Still Life

Abstract

This essay explores the subtle interplay between sculptural bodies and animate bodies by exploring several “moments” in the history of classical and neoclassical aesthetics. These exemplary moments include the ancient Roman period (Pliny's reflections on Greek sculpture); the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Winckelmann's reflections on Greek sculpture and later Italian excavations at Pompeii); the twentieth century (Nazi adaptations of ancient Greek sculpture in Munich); and the twenty-first century (recurring discussion of polychromatic Greek art). Given that most of the art under discussion was “pagan,” this slippage between sculptural bodies and animate bodies highlights the presence of desire, specifically a desire for forbidden bodies.

Flesh and Stone

We may be moved as well as troubled by the blurring of the line that allegedly separates sculptural bodies from living bodies, animate corpora from inanimate stones. There is far more to this blurring than the alleged naturalistic realism of classical sculpture in Greece and Rome.

There is far more to the sculptural body than the canons of Greek imitation allow. Calasso captures the mythic qualities of this blurring with rare elegance and insight. In his telling, a goddess inspires a statue, and her priestess endeavors to imitate the divine image in stone. The priestess is thus a copy of a statue that is, in turn, an imitation of the divine. At precisely this point, we meet the mythic turnabout that “suffices to overturn order”—literally “to disarticulate the order” (disarticolare l'ordine), in Calasso's fine phrasing.¹ The god prefers that modicum of difference that distinguishes the mortal copy from the immortal she imitates.

Desire is born because of such a difference, because of such illicit imitation. This complex interplay between copies and imitations, statues and bodies, gods and human beings and their amours, will prove to have inspired some complicated desires indeed.

A tradition of strikingly equivocal aesthetics was generated by this ancient insight. This aesthetics was grounded in desire, to be sure, but it was a desire uncertain of its referent, and uncertain—on reflection—of what it really wants. Here we encounter one of the most fertile points of intersection in ancient Greek philosophy and writing about art. Plato expressed strong doubts (most famously in the Phaedrus) about writing's ability to render the movement of thought in a manner true to lived philosophical experience. And yet many subsequent philosophers operating in a Platonic idiom will demonstrate a nearly obsessive interest in writing about statues that do not move as if they were animate, alive. For such philosophers, the soul was what animated the body, thereby making it move. A statue, by definition, was soulless. Yet the Greek philosophers will regularly discuss their statues in apparent violation of that philosophical truth. In moving the viewer, these statues appear to usher in movement. Zeroing in on the complex of bodily and sculptural forms that incited divine desire and, according to Calasso, culminated in divine vendetta, ancient theology and art criticism alike were destined to be uncertain enterprises. Nonetheless, Aristotle plunged ahead, despite his mentor's reticence, and thereby produced one of the defining texts in the early Greek canon of aesthetics and art history.

In the Poetics, Aristotle was so bold as to propose writing about the most movable art form then available: that is, stage drama, which was effectively the cinema of its day. Aristotle himself underlined the oddity of the situation. Drama, he observed, is etymologically related to the verb for “doing” (draô). Drama, unlike epic poetry, shows things rather than tells them. That is why Aristotle believed drama to be such a rich site for ethical reflection: if myth is the soul that moves the body of the action on stage, then drama is quite literally where the action is. Thus, as Hegel would later argue, a culture's entire “ethical substance” may come into view on stage. Far more than a theater of ideas, the dramatic arts were where the audience met embodied ethical action (praxis).

Now we come to the crux of the aesthetic problem. While stage drama is indeed a dynamic art form, sculpture is not. Sculpture stops the flow, rendering (at best) bodily motion in the form of a body at rest.² If aesthetics should be ambivalent about any kind of writing, then, it would presumably be writing about statues. Yet, as I have already noted, the ancient philosophers did a great deal of just that.³ Among the most encyclopedic of them was the Roman, Gaius Plinius Secundus (or Pliny the Elder, 23–79 CE), a man so curious about the nature of things that he took a ship to witness the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—and lost his life there as a result. His vast encyclopedia, the Natural History, of which thirty-seven books survive, dedicated significant attention to sculpture in the penultimate book. But Pliny's reasons for doing so will seem strange to most modern readers. Book 36 announces itself as a study of stones; and for Pliny, statues are one of the forms that stone⁴ may take. His interest in statues concerns the grain of the marble, the color and chrism of the stone, the texture of the chiseling—in short, the overwhelming materiality of what had been rendered, mainly by predecessor Greek artists.⁵ Here, for example, is what Pliny says about the renowned Laocoön Group (fig. 2): “[I]n the palace of General Titus, a work superior to any painting and any bronze. Laocoön, his children and the wonderful clasping coils of the snakes were carved from a single block in accordance with an agreed plan by those eminent craftsmen Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus, all of Rhodes.”⁶

What Pliny tells us here is as significant as what he does not. He tells us where the statue is housed (in Titi imperatoris domo). He tells us that it is the finest figural image in comparison to any other painting or bronze statue (opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae⁷artis praeferendum), though modern readers of Pliny have been mystified by the number of times he says the same thing about other statues. His art history hinges on superlatives. Pliny also tells us that the piece was carved from a single block (ex uno lapide) of marble.⁸ And then he names the three artists who carved it together.

What Pliny does not tell us is what accounts for this sculptural group's raw emotional power. We know Laocoön's story mainly from Virgil (Aeneid 2:56–324), who reports that he was the doomed Trojan priest who alone understood the danger presented by the monumental horse that the Greeks had left behind when they abandoned their beachhead in the Dardanelles. He urged the Trojans not to bring the horse into the city. The god Neptune (Poseidon), now intent on Troy's destruction, issued a marine serpent out of the waves in order to strangle the priest together with his sons. The Trojan witnesses to this horror misinterpreted it to imply that Laocoön had been punished for impiety rather than for his prescience.⁹ The sculptural group depicts the father and his two sons very near the end of their tragic struggle; the thickly muscled figure of Laocoön, beautiful even in his dying, dominates the center of the composition.

Viewed as a piece of classical art, the Laocoön Group may be read, as Pliny does, as a high-water mark in the history of the Greeks’ naturalist idealism—there is no other painting or sculpture quite like it. It manages its effects by inviting us to see the sculptural body as a real body, and Laocoön's pain as real pain. In this, its effects may seem very similar to those enacted on the Greek tragic stage. The body in pain is here depicted as a source of moral insight and aesthetic pleasure.¹⁰ The strangeness of that intersection of emotional registers impressed Aristotle a great deal.

In what follows, I would like to examine three moments in the long history of this complex aesthetic blurring of the distinction between the sculptural body frozen in stone and the animate body of flesh and bone. An initial prompt to my current interest here is curatorial: in the early modern period, we witness a curious turnabout through which sculptures were placed on public display as if they were living bodies, and human bodies were placed on public display as if they were statues. By electing to proceed through three “moments” here, I am attempting to mirror the dramatic preference for showing over telling, though I am aware that there are more words than images in this essay. In so doing, I also hope to trace a movement—several movements, in fact. One will involve tracing the subtle interplay between Greek and Roman conceptions of mortality, divinity, theology, and desire. Calasso already gestured in this direction. A more challenging and complex movement will trace the intersections between classical aesthetics, ethics, and politics, one animated by this very slippage between sculptural and animate bodies. This movement will unfold as the essay proceeds through its three moments.

Moment One

Pliny was one of those unusual intellects who made connections few others saw; he viewed the natural world from an oblique angle. When Pliny looked at a statue, for instance, he saw a rock quarry. Here is the somewhat unexpected, but altogether rousing, beginning to book 36 of his Natural History:

Pliny observes that, not so long ago, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps in order to invade the Italian heartland had seemed almost a miracle, but that the Romans of his own day quarried these same mountains for a thousand types of marble (mille genera marmorum), and without giving the matter a second thought.

Hannibal's unnatural feat enabled him to violate what Pliny regarded as a natural border and nearly brought down the Roman Republic. The contrast with Pliny's own age is startling:

Pliny appears to be linking a natural argument to a moral argument, as the Roman Stoics were wont to do. He believed that mountains and other such natural boundaries were nature's way of keeping peoples apart from one another. Mountains served virtually the same principle in this account as the Tower of Babel did in the Hebrew Bible: they accounted for, and helped to maintain, distinctions within the flux of human diversity. Roman engineers were violating all such natural borders—slicing through mountain ranges, slicing through open seas, all to glut a ravenous and inexhaustible appetite for marble.

The same might be said for the Roman empire and its legions. This is the moral argument that Pliny draws from his natural approach to stone. The empire's legions sliced through mountains and seas just as surely as the engineers had done; the empire also violated all of the borders traditionally separating various peoples from one another. Pliny seems aware of Augustus's famous quip, reported in the next generation by Suetonius (ca. 69–122 CE), that he had “found [Rome] built of brick, and left it in marble” [ut iure sit gloriatus marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam accepisset].¹³ Pliny sees nothing in this fact worth bragging over.

The moral position Pliny is developing is subtle and is couched in somewhat murky prose. It would be easy to conclude, and many of Pliny's more memorable observations confirm, that he was a Stoic believer in decadence, the idea that nature's laws see to it that animating powers fade with time. Human bodies are born of clay and die as stone. Moral and political decadence follow this same pattern. In making these connections, Pliny was making the same kind of argument that cost Cicero his life. The end of the Roman Republic was the end of liberty and the beginning of citizen enslavement. The Caesars were autocrats wielding power beyond the natural boundaries of restraint by the rocky forces of sentiment and Senate alike. But by then, the imperium was a fait accompli, so Pliny makes the argument quietly. He condemns luxury and appetite, rather than the acquisitive people whose luxurious appetites they were. And he does so in the sacred name of the ancestors, as well as the virtues of a Republic that had not yet become imperious.

Given Pliny's dates (23–79 CE), it may be tempting to consider the topic of early Christian iconoclasm here, since the early Jesus movement was much inspired by Stoic imagery and vocabulary and its general distaste for degenerate luxury. One luxury item especially concerned early Jesus followers: sculpture. The eastern Mediterranean's early scriptural monotheists engaged in a veritable war on images that was waged with particular venom against sculpture in the round. Sculptures were to be treated as if they were real bodies, pagan bodies that needed to be killed if their demonic power were to be neutralized. So they were decapitated, mutilated, buried, drowned. I will return to that matter again.

But Pliny's dates remind us especially of how he died. In essence, he was murdered by a mountain, suffocated by the ash and toxic fumes issuing forth from the vast eruption on Mount Vesuvius. Pliny had been observing the eruption as a natural phenomenon that combined his interests in minerology, fire, and natural force. Volcanoes offer an opening into the nether regions, which are far more dynamic and unstable than the surface (the terra firma). They throw up rocks as light as air, and gases as smothering as the sea. Pliny intended to observe things from a safe distance, aboard ship in the Bay of Naples, but then he received an imploring letter from a friend, Rectina, whose villa lay in the direct line of approaching fire. Pliny thus ordered galleys fitted out to save his friends as well as others in the vicinity. He landed at Stabiae and dined with his friend Pomponius, attempting a show of calm on behalf of his distraught charges. But he stayed too long; the pumice, ash, and other fiery elements approached, and the fumes overwhelmed him. His scattered friends found Pliny's body three days later, dressed as they remembered him.¹⁴

While Pompeii had been haphazardly excavated after 1748, sponsored first by Don Carlos, then king of Naples, more scientific excavations were initiated by the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli (1823–96) in 1860. Italy, we may recall, was in the process of national formation in that same decade, eventually cobbling together a fledgling nation out of the peninsula's disparate parts (parts which Pliny seemed to worry ought not mix). It is Fiorelli, an arch-Italian nationalist as critical of empire as Pliny had been, whom we have to thank for the thorough organization of the massive site into nine regions, inside each of which every block and street was numbered. Places and find-sites could now be identified with great precision.

And so, strangely enough, could the Pompeiian people. Where others saw a quarry, Fiorelli saw statues. It was he who developed the technique of pouring cement into the cavities created by the human and animal bodies who had been buried in the ash in 79 CE, then gradually disintegrated over the millennia. These human bodies created a hollow in the earth, a sort of ceramic mold, which mirror image Fiorelli turned to stone, in much the same way that ancient Greeks had cast bronze statuary. This is surely one of the most haunting kinds of statue imaginable (fig. 3), crude memento mori equal in emotional power to the Laocoön Group. That we place such bodily images in museums today speaks to something more than the history of curatorial display. It also bears a complex relationship to mortality, theology, and desire, ideas toward which I will gesture (and, admittedly, only gesture) at the end of this essay. Desire for a body is one thing, desire for a body in perpetuity is something else again. Greek myth and theology alike display a deep awareness of this dilemma. The body that does not change would need to be made of stone.

Moment Two

The Laocoön Group was discovered by Vatican architects and engineers while digging the foundation for a new building on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, in 1506. The papal architect, Giuliano Sangallo, along with his son Francesco and Sangallo's friend Michelangelo, all went to witness the exhumation. All were dumbfounded, though Sangallo is the one reported to have identified the artifact as the Laocoön Group, based on Pliny's description. Michelangelo's (1475–1564) presence at this disinterment is suggestive, given my interest in copies and originals, and the varying desires they may elicit. Michelangelo had famously carved a deliberate forgery of a sleeping Cupid in 1496 that he then “antiqued” and sold as an original; Vasari reports this story as one of the things that accounted for Michelangelo's early fame, and his first invitation to Rome. The story would inspire some later theorists to see the Laocoön Group as another forgery by Michelangelo's hand.¹⁵

Be that as it may, Pope Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere, 1443–1513) brought this sculptural group to the Vatican and installed it in his Renaissance sculpture garden on the Belvedere. More than two centuries later, the so-called father of neoclassicism and art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), would see it there. Remarkably, he had already written about it in what quickly became the great manifesto of neoclassical aesthetics, his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Artworks in Painting and Sculpture (1755). It now seems clear that Winckelmann had set his gaze, ironically enough, on a bronze copy of the marble original, one housed at the Dresden Art Gallery.¹⁶ It was to inspire the single most celebrated phrase Winckelmann ever put in print:

Gazing on a volcano, Pliny had been impressed by the contrast between the serenity of the terrestrial surface and its raging depths. Gazing on the sea, Winckelmann reversed the quotient, marveling at the sea's calm depths, despite its raging surface. Pliny too saw the sea as a raging place and thought it an unsuitable element for transporting the stillness of stone. Winckelmann took the stillness of depth even further, refusing to admit that Laocoön was screaming, insisting instead that the artists had depicted a “resigned groan.” A scream, Winckelmann appeared to insist, was simply and purely unclassical (fig. 4).

This passage has raised one inescapable question for most subsequent readers: “Why he should have chosen this particular group as an example of the very qualities it lacks, is no easy question to answer.”¹⁸ The answer, I believe, is that Winckelmann viewed sculptural bodies as if they were real bodies, and used this premise to capture what he viewed as their spiritual essences in lofty flights of rhetorical fancy.

The continuation of this same passage makes the strategy, and its seductiveness, abundantly clear. Winckelmann zeroes in on Laocoön's lower abdomen, running his curatorial eye over the tensed flesh to highlight the emotionally dense juxtaposition of raging surfaces and the lingering calm at depth (fig. 1).¹⁹ Many have noted the homoerotic tensing captured by the prose and by this visual strategy; this statue mesmerizes and attracts as intensely as any that Pliny described (see note 5 for his scandalous story involving the Aphrodite of Cnidus).²⁰ Going further still, Winckelmann insists that had the statue not been rendered in the nude, then half of its sensual power would be lost to us.²¹

The Vatican Museum opened to the public in 1792. By then, Winckelmann (who had curated its very first “Profane Museum”²² in 1767, shortly before his murder in Trieste) had sold his way of seeing the Laocoön Group in Europe. Vatican visitors thus literally came to see what Winckelmann had seen, in the very ways in which he had seen it. The irony of Winckelmann's success in promoting this highly sensual neoclassical vision involved some subtle new desires that it had unleashed, not least of them being the desire for possession. In 1796, after General Napoleon's forces in northern Italy had reduced Venice and the Papal States to humiliating surrender, the general did something unprecedented. The Treaty of Tolentino is the first modern peace treaty in which one hundred works of art were listed for expropriation to Paris, such expatriation being a central condition of the peace. Eighty-five of these hundred works of art were classical statues housed at the Capitoline and Vatican Museums. In blurring the boundary between sculptural bodies and real bodies, then, Winckelmann's aesthetics had ironically contributed to turning the French into grave robbers and the Vatican Museum into an empty tomb.

In Winckelmann's aesthetic musings, mourning became electric. If his 1755 Reflections was the manifesto that marked the neoclassical movement, then his 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity marked the first aspiration toward the archaeological and historical study of ancient art, managed by tracing its developmental stages. In this work, Hegel was to see the birth pangs of historicism. “In any case Winckelmann was already inspired [begeistert] in a way by the ancient perspective [Anschauung] on the Ideal, through which he has opened up a new sense [Sinn] with which to view art. . . . Thus Winckelmann is one of those in the field of Art [Kunst] who comprehended how to tap into a new organ, and entirely new ways of seeing, for the spirit [Geist].”²³

A new sense? A new organ? Perhaps. What I wish to mark is Winckelmann's new sensibility, one grounded in the paradoxical sensualism of stone and the erotics of sculptural gazing. Here is his remarkable parting image at the end of the 1764 History:

Unlike Vasari, Winckelmann preferred the ancients to the moderns; only by imitating them, he insisted, could modern artists become inimitable.²⁵ Very like Pliny, then, Winckelmann took decadence for a natural law; classicism's virtues were tied to their fragility and shortness of life.

Placing himself in the role of a young woman gazing on the horizon, and the classical statue in the role of the lost lover, Winckelmann made aesthetic loss the necessary starting point and the grieving prompt to neoclassical desire. The ship was doing the very work Pliny condemned: transporting marble to sate the taste for imagistic luxury. The sea's surface, home now to the turbulence of natural forces and human emotion alike, was nevertheless as attractive as Laocoön's abdomen . . . and for similar reasons.

Moment Three

The Laocoön Group was repatriated, along with all but one of the other looted objects (a monumental granite urn), after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815. In these same years, a newly discovered sculptural group would attract even more complicated aesthetic, erotic, and political attention.

The two pedimental sculptural groups that graced the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina²⁶ (just south of Athens) were rediscovered by four amateur artists (1811), then sold at auction (1812), then published in an exhaustive study by the painter Johann Martin Wagner and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1816), then restored by the noted neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1816–18), then installed in a museum specifically built to house them (1830), which was later Nazified (1934–36), then de-Nazified (1946), such that the statues were derestored (1966), and then reinstalled in the Glyptothek Museum just in time for the Munich Olympics (1972). I can think of no other classical sculptural group with an equally complex biography.²⁷

Four aspiring young artists, two of them British (Charles Cockerell and John Foster) and two Bavarian (Carl Haller von Hallerstein and Jakob Linckh), traveled together to the island of Aegina to sketch what they believed to be the ruins of a temple to Panhellenic Zeus. Their intention was to reconstruct visually what the temple had looked like when it was not a ruin. That desire—the attempt to make wholes out of fragments—was to be a centerpiece of Romanticism as it was of neoclassicism.

The young men cleared the overgrowth and the lines of the temple foundation, and on the third day they began pulling an impressive cache of sculptural fragments out of the ground. Their sketching expedition had thus become an excavation. One month later, the four men carted their treasures off to Athens and, unable to agree among themselves as to where the treasures should reside (London or Munich, perhaps, but surely not Paris), they agreed to sell the entire collection as a group at auction. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (1786–1868), well aware that the rivalries among the European gunpowder empires had taken a strange aesthetic turn after the Treaty of Tolentino, was determined to obtain this sculptural group at all costs. He sent an artist friend then living in Rome, Johann Martin Wagner (1777–1858), to Greece to purchase the group and—due to the maritime disruptions caused by the Napoleonic Wars, and the British blockade of the eastern Mediterranean—Wagner was the only man who made it in time. He eventually brought the sculptural fragments to a warehouse in Rome, where he wrote up his Report with the luxury of time and close proximity, and with the assistance of Friedrich Schelling's (1775–1854) impressive command of the classical literary sources. Wagner also enlisted his friend Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) to “restore” the group. This involved carving replacements for missing limbs and adding lost shields, swords, and spears, all in order to make these scattered sculptural bodies whole again. The sculptural fragment was thus reanimated (figs. 5–6). Crown Prince (now King) Ludwig erected an assemblage of buildings for his new museum complex in Munich. The Königsplatz boasted a full-scale imitation of the Propylaea, monumental gateway to the Athenian Akropolis, flanked by two neoclassical buildings, the Glyptothek and the Antikensammlungen. The north side of this complex, dedicated to Ludwig's vision of an “Athens on the Iser,” remained open.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, he determined to flesh out what he viewed as another architectural fragment in the city that had served as his first power base. He commissioned four new buildings on the north end of the Königsplatz: his Munich Chancellery, the Munich National Socialist Party headquarters, and two faux Doric temples he referred to as “Temples to the Heroes” (Ehrentempeln).

As the temples were being erected on the Königsplatz, Hitler ordered the exhumation of sixteen friends who had died in his failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, so that their remains could be reinterred in bronze sarcophagi inside the Ehrentempeln. Sixteen ancient Greek statues, ancient warriors now rendered whole, and the fragmentary remains of sixteen proto-Nazi foot soldiers, had been brought into direct architectural and political conversation. Each year on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, the sixteen names were read at roll call, each call receiving the collective response “Hier!” More than an exercise in Winckelmannian neoclassicism, the aesthetic link joining sculptural bodies to human bodies was now deemed to have political consequence. It is here that neoclassical aesthetics and modern politics, with their even more deliberate juxtaposition of sculptural and human bodies, came to generate deeply tangled desires and vendettas.

The Ehrentempeln, Hitler's Chancellery, and National Socialist Party headquarters all miraculously survived intensive Allied bombing in the summer of 1944, though the Glyptothek suffered a direct hit (the sculptures had been removed to a monastery for safekeeping). The bodies of Hitler's former brothers-in-arms were quietly removed and returned to their original sites of burial. The Ehrentempeln were dynamited in 1946 (a German film clip of the detonation is available on YouTube).²⁸

At this point, it was observed that Thorvaldsen's restorations had operated according to a logic eerily similar to that of Hitler's architects: more than simply making a whole out of fragments, these acts of Erganzungen had been managed in such a way as to elide the difference between different time periods, most notably classical antiquity and the present day.²⁹ Thorvaldsen had famously boasted that you would be unable to tell what was ancient and what was modern on the restored Aegina marbles. Hitler intended to make it seem as if the Königsplatz had always been home to Nazi Party headquarters. So the same logic that called for de-Nazifying the Königsplatz now called for the derestoration of the Aegina marbles. Consequently, the statues were dismembered, all of Thorvalden's limbs and other accoutrements taken for dead, and buried. The sculptural bodies, returned now to their original state of decomposition, were then placed on display for an Olympic audience in 1972, where they remain to this day (figs. 7–8).

Plato, in the very midpoint of the Phaedrus, describes Socrates saying something that seems very strange for a rationalist to say. “It would take a god to say what the soul is, Socrates observes, but human beings are especially adept at saying what things are like.”³⁰ Human beings, in other words, are image-making creatures, and the images they make aim at similitudes. It is worth noting that the topic of this dialogue was erotic desire, morphing into psychology, and that this precise pivot point, where the dialogue takes its dramatic turn, is what prompted Socrates's remark. Image-making, it would seem, can be revelatory and uplifting—if there is sufficient desire in the undertaking. The problem, of course, hinges on determining the right kind of desire, the kind that may prove to be generative of such elevating image-making. Modern ethnonationalist desires, by contrast, appeared to be aiming at a different kind of image-making, when they were not engaged in actual iconoclasm. In this blurring of the line separating sculptural bodies from real bodies, the ancients from the moderns, we meet a deliberate mingling of aesthetics and politics with a very complicated pedigree.

Polychromatics, Paganism, and Forbidden Desire

In the decade prior to the discovery of the Aeginetan sculptures, the Parthenon marbles had been removed to London by Lord Elgin (1766–1841), in a campaign that lasted a full decade (1801–11). It is striking to realize that Winckelmann never saw them, so perfectly do they seem to capture the neoclassical ideal to which he devoted his passions. Nor, for that matter, had he even heard of the Aegina marbles.

Unlike the Parthenon marbles, which had remained in their pedimental niches, exposed to rain and sunlight for millennia, the Aeginetan sculptures had tumbled from their perches in an earthquake and had long been buried underground. Their sudden exhumation in 1811 revealed something quite remarkable: namely, the surprising ancient practice of painting marble statues. Whereas Winckelmann distinguished the Greek arts of painting and sculpture—and presumably imagined Greek painting primarily as vase painting—we now know that these arts were combined in antiquity. The ancient Greek artists carved their marble statues, then painted them in brilliant blues, greens, reds, and yellows. The revelation of what might now seem a kitsch sensibility in the palette of ancient sculptors would have been (and was) shocking to eyes trained in certain canons of neoclassicism. The Greeks sculpted in bronze with copper and gemstone inlays, they constructed monumental statues made entirely of gold and ivory plates, they painted their marbles. The ancient artists may well have seen this all as making sculptural bodies more vibrant, more desirable, more alive. If early modern neoclassicism can seem consumed, like Hera and Zeus, with questions of copies, simulacra, and difference, then the ancients appear to be interested in sculptural animation, and the means whereby color can serve the interests of such aliveness.

Several years ago, this well-established fact of polychromatic Greek art returned to the popular media as if it were a radical new discovery. Sarah Bond, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Iowa who has become closely associated with this idea, has circulated her work mainly via blogs, social media, and online arts publications (such as Hyperallergic), as well as in a popular article for Forbes Magazine.³¹ She has reportedly received sharp criticism, violent threats, and more.

But the idea is not new, even in its twenty-first-century iteration. The Glyptothek Museum sponsored a special exhibition in 2003 titled Bunte Götter: Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur, which has been traveling almost continuously around the world ever since, visiting well over twenty locations on three continents, and including landmark shows at the Vatican Museums (2005), the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul (2006), the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (2007), Harvard's Sackler Museum (2007–8), the Getty Villa (2008), the Ashmolean Museum (2015), and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (2016–17). Most of the larger venues produced stunning catalogues and online displays; the original Glyptothek concept was published in an expanded version in 2017,³² when US scholars began to make public hay of the idea. It can often seem as if ancient Greek statues, treated once again almost as if they were real bodies, are being asked to carry more cultural weight and meaning than they can bear.³³

It may help to approach this matter from an oblique angle. After all, the fact that Greek art was polychromatic, and elaborately so, was well-known in the very period when Martin Bernal (see note 33) claimed that such ideas and images were being suppressed by academic classicists. The concluding chapter of Wagner's Report on the Aeginetan Sculptures was titled “On the Painting [Bemalung] of the Figures and of the Temple,”³⁴ since he recognized that the Greek architectural elements were painted, much as the statues inside them were. Schelling, for his part, made extensive use of the definitive study of Greek polychromatic art, Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy's Le Jupiter Olympien, published the previous year (1815). Quatremère was clear and emphatic: “Almost always we have looked upon these sculptural monuments in gold and ivory as exceptional works [ouvrages d'exception], or as accidental and occasional [productions de caprice]. I am out to prove that this taste reigned supreme for twelve centuries [douze siècles].”³⁵ Given the recent debate generated by the proposal of polychromatic Greek art, the question becomes: How was this all forgotten, after being so well-known?

The previous director of the Glyptothek Museum, Raimond Wünsche, has written most insightfully about these matters. Since the painting on the Aeginetan sculptures was far more visible when Wagner saw them two hundred years ago than it is now, Wünsche utilized state-of-the-art UV photographic and fluorescence techniques to determine the extent of the surface coverage by the paint. The results are genuinely astonishing (figs. 9–10).³⁶ In Wünsche's view, the marble served very much as a canvas on which Greek artists painted. The effects are riotous and decidedly far from anything recognizably neoclassical; they are neither “simple” nor “still.” So again the question impresses itself upon us: If this was so well-known in the nineteenth century, then how did this knowledge come to be lost? Perhaps a related question is more urgent: What knowledge came to replace it? Once more the subtle flow of influence between Greek originals and the countless copies they have generated disturbs the theoretical waters.

Wünsche's answer is as simple as it is far-reaching. Quatremère de Quincy's books are all lavishly illustrated with chromolithographic illustrations (fig. 11). That was the common practice in the nineteenth century. But by the early twentieth century, black-and-white photography had replaced chromolithographs as the mainstay of illustration in art historical textbooks. Thus the color was literally drained from our more bookish displays of Greek statues. To put it simply, the concern with blackness and whiteness in Greek art was a decidedly twentieth-century concern. Such photographs were capable of generating desires all their own, to be sure. But the anima of classical sculptural representation had been lost; here, if anywhere, we are confronting the premier twentieth-century excruciation: a still life.

This essay began with a jarring sculptural observation: “The more negligible the difference, the more terrible and violent the revenge.” Using Calasso's prescient comments as a guide here, I wonder what more we might make of his understanding of Io's tragic predicament, if we imagine the statues in question polychromatically. A woman endeavors to imitate a statue in order to become a copy of what the statue represents. A god prefers the copy to the statue, and thus the mortal woman to the divine prototype. The preference is based on a desire, and the desire is prompted by a difference. What kinds of difference are in play here—the difference separating the copy from the original (think of Pliny, or Michelangelo)? the difference separating the artwork from the viewer (think of Winckelmann, mourning toward the horizon)? the difference separating the person from the god (think of Greek art as a whole)? Now erase the color, reduce the images to black-and-white, and see that the difference is not as great as it was presumed to be. Violence erupts (think of Nazism, at the very least). When bodies die, they turn inanimate, turn to stone. This was the tragic moment captured by the Laocoön Group. Winckelmann's aestheticizing (and eroticizing) of this moment would be translated into very different German less than two centuries later. The still life is one thing; it is still life. The stilling of life is something else again; there is no color in it. I am haunted by the fact that this suggestive English term is decidedly different in Italian (natura morta), in French (nature morte), and in Greek (nekrê physê): “dead nature” rather than “still life.”

When Johann Martin Wagner learned that his king planned to build a new neoclassical museum to house the Aeginetan sculptures, he drafted a proposal for the modern sculptural group that would eventually be placed in the modern pediment of this modern temple dedicated to ancient art (we should recall that the very name mouseion means “shrine to the Muse” in Greek). Among these figures, one of them stands out especially today: it is a sculpture depicting a painter who is painting a statue. The mirror phasing here is nearly Freudian (if not Lacanian) in its complexity: polychromatic sculpture as the suppressed childhood memory of neoclassical aesthetics.

Not long after Winckelmann's shocking murder in Trieste, Goethe penned a short but book-length encomium to him, one that offered a surprising way of exploring the complexity of his neoclassical desires, and the passions they had so quickly kindled in others. For Goethe, the issue was essentially religious in nature: Winckelmann made himself over as a pagan to appreciate pagan art more fully. Winckelmann, Goethe opined, was virtually the reincarnation of an ancient pagan, “insofar as that may be said of anyone in our time” (eine solche antike Natur war, insofern man es nur von einem unserer Zeitgenosses behaupten kann, in Winckelmann wieder erscheinen).³⁷ This was particularly the case when Winckelmann turned his attention to ancient sculptures depicting gods (such as Apollo) and priests or priestesses (such as Laocoön).

The implications of Winckelmann's pagan self-rendering were several, and surprising in many respects. Using Calasso as our guide once again, we will note that the statue was an imitation of the goddess, and the priestess an imitation of the statue. Playing a game of visual “telephone,” each imitation in the series presumably generated a discrete and subtle difference that, in turn, generated complex cross-currents of desire. Avoiding the sexualization of sculptural bodies that so vexed Pliny, Zeus chose the priestess over the prototype who was his wife. The mythic progeny engendered by this choice was violent and vengeful. Christians would later read all of this as a morality tale: seductive images of false gods spell disaster. This was decidedly not Winckelmann's—nor Goethe's, nor Ludwig's, nor Wagner's, nor Schelling's, nor Hitler's—view of the matter.

Winckelmann's aesthetics permitted the Greek gods to be real, in their way, and the sculptural imitation of them to be perfect, in its way. He would have had little need, then, to reflect on the duplicities of difference, and less desire to worry about Hera's harsh revenge. The fact that he was converting to Roman Catholicism as he completed his Reflections on Greek sculptural imitation in 1755 is one complex personal juxtaposition worthy of further consideration. The fact that he curated such sculptures in the new context of a “Profane Museum,” inside the Apostolic Palace itself, just one decade later is another. Here is Goethe's conclusion on the matter: Winckelmann's “pagan spirit” (heidnisches Sinn) was unsullied by his “so-called conversion to Catholicism,” since “being a pagan from birth [als einen gründlich geborner Heiden], his Protestant baptism had not been able to turn him into a true Christian.”³⁸

There is thus another question lurking beneath the rippled surface of these pagan and Christian juxtapositions. What kind of desire is this? Clearly, it is a type of forbidden desire. The pagan body, only nominally forbidden to Christian theology, was to generate complex and generative passions all its own in early modern Europe. The history of the flirtation with such forbidden desires, inspired by such abject and forbidden sculptural bodies, seems an important and underappreciated aspect of early modern aesthetics. It all hinges on the subtle and not-so-subtle blurring of the boundary between sculptural and animate bodies that I have been tracing through these three moments. Given the choice, early modern and other neoclassical aesthetes preferred the (polychromatic) sculptural copy. The more forbidden the pagan form, the more subtle the sculptural differences, the more intense and manifold that desire.

The epigraph for this article is from Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Vintage, 1993), 24. I have emended the translation somewhat in consultation with Calasso's Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Milan: Adelphi, 1988), 38. Given Calasso's passing on July 28, 2021, I dedicate this essay to his memory.

Notes

Works Cited