LLEI D'ART 11

sought another paradigm for her of Excellence’, the ancient School of Hellas, Periclean Athens. If France had identified herself with the conquering ambitions of Rome, England took as her model the freedom-loving Athens of Pericle’s day. The association is made explicit in a remarkable passage in the Report of the Select Committee which sat in 1816 to determine the future of the Elgin Marbles. In 1851, lest anyone should forget why it was that the most famous body of sculpture in the world had been chosen for the British Musuem. The possession of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum was contrasted with the recently returned French spoils of imperial conquest. Early in 1817, the comparison was made explicit by an anonymous contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine . Announcing the imminent opening of new temporary accommodation in the British Museum, the article goes on: ‘they are a proud trophy, because their display in the British Metropolis is the result of public taste, and also a pleasing one, because they are not the price of blood shed in wanton or ambitious wars’. J.J.Winckelmann, writing around 1750, had attributed the greatness of Greek art to the freedom of the Greeks themselves, by whom he had principally in mind Athens after the Persian Wars. Waterloo became England’s Battle of Marathon, and acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum was hailed as confirmation of the ancient claim that liberty and the arts rise and fall together. Winckelmann and the pursuit of ideal beauty The acquisition of the Elgin Marbles is arguably the single most important event in the history of the British Museum and certainly in the course of nineteenth-century European Antikenrezeption . At the time of their arrival in this country, the manner in which sculpture was seen and discussed was founded upon the literary tradition of antiquity itself. The pursuit of ideal beauty, the major concern of neo-classical theorist , depend ultimately upon a quasi Platonic hierarchy of forms, through which art was elevated above nature. Reynold , Fuseli and Flaxman all expressed in their respective theoretical systems the notion of ideal perfection as a fixed standard and goal, against which all art, ancient and modern, might be measured. Plato and later critics such as Cicero, Quintilian and Plotinus provided the ancient philosophical authority for this Credo . Reynolds’s philosophy of art made especial use of the Platonist belief that ideal beauty existed only in the mind. It was an unattainable truth: ‘the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it; it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting.’ The paradox that perfection can be both the source and the goal of beauty was a common belief among ancient theorists, many of whom were more optimistic than Plato had been about an artist’s power to reproduce ideal beauty. Plato had a poor opinion of art which, as an imitation of nature, was at two removes from that abstract beauty of which nature itself was a copy. Here by contrast is Cicero praising Pheidias’s extraordinary abilities: ‘When he created his Zeus or Athena, he did not contemplate any persons from whom he drew a likeness, but rather a sort of extraordinary apparition of beauty resided in his mind, and concentrating on it and intuiting its nature, he directed his art and his hand towards reproducing it.’ The idea that classical Greek sculptors had been gifted with a divine intuition or phantasia was developed first by Hellenistic Greek theorists who in turn passed it on to their Roman successors. Post-Renaissance neo-classicism adopted the notion as the fundamental premise of beau-idealism , the system of critical theory that came to represent the ground rules of art. The goal of art was not, however, to be achieved by rules alone and that peculiar beauty or Grace possessed by such ancient statues as the Apollo Belvedere was encapsulated in academic art-circles by frequent recourse to the beau- idealist catch-phrase: ‘ je ne sais quoi’ . Even the ancients themselves, as Alexander Pope had observed in his Essay on Criticism , ‘their rules invade’. And in so doing, ‘Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend ... And snatch a grace beyond the reach of Art.’ The most important figure to emerge from the eighteenth- century Greek revival and the theorist who would exert the greatest influence on the nineteenth century was Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Without rejecting the concept of the absolute, he emphasised the importance of observation in detecting in actual examples the presence and progress of beauty upward to its ‘source’. Winckelmann, like Aristotle that was interested in the mechanics of beauty, in particulars as well as universals. An understanding of the individual parts of a statue was therefore essential for comprehending the whole. The ideal unity of Greek sculpture, as he saw it, depended upon the Greek genius for selecting the most perfect forms in nature and combining these into an ideal whole. A consequent interest in close observation and the comparison of the actual remains of antiquity is what makes Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art important as the foundation stone of modem empirical archaeology. In stressing Winckelmann’s particular claim to celebrity it would be wrong to lose sight of his beau- idealist orthodoxy. For both Plato and Aristotle beauty, as represented by the harmonious whole, was ultimately a metaphysical concept predetermining the proper ordering of parts. In Plato’s theory of mimesis ideal beauty pre- exist the efforts of artistic imitators, and Winckelmann similarly treats ideal beauty as both the goal and the inspiration of art. ‘Beauty seemed to beckon me’ , he wrote in explanation of his desire to chart the rise of Greek art in antiquity, ‘probably that same Beauty which exhibited itself to the great artists, and allowed itself to be grasped and figured, for I have sought and longed to recognise her in their works’. Winckelmann’s philosophy of art was, however, less defeatist than that of Plato. He certainly knew and admired the works of the first of the Greek philosophers to turn his mind in earnest towards a definition of ideal beauty, but in detail Winckelmann’s own philosophy derives more from the works of such 79