The Discreet Charm Of The Belvedere: Submerged Homosexuality In Eighteenth‐Century Writing On Art

Abstract

This essay comprises an investigation of ekphrasis in the work of J. J. Winckelmann and particularly in his presentation of famous statues in the Vatican Belvedere courtyard collection. Key treatments of statues are revealed as offering much more than descriptions or art-historical analyses. Rather, they detail emerging relationships with works of art, relationships the dynamic nature of which is captured in the rhetoric of the descriptions. And like many good relationships these are informed by sex -but perhaps not in the obvious manner. It is more than a matter of Winckelmann taking a fancy to the objects he describes. Writing on art is revealed as an important site of repressed/submerged homosexuality. Following theoretical leads offered by Michel Foucault and Michael Worton, the essay investigates the disguised discursive existence of homosexuality in the rhetoric of aesthetics and explains its importance and subversive potential in a world where homosexuality cannot easily exist in the open; it then reflects upon the fact that in the apparently more liberated twentieth century, discussion of the sexual subtext to Winckelmann is still remarkable for its absence. Winckelmann is thus preserved in the literary/historical consciousness as the initiator of a rather arid brand of NeoClassicism -all noble simplicity and calm grandeur -when his own writing reveals opposite, more human qualities.The body, and particularly the body as depicted in art, is one of the most important sites for the discussion of aesthetics. The Classical nude statue and its more modern variants in a variety of media have often had canonical status; they have come to embody not just stylistic norms of the given age but also aesthetic principles which could have value beyond their own age. And the aesthetic was often more or less directly connected to moral principles which were understood to inform the realm of art. Thus the famous Laocöon statue could be seen (misguidedly) as the perfect illustration of the stylistic simplicity and clarity of great Greek art. 1 What is more, it can be seen as likely to promote stylistic improvements in the art of later periods exposed to it. It can be seen as an aesthetic incarnation of a brand of stoic philosophy which enables Laocöon in this representation to bear his own and his sons' suffering with dignity. In interpreting the statue in this way, I do so knowingly; the voice is not my own but something of a composite of representative eighteenth-century voices, not 1 The statue is now generally regarded as representative of late Hellenistic baroque art. The very presence of the word 'baroque' in any stylistic categorisation of the statue would surely have been most painful to Winckelmann, since the Baroque was precisely what he was writing against. It shows that Winckelmann often saw what he wanted to see in art -and interestingly, from our point of view, that his writing often tells you more about him than about the given work of art.

Winckelmann and Antinous

“…It gives a more nuanced understanding of the mechanics and motivation of this project, not to mention the effort it took to dub several statues 'Greek'. Also indispensable here are Davis (1994) and (1996), Ettlinger (1981), Morrison (1999) and Prettejohn (2005) 15-39, whose discussion of Winckelmann's demonstration of the beauty of classical art is a welcome antidote to the recent tendency to render his admiration of the male nude as 'simply' 'homosexual', however sublimated or complex. One of the most 4 Winckelmann (1764) 392.…”