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later figures as the third-century Roman neo-Platonist Plotinus. He differed from Plato in affording artists and their creations a more exalted role. According to Plotinus, material things could possess ‘Intellectual Beauty’. A single quotation will suffice: ‘Now it must be seen that the stone ... brought under the artist’s hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone –for so the crude block would be as pleasant– but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art’ The especial importance of Winckelmann for the rise of classical scholarship, therefore, lies in the fact that he was the first to work up the ancient commentaries, in particular that of Pliny, into a ‘modern’ system of criticism, marrying the literary tradition of art theory to the monuments themselves. In so doing he established an empirical scheme for discussing the development of ancient sculpture within the traditional literary and philosophical framework. His connoisseurship coupled with Plato’s inspirational vision of transcendental beauty was to remain the overriding influence upon the critique of classical sculpture. His system for tracing the rise and fall of Greek art was to be challenged and modified, while by some it was rejected altogether. And yet, even today –and notably in Germany– Winckelmann remains the presiding genius of classical archaeology. In particular, it is his insistence on the supremacy of Greek over Roman art that persists as the lasting legacy of his influence. Only in the art of the Greeks, and in the best period, could be found that approximation to ideal beauty that represented the goal of art. At its simplest, Winckelmann’s scheme for the stylistic development of Greek art may be divided into four periods: first, the ‘straight and hard’, which characterises the severe lines of the archaic period; second, the ‘grand and square’ style of the Pheidian era; third, ‘the flowing beauty’ exemplified by the idealised naturalism of the softer Praxitelean period; finally, the merely imitative and decadent copying of nature that characterised the decline of the arts in the Roman period. E. Gombrich has shown how Winckelmann’s system of progress in the arts is consistent with the history of human civilisation, as conceived by Gian Battista Vico, ‘the founder of Cultural History’, who in his Scienza Nuova of 1744 had proposed as one of his axioms that ‘The character of nations is first rude, then severe, then benign, then delicate and finally dissolute’. Whether or not Winckelmann had read Vico is not important since, as Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, ‘ideas travel without labels’. What is certain, however, is the fact that Winckelmann’s four styles of Greek sculpture drawn upon the ancient testimonies of Cicero and Quintilian, where the development of oratory is compared with that of sculpture and is seen to evolve from ‘hardness’ to ‘softness’. Whatever the inspiration, Winckelmann’s History was worked out in practice on the basis of Roman copies of Greek sculpture, which he mistook for the originals. These copies were to be found in the Albani and other Italian collections; he never visited Greece. Among the first to point out the likely truth about the works Winckelmann had hailed as originals was his friend the painter Raphael Mengs. He argued that among those statues listed by Winckelmann as the exemplars of Greek sculpture there were, in fact, a number of later copies belonging to the inferior Roman period. These revelations did not, however, weaken the prevailing conviction in the supremacy of Greek art; rather the reverse. A growing awareness of the remoteness of the Greek served to intensify reverence for them. Winckelmann acknowledges in the closing passage of his History of Ancient Art that ‘the authority of antiquity predetermines our judgement’, and what follows seem to prepare his reader for the possibility that our longing for what the ancients knew may lead us astray: Just as maiden standing on the shore of the ocean, follows with tearful eyes her departing lover with no hope of ever seeing hm again, and fancies that in the distant sail she sees the imafe of her beloved. Like that loving maiden we too have, as it were, nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes, but that very indistinctness awakens only a more earnest longing for what we have lost, and we study the copies of the originals more attentively thatn we should have done the originals themselves if we had been in full possession of them. In this particular we are very much like those who wish to have an interview with spirits, and who believe that they see them when there is nothing to be seen. Ultimately, therefore, Winckelmann’s understanding of ancient sculpture depended not upon the presumed surviving models of Greek beauty but upon a nostalgia for the metaphysical perfection of Greek art that transcended mere material paradigms. His approach to antiquity was charged with a melancholy of longing for a lost golden age. The beauty of this world serves only to remind us of that which we have lost. Winckelmann’s authority was paramount but did not go unchallenged. A powerful dissenter was Ennio Quirino Visconti who, while accepting the greatness of Greek art in the classical period, yet declined to accept that the sculpture of the Hellenistic and Roman periods must be judged inferior. He considered that the standard of art established by Pheidias had continued through the so-called Macedonian period and on into the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian. He acknowledged the lateness of the sculptures that since the Renaissance had been held up as the paradigms of antique art, but insisted that they were not imitations so much as ideal adaptations. This last is a view recently revived by some other champions of Roman art, who invoke a similar principle of imitations perfectionées in defence of Hellenised Roman sculpture. It provides an archaeological alternative to the science of Kopienkritik with is often seemingly obsessive pursuit of lost Greek originals. Time alone will tell whether the current bid to promote the reputation of Roman copies will have a lasting influence. As for Visconti, his attempt met with barely more success than did Richard Payne Knight’s declaration that the Elgin Marbles were Roman works of the Hadrianic period. 82