"Two Styles More Opposed"

This paper explores how Harriet Hosmer (1930-1908) positioned two early busts, Daphne (1853/4) and Medusa (1854) in opposition to Gianlorenzo Bernini's works of thes same subject through careful deployment of Winckelmannian principles. This engages with the first English translation of Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity by Giles Henry Lodge in 1850, as well as the rich body of antique material available to Hosmer in Rome. It problematises art historical approaches to Hosmer's work that emphasise biographically-led readings over object-led interpretations informed by contemporary translations, discourses of originality, and display practices. It demonstrates the conflicting position of Bernini in the middle and late nineteenth century as the "Prince of Degenerate Sculpture", and shows that Winckelmann's victimisation of Bernini led to his poor reputation. This reputation as skilled but degenerate provided the foil for Hosmer to reclaim these subjects, demonstrate her correct understanding of classical principles and citation, and prove her superiority. Ultimately, however, the two artists will be shown to have more similarities than differences in their use of classical references; only access to Winckelmann's writings separates their reception in the nineteenth century.

The Future of Winckelmann’s Classical Form

Winckelmann’s thought and writing are routinely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on the artistic practices of the half-century after his death, known under the label ‘Neoclassicism’. Standard accounts of modernism in the arts, however, assume that this influence came to an abrupt end around 1815. According to such accounts, the anti-classical reaction that followed the Battle of Waterloo and the demise of Neoclassicism was itself a motive force in the generation of modern art and modernism. This paper argues, on the contrary, that Winckelmann’s ideas not only remained relevant, but gained in power through the generations after the fall of Napoleon. Mediated by critics and artists among whom Walter Pater and Frederic Leighton serve as the principal examples, Winckelmann’s thought made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century modernism. In particular, the articulation in both criticism and artistic practice of ideas about classical form, indebted to Winckelmann, had a subtler and more complex impact on the modernist doctrine of ‘formalism’ than literary or art historians have acknowledged. A renewed attention to classical form will help future scholars to write a more nuanced account of modernism in the visual arts. More importantly, it will call attention to artistic projects that have been excluded from histories of modern art due to reductive assumptions that classicism and modernism are inherently contradictory. The paper concentrates on Frederic Leighton as a case study of an artist whose historical importance and aesthetic merit have been occluded by reductive thinking of this kind.

Winckelmann in Nineveh

By the middle of the 19th century, French and British diplomats managed excavations in the biblical land of legendary Assyrian kings, where Nineveh had been buried long before Greek classical era. Here was the opportunity to reconsider the way Winckelmann cristallised the art of Antiquity, but when Assyrian remains entered in museums, they had precisely been evaluated under the reputation of Greek art inherited from the History of the Art of Antiquity, in which few Near Eastern items were said to be the exact opposites of classical beauty: scientists questioned art values of such strange objects, and museums themselves hesitated to exhibit this unexpected heritage so close to Greek "high art" (Edmund Oldfield). However, Assyria had got too many supporters in a few years to be forgotten a second time, and instead of highlighting the value of Hellenic unrivalled items, the « chain of art » principle figured from Winckelmann was used to support how Assyrian remains, at the very end, had influenced the brighter well-known classical masterpieces.

The Classics at World’s End.

The Dutchman Johannes Willem van Grevenbroek (1644-circa 1726) was secretary of the Dutch East India Company’s Council of Policy at the Cape from 1684 to 1694. In the years that had passed since Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape in 1652, marking the first permanent European settlement in modern-day South Africa, regular expeditions had been launched into its hinterland. A year after his retirement from VOC service, Grevenbroek wrote a letter in Latin about the Cape’s native inhabitants: Elegans et accurata gentis Africanae circa Promontorium Capitis Bonae Spei vulgo Hottentotten Nuncupatae Descriptio Epistolaris (An Elegant and Accurate Account of the African Race Living Round the Cape of Good Hope, Commonly Called Hottentots). In this paper, I consider Grevenbroek’s engagement with ancient (Greek and Roman) antiquity in his framing of the Khoi. Ancient times had left early modern Europe with an authoritative literature on the world’s geography and history, descriptions about its then-known people, and suppositions about the ways of life of its many un-known people in yet to be discovered realms. In his letter, Grevenbroek returns to the Classical sources to meaningfully recapture the Cape native people and thus renegotiate the popular contemporary European image about them.

From Adam to Tsar’ Kosmos.

Setting out from the short dialogue in which the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was asked “Where are you from?” and he replied “I am a citizen of the world [ὃ κοσμοπολίτης; a cosmopolitan]”, the purpose of this article is to explore cosmopolitanism from Byzantine and Constantinopolitan perspectives. The intention is toreflect on the significance of cosmopolitanism for world-making in European historical literature by considering it within the framework of various languages, most importantly Greek. Inspired by Lettevall and Petrov (2014), and Robbins and Horta (2017), cosmopolitanisms are discussed in the plural as a controversial concept that encompasses both unity and plurality. Textual examples from the first centuries adpresent Homer, Adam and Moses, as citizens of the world. Later, in the twelfth century, Orthodox Christian monks are in contrast instead called citizens of heaven (οὐρανοπολίται; ouranopolitans), and at around the same time, the Constantinopolitan writer John Tzetzes records in a unique text the multilingual soundscape of the cosmopolitan city. Furthermore, the Byzantine tradition of Orthodox Christian hymnography, homilies, and iconography is explored. The selected examples concern the celebration of Pentecost as the multilingual event which unites and enlightens kosmos(κόσμος), in contrast to the confusion of tongues in Babel. It is concluded that cosmopolitanism, like the notion of Byzantinism (Bodin 2016), functions as a bordering concept that simultaneously unites and separates semiospheres (Lotman 1990) in the times and spaces in which it operates, oscillating between a homogenising (monolingual) and a heterogenising (multilingual) mode.

Cosmopolitanism and the Roman Empire.

My article explores the tension between idealized cosmopolitan ideas, of a single citizenry for all people in the world, and imperial Roman nationalism between the late Roman Republic and the Italian Renaissance. In the form of three case studies (and without any claim that those are representative for the development) it focusses on three important thinkers whose work shows affinity with cosmopolitan discourse, but who at the same time also explicitly reflected on the political realities they were living in: Cicero, Augustine, and Lorenzo Valla. All three favour cosmopolitan ideals over political egoism, and all three reflect on whether and how the historical reign under which they are living can live up to the philosophical or theological ideals they advocate. Finally, all three authors do not only share similar discursive patterns, but also react to each other intertextually (links will be mentioned especially between Cicero and Augustine and between Augustine and Valla). Thus, while all three are distinct in their argument and use cosmopolitan concepts for hugely different aims, the comparison can share light both on the boundaries and the discursive power of the concept in Latin literature.