Acknowledgements

Potts, Alex

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Acknowledgements

Alex Potts

Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

I wish to acknowledge a number of people for the role they played, sometimes unwittingly, in the shaping of this book. The names that follow trace important encounters that helped me rethink and give substance to what I was doing—some shedding new light on problems over which I kept stumbling or offering me fresh perspectives when I seemed stuck in a blind alley, others prompting me to spell out my preoccupations and prevent these from becoming merely private obsessions. The stimulus often came …

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14692

Acknowledgements

My warm thanks go to Ernst Gombrich for his help with my early research on Winckelmann and to John Nicoll for his continuing support throughout the long gestation of this book. To Susan Siegfried I am ever grateful for the encouragement she gave and for her insistence on finding ways to clarify my more opaque arguments. I owe a very particular personal debt to Fred Orton and to Michael Podro for the discussions I have had with them over the years.

I also wish to thank Graham Andrews, Caroline Arscott, Sally Alexander, John Barrell, Michael Baxandall, Tony Carter, Tim Clark, Tom Crow, Carol Duncan, Whitney Davis, Wolfgang Ernst, John Gage, Tamar Garb, Nick Green, Tag Gronberg, Francis Haskell, Jutta Held, Andrew Hemmingway, Rasaad Jamie, Elizabeth McGrath, Stanley Mitchell, Hannah Mitchell, Laura Mulvey, Patricia Potts, Adrian Rifkin, Lyndal Roper, Raphael Samuel, Conal Shields, Wendy Smith, David Solkin, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Martin Thom, Lisa Tickner, William Vaughan, Jeffrey Weeks and Karl Werckmeister.

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BOOKFlesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History

Alex Potts

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00050

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14690

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century.

Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann's writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals—such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann's historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.

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Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date August 1994 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300087369

EISBN 9780300229608

Illustrations 46

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