30 eighteenth-century germany: winckelmann and kant
Winckelmann’s passionate friendships with men, which he sees as
crucial to the older writer’s aesthetic sensibility.
21
Subsequently Winck-
elmann’s homosexuality has become inseparable from his fame, for
instance in the frequent assumption that the strange event of his
murder, in Trieste in 1768, must have had a homosexual or homophobic
motive (although there is no evidence that the murder was anything
more than a robbery that turned tragically to violence). Recent scholars
have dwelt more positively on the homoerotic resonances of Winckel-
mann’s writing, and rightly so: Winckelmann initiated a practice of
homoerotic art criticism of superb quality in its own right, and which
was inspirational for later critics such as Walter Pater, who will be dis-
cussed in Chapter 3.
Nonetheless, there is a danger in assuming that Winckelmann’s
response to the beautiful can be explained away as the effect of his
homosexuality. The sensual element in Winckelmann’s response to the
beautiful cannot be reduced to an expression of desire for the sculp-
tured male body. Rather, it permeates his descriptions, for instance of
the texture of chiselled marble, of the fall of sculptured draperies, and
even of female figures. He writes of the Venus de’Medici [12], then the
most famous ancient female nude:
The Medicean Venus . . . resembles a rose which, after a lovely dawn, unfolds
its leaves to the rising sun; resembles one who is passing from an age which is
hard and somewhat harsh—like fruits before their perfect ripeness—into
another, in which all the vessels of the animal system are beginning to dilate,
and the breasts to enlarge, as her bosom indicates. . . . The attitude brings
before my imagination that Laïs who instructed Apelles in love. Methinks I
see her, as when, for the first time, she stood naked before the artist’s eyes.
22
Even without the final reference to Laïs, a famous courtesan of an-
tiquity, the passage clearly involves fantasies of sexual awakening,
expressed for instance in the image of the opening rose; the flower—
the rose in particular—would soon and lastingly become the most
common and efficient single symbol for pure beauty. Thus the rose,
like the sea images Winckelmann used more frequently in descriptions
of male figures, may be read either as a sexual image or as an aesthetic
one—indeed, the two cannot easily be distinguished.
Passages such as that on the Venus de’Medici, as well as that on the
Apollo Belvedere, raise urgent questions about the relationship between
the beautiful and the erotic—questions which, as we shall see, have
remained central to both aesthetic thought and art practice ever since.
It would be easy enough to resolve them by collapsing the beautiful
into the erotic. Thus in Winckelmann’s case it is tempting to avoid
difficulties by seeing his love of the beautiful simply as a disguised or
sublimated form of erotic attraction to young men. Yet that would not
only reinforce the stereotype, ingrained in modern western societies,