By Talia Neelis
A specter is haunting our reception of the ancient world– the specter of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Dubbed the ‘Father of Art History,’ the 18th-century historian became a modern Pygmalion by rhetorically sculpting the canon of art historical values into his own Galatea. His fixation on the form of the white male sculptural body, which still carry through to ideologically-charged manipulations of the past among contemporary white supremacist groups. He idolized the Apollo Belvedere (135 CE, fig. 1) as the epitome of beauty with a “sublimely superhuman” build and a stance that conveys “the charming manliness of maturity with graceful youthfulness” (tr. Potts 2006, 357).
Apollo Belvedere, Vatican Museum. Photo by Richard Cassan, October 2009.
Winckelmann asserted that gleaming white sculptures of men allowed for closer examination of the body’s musculature, whereas female bodies and color marked unsophistication:
As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea,
so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved
little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for
beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its
supreme beauty is rather male than female (ibid).
By distinguishing male bodies as ideal examples of pristine chiseled heroism, Winckelmann influenced generations to conceive statuary female bodies as inferior to male bodies.
While the polarity between masculinity/monochromatism and femininity/color might seem conjectural, the ancient poet Sappho (4th c. BCE) established colorful variegation as an explicitly feminine attribute. Anne Carson translates Sapphic fragment 1.1 as “Aphrodite of a spangled mind” (tr. Carson 2002, fr. 1.1). Carson conveys the Greek ποικιλος as spangled. Sappho sets colorful dynamism as an inherently feminine trait throughout her writing in the goddess’s “spangled straps” (tr. Carson 2002, fr. 39.2) and a woman’s head binder “spangled from Sardis” (tr. Carson 2002, fr. 38b). As a woman, Sappho renders another woman as ποικιλος–intricate, complicated, embroidered, ever-changing, sparkling, and shifting in color. These are not characteristic perceptions of ancient sculpture, especially in light of Winckelmann’s scholarship. When color is omitted from ancient art, so is much of the pleasure that could be drawn from the work. Audre Lorde draws a direct parallel between color and eroticism:
When released from its intense and constrained pellet, [eroticism] flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experiences (2016, 57).
Ποικιλος fills beholders of art with pleasure and draws them into vibrant worlds in an intrinsically feminine journey derived from color. Femininity, diversity, and eroticism are polychromy, and so are they ποικιλος–to be spangled and multi-faceted. Ποικιλος is to be so taken by the outward expression of a work’s interior that the observers themselves are brought into the diverse experience of the piece.
However, modern observers lack both material and historical context for these experiences. Winckelmann’s preference for male bodies sculpted from pristine white marble epitomizes what David Batchelor (2000) calls chromophobia: the fear of corruption or contamination through color. The insistence to propagate an image of the ancient world that’s monochromatically white was picked up by Identity Evropa, a group of white supremacists who pride themselves on preserving ‘Western’ culture through white male heritage. The capability, beauty, and idealism of the white male body is juxtaposed with the inferiority of feminine and diverse bodies.
Photo by Robby Virus, July 2017.
Photo by Karon Flage, February 2023.
Propaganda for ‘identitarian’ movements like Identity Evropa (figs. 2, 3) picks up on Winckelmann’s denial of femininity and color in favor of the masculine necessity of whiteness and form.
Audre Lorde describes that systems like Winckelmann’s hierarchy,
rob our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such systems reduce work to travesties of necessities (2016, 55).
Winckelmann robbed classical sculpture of its erotic value and reduced carefully curated experiences to a travesty of necessities by isolating the white form as the be-all and end-all of aesthetic beauty. He strew a white-marble-idolizing veil over Classical reception, much of which saw the ancient world through male-venerating alabaster glasses. The specter of Winckelmann’s ideas is still powerful enough to inspire a newer generation of Pygmalia in Identity Europa who draw on this narrative of beauty buttressed by male whiteness. However, instead of representing Galatea’s ideal form of womanhood, statues in the eyes of Winckelmann and Identity Europa figures have their femininity and diversity erased by claims to purity, preservation, and idealism. If we are critical and cognisant of the dangerous power that ancient art has when it is used as an advertisement for fraternities of white male supremacy, we can lift the veil of white monochromatism that Winckelmann drew and respect the vitality of polychromy in understanding ancient identity.
References
Batchelor, David. 2000. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books.
Bond, Sarah. 2017. “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.” Hyperallergic, June 7, 2017. https://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/.
Carson, Anne, trans. 2002. If not, winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Knopf Publishing. Lorde, Audre. 2016. Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches. London: Penguin Classics
Potts, Alex, trans. 2006. History of the Art of Antiquity. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.