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| Johann Joachim Winckelmann |
A famous sketch of J.J. Winckelmann made in Rome, in 1764, shows him sitting over an open book, quill in hand. Huge, dark eyes shine out from under an intellectual brow. The nose in large, almost a Bourbon nose in this portrayal. The mouth and chin are soft and rounded. Altogether the drawing suggests an artistic rather than an academic personality. Winckelmann, a cobbler's son, was born in 1717 in Stendal, a small town in Prussia. As a boy he tramped the countryside looking for the pre-historic barrows of the district and lured his comrades into helping him dig for old urns. By 1743 he had made himseld senior assistant master of a grammar school in Seehausen.
In 1748 he found a post as librarian for the Count of Bunau, near Dresden, in Saxony, and left the Prussia of Fredrick the Great without regreat. He had early realized that Prussia was a "despotic land", and in later life he looked back on the years spent there with a shudder, remarking that "I at least felt the slavery more than others".
The future course of his life was determined by this move. He landed in the midst of a circle of important artists, and in Dresden founded the most comprehensive collection of antiquities then extant in his native Germany. The opportunity to study these relics put out of his thoughts half-serious plans to go abroad, perhaps to Egypt. When his first writings appeared, they evoked echoes throughout all Europe. In order to get a chance to work in Italy, he turned Catholic, but with the passage of the years he became, if anything, more spiritually independent than before his conversation, and in religion he never dogmatic. Rome, he thought, was worth a Mass to him.
In 1758 he became the librarian of Cardinal Albani's collection of antiquities. And in 1763 he was appointed Cheif Supervisor of all antiquities in and about Rome, and in this capacity he visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1768 he was murdered.
Three of Winckelmann's voluminous works contributed basically to the introduction of scientific methods in the investigation of past. These are his Sendschreiben, or Open Letters, on the discoveries of Herculaneum; his main work, History of Art of Antiquity; and his Monumenti antichi inediti, or Unpublished Relics of Antiquity.
Excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum during the early years were haphazard. But worse than planlessness was secrecy. An atmosphere of exclusivenss was generated by prohibition imposed by self-seeking rulers on all foreigners, whether mere travelers or students of the past, who sought permission to visit the two dead cities and tell the world about them. The only exceptions made by the king of Two Sicilies had been to allow a bookworm by the name of Bayardi to perpare catalogue of the finds. But Bayardi plunged into an introduction to his catalogue without even bothering to visit the excavations. He wrote and wrote, and by 1752 had completed five volumes, totaling some 2677 pages, without getting to the essentials. Meanwhile he spread malicious reports about two newcomers who showed signs of going straight to the heart of the matter, and was able to have them denied permission to visit the site.
And whem a bonafide scholar managed to get hold of one or another excavated piece to inspect at first hand, as often as not total lack of preparation would lure him into such devious theories as one advanced by Martorelli. This Italian savant wrote a two-volume work running to 625 pages in order to prove, by inspection of an inkwell, that the ancients did not use scrolls, but regular books of rectangular shape. And this when the papyrus rolls of Philodemus stared him in the face.
The first large folio volume on the antiquities of Pompeii and Herculaneum finally appeared in 1757, written by Valetta, and subsidized by the King to the extent of twelve thousand ducats. Meanwhile Winckelmann entered this atmosphere of envy, intrigue and moldy bookishness.
