in the late eighteenth century, a surprisingly modern sense of cultural relativism. The present extracts are taken from Denkmal Johann Winckelmann’s: Eine ungekrönte Preisschrift Johann Gottfried Herder’s aus dem jahre 1778, von Dr. Albert Duncker, Verlag von Theodor Kay, Kassel, 1882, pp. 41–44 and 48–51. They were translated for the present volume by Richard Elliot.
The great admirer of the Greeks supposes that ‘They, like all peoples, invented their art themselves; to no other people are they indebted.’1 This principle makes their entire history very straightforward for we no longer need to think in terms of a transmission or transition from one people to another, and the book falls into as many sections as there are peoples under discussion. It does indeed seem true in a general and ideal sense because not only can each and every people invent its own art, most have actually invented some beginnings of it, just as children paint and bake horses or faces from bread or wax. Winckelmann and his followers’ arguments are also based for the most part on general, hypothetical possibilities and are (in academic parlance) a priori, in this instance proving nothing, or not enough, precisely because they prove too much.
For one thing, while the ability of a people – to say nothing of a people such as the Greeks – to invent their own art has probably never been doubted, the question is: can it be historically proven that the Greeks did actually invent theirs? On this I believe history would speak against rather than for. For another, no one art is, in any case, exactly the same as any other. Blocks of wood and quadrilateral stones are not art. Indeed they have, since time immemorial, been, or been venerated as, symbolic deities without ever becoming art, let alone art of any beauty. The question here is: who achieved the first advances in the creation of a work of art as such, ascertained the mechanical aspects of art (always the most difficult part) and provided a model? Who subsequently had the idea of employing art in religious worship and the like (for which other things could have been used), thereby setting a precedent in custom and usage? Finally, should one not also intensify and multiply the difficulties when thinking about how one people might have been able to act upon another, in how something could pass from one people to another? Otherwise doubts will be entertained about the plainest matters and objections raised to the simplest. Ultimately, any movement is impossible for which merely pacing up and down and pondering is the only and best rebuttal. Let us examine the issue on the basis of similarity and fragments of ancient writing, on the basis of the ancient Greek style itself, and see what these, without prejudice, tell us.
Analogy shows that individuals and peoples extremely seldom invent when they do not have to, that they always, except in dire necessity, choose to make do with tradition, inheritance, imitation, learning from others rather than thinking things up for themselves. However little this redounds to the honour of mankind, it is so. We can see it in ourselves, in every child of every people. We invent extremely little on our own account: the most highly praised inventions are mere flashes of inspiration generated by the friction between the most carefully prepared circumstances and, as it were, prior inventions, but even here humankind discovers far more often than it invents. The chain of culture among the few peoples of the world shows how much a people can achieve through contact, tradition, looking beyond its own boundaries, and how little by itself, idle and isolated. A self‐enclosed people can remain uncultured in the least expected areas. By making do alone it will hardly, or only with difficulty, progress even in the bare necessities of life and those on plainest view, let alone in the habits and pleasures of the mind. Why has that which we call art and science taken hold in, and made an impression on, such a narrow swathe of the Earth? Clearly, climate, government and so on cannot be responsible for everything because they vary greatly across the small number of cultivated nations. Tradition, learning from others, the chain of instruction do the most – and above all, no doubt, where the mechanical aspects of art are concerned.
Every people is capable of inventing its own language, but does this mean that each one has necessarily invented its own? Do not ties of family, clan, race, the most natural bonds in the world, take precedence here? Every people is capable of inventing its own gods, but has each one therefore done so? And if, according to even Herodotus (invoked here as the presumed oldest historian, who was at least more familiar with these matters than we are), most of the Greek gods were Egyptian or bore a resemblance to the Egyptian gods, whence can they have emerged but from a common origin and fatherland? Moreover, could the gods, from wherever they hailed, have come to Greece without any idea of the images and form in which they were adored, given that idols were fashioned and fixed by the image? Thus tribal and religious connections were accompanied from the outset by notions of art, for the Greeks had not simply risen up out of their own soil. Above all in their culture, they signal to Asia and Egypt. These had idolatry, art and architecture before Greece had progressed beyond barbarism, and if Greece obtained something from these lands, it must have been in a vehicle and outward form that were customary and sacred there.
***
I would just like to say a word about Egyptian art by way of a second test. That Winckelmann considered the art of the Egyptians not as a Greek, but within the context of his theoretical system for Greek art, is undeniable, after all beauty and the essence of art are everywhere the same, resting on a common set of rules. However, it is another matter altogether if we are to view the history of art as history pure and simple rather than as a system. The Egyptians are older than the Greeks and need to be judged not against the latter but on their own merits. What was art to the Egyptians? How, in their great antiquity, did they light upon the idea of it? And what was its purpose among them? Had they nothing in common with the Greeks in all of this, the works of the two should not be seen as part of the same framework but should each be allowed to serve its particular time and place. After all, going back to their origins, the Egyptians most likely intended working neither for the Greeks nor for us.
For whom, then, were they working? For themselves, and their art in all likelihood developed exclusively out of their mummies. Because they felt such an antipathy towards decay (and for that very reason invented embalming) and because, according to an ancient report, they had, to start with, simply amassed the bodies of their ancestors, visiting them frequently, indeed apparently almost living with them, a need no doubt arose to transform them into stone and to embalm them. And this explains the peculiarities of Egyptian artistic
