24 eighteenth-century germany: winckelmann and kant
the sea always remain calm however much the surface may rage, so
does the expression of the figures of the Greeks reveal a great and com-
posed soul even in the midst of passion.’ For a simple description of the
Laocoön as demonstrating one emotion pushed to its limit, Winckel-
mann substitutes a more complex account based on a magical equilib-
rium between two seemingly opposite characters: ‘The physical pain
and the nobility of soul are distributed with equal strength over the
entire body and are, as it were, held in balance with one another.’
Already Winckelmann is beginning to emphasize the observer’s
involvement in the aesthetic response, so intense that it is felt corpore-
ally: ‘The pain is revealed in all the muscles and sinews of [Laocoön’s]
body, and we ourselves can almost feel it as we observe the painful con-
traction of the abdomen’. But as the observer responds to the sense of
physical pain, the sculpture preserves its nobility; there is ‘no sign of
rage in his face or in his entire bearing’. Through empathetic response
the viewer is inspired with respect or awe: ‘his pain touches our very
souls, but we wish that we could bear misery like this great man’.
12
Thus the double emotion, poised between pain and nobility, shifts in
the process of contemplation from being a property of the sculpture to
characterizing the viewer’s response.
By the time Winckelmann published his History of Ancient Art,
in 1764, he had been in Rome for nearly a decade, but the study of a
wide range of surviving antiquities had done nothing to lessen his
enthusiasm for the Laocoön. Indeed, his increasing knowledge made
the Laocoön more important than ever, as the sole demonstrable link
between the beauty that could be directly experienced and the glorious
but lost world of art described in the ancient texts. Winckelmann
emphasized this in the dramatic placement of the Laocoön within the
History. Winckelmann presented the reign of Alexander the Great as
the final culmination of Greek art, but he had to admit that no trace
remained of the works Pliny had assigned to this period. ‘Of the works
of Lysippus not one probably has been preserved’, he notes of one of
the most famous names of the period; ‘[t]he loss of the works of this
artist is an indescribable one’.
13
This is one of the most melancholy
moments in the History, when the loss of ancient beauty is most
poignant. Suddenly, though, the mood changes:
But the kind fate which still continued to watch over the arts, even during
their destruction, has preserved for the admiration of the whole world, after
the loss of countless works executed at this time when art was in its highest
bloom, the most precious monument, the statue of the Laocoön, as a proof of
the truth of the accounts which describe the splendor of so many masterpieces
that have perished. . . .
14
The coup de théâtre is brilliantly effective, even though as a responsible
scholar Winckelmann is obliged to add a disclaimer: ‘we say at this