The Westmacott athlete

~The account that I gave in chapters 3 to 8 of the changing imagery of war, athletics, sexual relations, relations with the gods, drinking parties and reveling, and of satyrs was a broad-brush...

Among many ways in which I might have defined the historical afterlife of Winckelmann’s work, I have deliberately singled out two very loaded engagements with his image of the Greek ideal, the first connected with the politics of the 1789 French Revolution and the second with late nineteenth-century aestheticism and definitions of homosexual identity. In each instance, a distinctive combination of historical circumstances made Winckelmann’s conception of Greek art particularly compelling as the …