content, tragedy, the epic poem, and in general the solid gold of wit, which under French hammers can be stretched to thin leaves of great surface. In Germany wit still shines very much through a foil. Earlier, it was flagrant, but through examples and by the understanding of the nation it has become more charming and noble – but the first with less naïveté, the second with a less bold energy, than in the aforementioned peoples. The taste of the Dutch nation for a painful order and a grace that stirs one to solicitude and embarrassment causes one to expect little feeling also in regard to the inartificial and free movements of the genius, whose beauty would only be deformed by the anxious prevention of faults. Nothing can be more set against all art and science than an adventurous taste, because this distorts nature, which is the archetype of all the beautiful and noble. Hence the Spanish nation has displayed little feeling for the beautiful arts and sciences. […]
If we cast a fleeting glance over the other parts of the world, we find the Arab the noblest man in the Orient, yet of a feeling that degenerates very much into the adventurous. He is hospitable, generous, and truthful; yet his narrative and history and on the whole his feeling are always interwoven with some wonderful thing. His inflamed imagination presents things to him in unnatural and distorted images, and even the propagation of his religion was a great adventure. If the Arabs are, so to speak, the Spaniards of the Orient, similarly the Persians are the French of Asia. They are good poets, courteous and of fairly fine taste. They are not such strict followers of Islam, and they permit to their pleasure‐prone disposition a tolerably mild interpretation of the Koran. The Japanese could in a way be regarded as the Englishmen of this part of the world, but hardly in any other quality than their resoluteness – which degenerates into the utmost stubbornness – their valor, and disdain of death. For the rest, they display few signs of a finer feeling. The Indians have a dominating taste of the grotesque, of the sort that falls into the adventurous. Their religion consists of grotesqueries. Idols of monstrous form, the priceless tooth of the mighty monkey Hanuman, the unnatural atonements of the fakirs … What trifling grotesqueries do the verbose and studied compliments of the Chinese contain! Even their paintings are grotesque and portray strange and unnatural figures such as are encountered nowhere in the world….
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths….
Among all savages there is no nation that displays so sublime a mental character as those of North America. They have a strong feeling for honor, and as in quest of it they seek wild adventures hundreds of miles abroad, they are still extremely careful to avert the least injury to it when their equally harsh enemy, upon capturing them, seeks by cruel pain to extort cowardly groans from them. The Canadian savage, moreover, is truthful and honest. The friendship he establishes is just as adventurous and enthusiastic as anything of that kind reported from the most ancient and fabled times.
IIC7 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) from The History of Ancient Art
Winckelmann is usually seen as the founding figure of the modern academic discipline of art history. Whereas this was once an unproblematically positive assessment, now that the foundations of the discipline have been questioned, its criteria for inclusion and exclusion in the canon of art modified or even overthrown, Winckelmann’s legacy in its turn has been questioned. In terms of the present anthology this is so in particular of claims for a continuous Western canon, rooted in Greek and Roman antiquity, resumed after the hiatus of the ‘Dark Ages’ by the Italian Renaissance, and essentially autochthonous in development. As is well‐known, Winckelmann’s central emphasis, both in his earlier Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) and in his History of Ancient Art, is on the peerless achievement of classical Greek sculpture, its ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. In the present extracts, taken from the early sections of his History, Winckelmann, like Caylus before him, discusses the legacy of Egyptian art. He readily concedes its chronological priority over Greece. But his key claim is that neither Egyptian art, nor the art of other preceding cultures such as the Persian and the Etruscan, ‘caused’ or ‘influenced’ the emergence of Greek art as such. In essence, his argument is that art has the same beginnings everywhere, but that in Greece its development took on a qualitatively new form; a form that responded to the specificities of Greece and the Greek experience alone: in particular its congenial climate and its distinctive sociopolitical organization. (Whereas Egyptian art was, in Winckelmann’s words, ‘checked and arrested’ by the political and religious imperatives of Egyptian civilization.) Our extracts are taken from The History of Ancient Art [1764], translated by G. Henry Lodge, Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873, vol. 1, Preface and Book 1, Chapter 1, pp. 149–50, 191–4, 196–8, 203–4. (Further extracts from both Winckelmann’s Reflections and his History can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815, IIIA5 and IIIA8, pp. 450–6 and 466–75.)
The History of Ancient Art which I have undertaken to write is not a mere chronicle of epochs, and of the changes which occurred within them. I use the term History in the more extended signification which it has in the Greek language; and it is my intention to attempt to present a system. […]
The History of Art is intended to show the origin, progress, change, and downfall of art, together with the different styles of nations, periods, and artists, and to prove the whole, as far as it is possible, from the ancient monuments now in existence.
* * *
The arts which are dependent on drawing have, like all inventions, commenced with the necessary; the next object of research was beauty; and, finally, the superfluous followed: these are the three principal stages in art.
In the infancy of art, its productions are, like the handsomest of human beings at birth, misshapen, and similar one to another, like the seeds of plants of entirely different kinds; but in its bloom and decay, they resemble those mighty streams, which, at the point where they should be the broadest, either dwindle into small rivulets, or totally disappear.
The art of drawing among the Egyptians is to be compared to a tree which, though well cultivated, has been checked and arrested in its growth by a worm, or other casualties; for it remained unchanged, precisely the same, yet without attaining its perfection, until the period when Greek kings held sway over them; and the case appears to have been the same with Persian art. […]
Art appears to have originated in a similar way among all the nations by which it has been cultivated; and there is no sufficient reason for assigning any particular country as the land of its birth, for every nation has found within itself the first seed of those things which are indispensable; and although Art, like Poetry, may be regarded as a daughter of Pleasure, still it cannot be denied that pleasure is as necessary to human nature as those things are without which existence cannot be continued; and it can be maintained that painting and the forming of figures, or the art of painting and figuring our thoughts, are older than the art of writing them, – as proved by the history of the Mexicans and other nations. But as the earliest essays appear to have been made on figures of the divinities, the era in which art was invented consequently differs according to the age of each nation, and the earlier or
