Life and (Love) Letters: Looking in on Winckelmann’s Correspondence

ABSTRACT Over the 250 years since his death, Winckelmann’s posthumously published ’private’ correspondence has shaped understandings of his life and work just as much as his aesthetic and antiquarian writings. While editions appeared as early as the 1770s, the publication of Goethe’s Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert and the inclusion of two volumes of ’freundschaftliche Briefe’ within Josef Eiselein’s Sämtliche Werke (1825-) marked a new role for the correspondence in the nineteenth-century monumentalising of Winckelmann as a German ’classic’. We suggest that this tradition has generated a distanced, even voyeuristic, perspective on the letters, treating them as windows onto biographical scenes of emotional, and sometimes erotic, intimacy and expression. We criticise some examples of this tendency in recent Winckelmann scholarship, explore the often adventitious steps by which it arose, and, using examples of particular letters, suggest some alternative interpretations.

Sichtermann politely pointed out that even in the 1960s one might have disagreed with Rehm's judgement. He listed Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt, Otto Brendel, German Hafner, and Reinhard Herbig as the latest in a line of archaeologists whose work continued to engage explicitly or implicitly with Winckelmann's ideas (Sichtermann, p. xiii). Three years later, Nikolaus Himmelmann would make the case for the continuingif problematicrelevance of Winckelmann's interpretative principles to archaeological analysis. 2 The Winckelmann of the late twentieth century did indeed attract the attention of scholars for his 'Wissenschaft', as well as for his reception history. We also now have the Kritische Gesamtausgabe, in progress under the auspices of the Mainz Akademie der Wissenschaften. 3 Even more surprising than his verdict on the interest of Winckelmann's scholarly writings is the fact that Rehm makes no mention of Winckelmann's letters. It was the letters he had spent much of the previous three decades collecting and editing, in preparation of the four-volume critical edition that is still standard today. Perhaps Rehm felt that this work merited no comment, for it was in tune with both dominant modes of humanities research and currents of interest in Winckelmann in particular over the previous century. As Constanze Güthenke has shown, one aspect of the disciplinization and professionalization of humanities research in nineteenth-century German universities was the privileging of biographical interpretation in various areas: not only in classical scholarship, where a standard Ph.D. dissertation 'would take a littleknown writer and collate his fragments, biographical sources and testimonia as fully as possible', but also in the new vernacular philologies that were being formed, often with the new classical philology as their model. 4 One can view Rehm's work on Winckelmann as combining biographical modes of scholarship with the ad fontes emphasis on archival and documentary research that characterized German historiography after Ranke. More obviously, he was following in the footsteps of Carl Justi, whose monumental Winckelmann biography of 1866-72 rested on years of patient archival research and examination of unpublished material, including letters, held in libraries across Europe and in the hands of private collectors. While Rehm was working on Winckelmann's letters, he also oversaw the fifth revised edition of Justi's work, which appeared in 1956, midway through the publication of the Briefe. 5 Justi and Rehm between them discovered hundreds of pages of previously unpublished documentary material, and brought an unprecedented level of scrutiny to the editing of Winckelmann's texts. 6 But editorial efforts on the letters stretch back across the nineteenth century and into the eighteenth.
Although only a few letters of Winckelmann's were published during his lifetime, collections began to appear within a decade of his death, with Christian Gottlob Heyne's publication in the 1770s of Winckelmann's correspondence with him and the Hanoverian Prime Minister, Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen; a two-volume collection of Winckelmanns Briefe an seine Freunde edited by the Dresden Royal librarian Karl Dassdorf; and a volume of his letters to Swiss correspondents edited by Leonhard Usteri. Further publications of specific epistolary exchanges appeared in the 1780s and 1790s, and the two early nineteenth-century editions of Winckelmann's Complete Worksthe 'Weimar' edition and that of Josef Eiseleinboth included volumes of letters. The Weimar edition was, moreover, presented as the fulfilment of a project called for in an earlier edition of Winckelmann's correspondence. The third of the 'Skizzen zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns'composed by Goethe, Friedrich August Wolf, and Johann Heinrich Meyer and appended to Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, Goethe's 1805 edition of Winckelmann's letters to his friend Berendisended with a declaration of hope that popular support might grow for an edition of the complete works of a man who had won German culture such fame overseas (FA, 1, 19, p. 232). Karl Ludwig Fernow, first editor of the Weimar edition and a contributor to Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, presented it as a continuation of the 'Skizzen' and the realization of Goethe's demand. 7 Rehm's edition of Winckelmann's letters thus crowned a tradition of scholarship that stretches back through Justi and Goethe into the eighteenth century itself. Our interest is not only in tracing this tradition, but in interrogating the modes of reading Winckelmann's output that it has fostered. We begin by considering a particular feature of Rehm's edition, which has been pointed out before by Martin Disselkamp. 8 In putting together his definitive edition, Rehm broke up the ordering by exchange that had been a characteristic of many earlier publications, declining to print surviving letters correspondents had written to Winckelmann in series alongside his own. Instead, Rehm printed three volumes of Winckelmann's letters to others, ordered chronologically by date of composition, followed by a fourth containing a chronological presentation of the admittedly much smaller number of extant letters to him, together with other testimonia and official documents pertaining to his life. By organizing his edition in this way, Rehm was yet again fulfilling a desideratum voiced by Goethe, who in Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert had included a chronological index of all the previously published correspondence in order to allow the reader 'der Lust hat einen solchen Charakter unmittelbar anzuschauen' to achieve eine 'bequeme Übersicht' of 'Winckelmanns ganzes Leben und Treiben' (FA, 1, 19, p. 233). By doubling the number of letters available to such readersfrom the 425 listed by Goethe to more than 900 -Rehm's edition gave them a proportionally enhanced 'Übersicht' over Winckelmann's life.
Although a defensible editorial decision, Rehm's choice was not without consequences. By arranging the letters chronologically rather than by correspondent, and relegating the replies to a separate volume, Rehm followed Goethe in privileging a mode of reading that focused upon the life story to be gleaned through the letters, the progressive development and unfolding of the 'Charakter' that was Winckelmann. Such a reading works by emphasizing the transparency of letters as documents of a life: as unstudied, natural, naïve, rather than as, say, a set of carefully constructed rhetorical performances aimed at particular addressees, or a set of discourses upon particular subjects. 9 This mode of reading, which interprets personal correspondence as the expression or reflection of a consistentor at least a consistently developingpre-textual personality, finds an echo in a more recent body of criticism on Winckelmann which appears at first very different. In these readings, the correspondence is seen as the private, and thus uncensored, expression of a homosexual subjectivity that is striving to recognize itself as such. Such interpretations begin in the nineteenth century, arguably with Goethe, 10 but are particularly prominent in a number of studies since the 1980s, a decade that saw the institutionalization of LGBT studies and the beginnings of queer theory. The Winckelmann who emerges in the writings of Hans Mayer, Simon Richter and Paul McGrath, Susan Gustafson, Alex Potts, and Wolfgang von Wangenheim displays some marked differences from the canonical Winckelmann of Goethe and Justi. Most obviously, they present Winckelmann's personality not as a unified and harmonious, but rather as one that embodies a 'problematic and contradictory' (Sweet) or simply a 'double life' (Mayer). 11 In common with their nineteenth-and twentiethcentury predecessors, however, they present Winckelmann's 'Leben und Treiben' as the key to understanding his scholarship, while privileging the letters, as 'private' correspondence, as the key to interpreting the published works.
It may seem surprising that such interpretative strategies have persisted among scholars whose work proceeds from this context. Several have emphasizedcorrectlythat queer theory contains the resources for destabilizing naively biographical approaches to literary texts, as well as interpretations that proceed from what Robert Tobin, citing Alice Kuzniar, calls 'the self-congratulatory privilege of knowing what this other person is presumed to be repressing or what a third party can't see or isn't privy to'. 12 One of the most influential Anglophone discussions of Winckelmann, that of Alex Potts, admittedly makes little reference to queer theory, instead adopting a combination of a psychoanalytic perspective and sociohistorical ones on Winckelmann's work (Potts, pp. 5-6). This may be partly a matter of disciplinary formation, in that within art history, psychoanalysis has a longer history and greater prominence than queer theory as an interpretative framework. Its persistence in literary studies is perhaps explicable by the authority of the interpretative tradition that stems from Goethe, as well as the dominance of a particular figuration of the homoerotic, operative from 1800 until fairly recently, that lends itself to construal in terms of coded outer revelations and inner meanings. Such readings of Winckelmann conform to the structure of the closet.
Beyond such questions of discipline formation and politics, however, lies the historical question of whether this reading mistakes the nature of Winckelmann's letters, resting as it does upon a misapprehension of the character of personal correspondence in the eighteenth-century scholarly, literary, and connoisseurial circles in which Winckelmann moved. Even a cursory survey of the flourishing recent scholarship on eighteenth-century epistolography, whether on actual letters, Latin and vernacular manuals of letter-writing, or epistolary fiction, suggests that the genre of the eighteenthcentury familiar letter is less stable, and certainly less stably private, than much scholarship on Winckelmann's letters has assumed. John Howland is one among many to have explored how the eighteenth century 'witnesses a veritable explosion of letters in published writing', whereby 'almost any kind of prose composition can be found in epistolary form.' 13 When we consider in addition the phenomenon of illustrious men and women writing letters with an eye to posthumous publication; the sociability of reception of eighteenth-century letters, which were often sent as enclosures in third-party correspondence and read out loud in groups; and the wide circulation of letters in manuscript even when they remained unpublished, the boundary between 'published' and 'private' letters appears significantly blurred.
Winckelmann's correspondence displays many of the features mentioned. Winckelmann, who was drilled in the art of epistolary composition at his Latin School and composed his personal correspondence in Latin, French, German, and Italian, chose the format of the open letter (Sendschreiben) for shorter antiquarian works of both his Dresden and Roman periods. Such works, for example the Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (1762) and the Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben (1763), were addressed to the same young noblemen and Grand Tourists who often feature in his personal correspondence. Other letters, such as those to Heyne and to Christian Felix Weisse, editor after Friedrich Nicolai of the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, were destined for publication in scholarly and literary periodicals. There is ample evidence from the correspondence of Winckelmann and his contemporaries for those sociable modes of reading out loud current in the mid-eighteenth century, and clues that certain letters, such as those Winckelmann sent to Johann Georg Wille and Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn in 1757 (WB, 1, 183, 184) containing early drafts of his description of the Apollo Belvedere, circulated in manuscript among northern European connoisseurs. 14 Finally, as the letters discussed below demonstrate, Winckelmann was an avid consumer of many different kinds of epistolary literature fashionable in his age. The eighteenth century offered many models, both ancient and modern, for elegant epistolary composition, and letter-writing manuals often consisted in large part of collections of model letters. The prose letters of Cicero and Pliny were widely admired and imitated, while Ovid's Heroides and Horace's Epistles provided models, respectively, of 'heroic' and ethical-didactic poetry in verse. Supplementing these were corpora of modern letters, published and consumed as literature. The correspondence of Vincent Voiture and Mme de Sévigné adorned many a polite library, 15 and it was also the great age of the epistolary novel: Richardson's Clarissa was published in 1748, the year Winckelmann took up his position as Librarian to Count Heinrich von Bünau. Although Winckelmann appears to have read little German literature after his departure for Rome in 1755, the same cannot be said for French and British literature. His letters and manuscript notes attest to his consumption of authors of taste, including writers of epistolary literature, such as Shaftesbury, Hume, Pope, Richardson, Voltaire, the Encyclopaedists, and Cleland. In more than one of his love letters Winckelmann's address to a friend or beloved includes a reading list: the recommendation of a set of shared literary models through which the mutual understanding and intimacy of writer and addressee are deepened and assured.
Examination of these contextssocio-cultural, rhetorical, literaryis crucial to an assessment of Winckelmann's epistolary art, and it can give further depth and specificity to dissident readings of Winckelmann's letterssuch as the analyses of Martin Disselkamp and Ernst Osterkampthat have refused to treat the letters as transparent windows onto his soul. 16 Disselkamp sets himself explicitly against previous traditions of interpretation, taking as his primary object 'nicht die Persönlichkeit Winckelmanns und seine Lebensumstände, sondern die Bilder, die der Verfasser in seinen Briefen in unterschiedlichen Gesprächszusammenhängen von sich entwirft' (Disselkamp, p. 10). He offers a thoughtful discussion of Winckelmann's letters in the context of other eighteenth-century German correspondence corpora and letter manuals, situating it between the rather moralizing and pious outlook of the emergent German bourgeois epistolary culture of the mid-eighteenth century and the more worldly, 'free', and potentially antinomian lifestyle promised by Rome (Disselkamp, p. 78). He acknowledges the importance of earlier work by Osterkamp, who both emphasized Winckelmann's use of his correspondence in order‚ 'die Art und Weise, wie er von Deutschland aus wahrgenommen wurde, bis ins kleinste zu kontrollieren und zu steuern [. . .]' and showed how that image differed from the persona Winckelmann adopted in letters to Italian patrons (Disselkamp, p. 306; Osterkamp, p. 205). Neither scholar, however, attempts a close stylistic analysis of Winckelmann's letters with reference to early modern (and classical) traditions of epistolary rhetoric.
Two further preliminary points must be made before we present some individual letters. First, our focus is upon Winckelmann's love letters: a category in which we include both letters Winckelmann wrote to men he professed to love, and letters to friends in which he wrote of erotic matters. Prior discussions of Winckelmann's letters in the context of his homoeroticism or homosexuality have tended to focus upon only a subset of those letters that treat erotic themes. Particularly privileged has been the correspondence with Reinhold von Berg, and especially the first of the 'private' letters to Berg (WB, 2, 488), dated 9 June 1762 and first published in 1784 (Gustafson, pp. 50-52, 57-61; Richter and McGrath). There are a number of reasons for this: first, the literary qualities of the letter itself, with its Homeric similes, Platonic imagery, and allusions and quotation from Abraham Cowley's poem 'Platonic Love'. Since Berg was also the dedicatee of one of Winckelmann's most homoerotic published works, the epistolary Abhandlung, the availability of this published work alongside a 'private' letter offers opportunities for comparison. But it is also relevant that the correspondence with Berg deploys a Platonic-paederastic discourse of philosophical, 'Greek' love that is easily assimilable to the nineteenth-and twentieth-century paradigm of homosexuality as 'the love that dare not speak its name'. Other Winckelmann letters offer us significantly different erotic voices.
Our final introductory point moves back to Goethe. In the 'Vorrede' to Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert, he offers the following general characterization of personal correspondence: Briefe gehören unter die wichtigsten Denkmähler, die der einzelne Mensch hinterlassen kann. Lebhafte Personen stellen sich schon bey ihren Selbstgesprächen manchmahl einen abwesenden Freund als gegenwärtig vor, dem sie ihre innersten Gesinnungen mittheilen, und so ist auch der Brief eine Art von Selbstgespräch. (FA, 1, 19, p. 13) One could almost be forgiven for mistaking Goethe's observation as conventional, for his words echo theorisations of letter-writing familiar from the rhetorical tradition. Ps.-Libanius's definition of a letter as 'a conversation between absent persons', promoted by Erasmus, had become a commonplace by the end of the sixteenth century, 17 as had the notiontraceable back at least as far as Ps.-Demetrius, On Stylethat 'everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul'. 18 These ideas were elaborated upon in early modern rhetorical works: by the late seventeenth century, Daniel Georg Morhof claimed that letters were superior to face-to-face conversation because the epistolary medium masked merely physical defects apparent in manners or appearance: 'in letters the soul alone speaks, and displays itself unclothed'. 19  Here Goethe occludes a third important element of the rhetorical tradition's treatment of letters: the idea of a letter as a specific communication aimed at a particular addressee. His characterization of letters as a monologue ('eine Art von Selbstgespräch'), cast forth with no thought of the addressee, is the very opposite of the traditional emphasis on the letter as 'one of the two sides to a dialogue' (Ps-Demetrius, De elocutione, 223). 20 By suggesting that the absent friend provides 'mehr de[n] Anlaß als de[n] Gegenstand des Briefes', Goethe erases this important dimension of the classical view of letters, replacing it with a notion of the letter as a spontaneous and solipsistic exercise in selfexpression. Although Ps.-Demetrius is source of the idea that a letter provides 'the image of the soul', he is by no means so one-sided. The famous commonplace of a letter as one half of a dialogue is followed by a qualification: The four letters that Rehm assigns to the Lamprecht correspondence in the first volume of the Briefe stem from a single source: an autograph notebook containing drafts of missives to various addressees, alongside original Latin epigrams and other compositions, preserved in Hamburg (Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. hist. art. 1, 2, fols 174-95) and first published by Justi in 1866. Despite Justi's assurances that these letters, 'ganz oder fast ganz so, wie sie hier stehen, an die Adressaten abgegangen sind' (Justi, 1, 484), we do not know how far the versions of the letters that Winckelmann eventually sent, if indeed they were sent, resemble the drafts. Nor indeed is it certain that all four were for Lamprecht; while references to 'Heimersleben' (an eighteenth-century vernacular variant on Hadmersleben; see Justi, 1, 198) and Ilefeld, places where Lamprecht lived and studied, make the addressee of a letter Rehm dates to mid-September 1746 (WB, 1, 38) all but certain, such circumstantial evidence is lacking from the others. They vary in language (Latin, French, German), and the two German letters differ in employment of 'Du'/'Sie'. This led Berthold Vallentin to suggest that some of the letters may have been addressed not to Lamprecht but to Friedrich von Bülow, another young man Winckelmann tutored. 22 Despite these uncertainties, one may say that each of the four is addressed to a young man whom Winckelmann calls variously his 'deliciae' ('darling'), 'Bruder', and 'ami' ('friend'), to whom he makes assurances of lasting loyalty and affection. But these are not just love letters written in Latin, French, and German; they are composed in accordance with certain literary and rhetorical conventions, about which the letters appear sometimes quite self-conscious. A letter of 16 February 1744 (WB, 1, 22), written in Latin, mutates surprisingly from a love letter into an exhortation to prose composition. Winckelmann asks Lamprecht to undertake extensive Latin translations from Voltaire's Histoire de Charles XII and send them to him, both so that 'the force of your style ('vis stili Tui'a possible double entendre, since 'stilus' translates literally as 'pen/stylus') may shine brighter for me', but also so that he can correct his protégé's efforts at this typical schoolboy exercise. 23 Disselkamp surmises that 'eine sprachdidaktische Absicht' may also lie behind the formulations of a French-language letter that Rehm dated to April 1747 (WB, 1, 42; Disselkamp, p. 266). This opens up the question of how far Winckelmann's letters to his pupils are intended as form letters: models of epistolary style. To be found among these letters (on folios 176v-178v of the Hamburg manuscript) is indeed a series of what, to judge from their content and generic headings ('Excusatio de omissa ante discessum valedictione', 'Invitatio ad nuptias', 'Epistola valedictoria', etc.), 24 seem to be form letters copied out of a Latin epistolary manual (WB, 4, 11-20).
If we can ask this question of the Latin and French letters, we should also ask it of the German ones, in which protestations of undying affection are embellished with a series of commonplaces drawn largely from one source: Ovid's Heroides. Despite Ovid's modern image as a witty and ironically risqué, even immoral poet, in the eighteenth century his works could receive moralizing and allegorical interpretations, and his love-struck heroines were recommended as offering 'many excellent lessons of morality' and of 'the fatal effects of ungoverned and misguided passions', to quote from one 1760 English work aimed at a female readership. 25 Ovid's impeccable Latinity and prosody also recommended him, then as now, as a school text; the Heroides took their place among models listed in epistolary manuals and spawned Latin and vernacular imitations.
The Heroides have a significant echo in that famous and enigmatic closing passage of Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, in which he likens himself, the contemporary historian of ancient art, to 'eine Liebste an dem Ufer des Meeres', who 'ihren abfahrenden Liebhaber, ohne Hofnung [sic] ihn wieder zu sehen, mit bethränten Augen verfolget, und selbst in dem entfernten Segel das Bild des Geliebten zu sehen glaubt'. 26 In a psychoanalytically informed reading, Whitney Davis has interpreted this figure as an archetype for the historian's constitutive splitting between a subjective erotic and an objective historical interest in the past. Winckelmann's presentation of the unnamed 'Liebste' as a layering of various antique heroes and heroines, 'not only a Penelope mourning her loss [but] also the lover Theseus [and] even Ariadne' 27 resonates interestingly with the layering of commonplaces present in the aforementioned mid-September 1746 draft (WB, 1, 38). There, Winckelmann's Ovidian citations present us with laments uttered in turn by Ariadne to Theseus, Medea to Jason, Laodamia to Protesilaus, Dido to Aeneas, Hypsipyle to Jason, and Paris to Helen. Insufficient attention has, however, been paid to the history of this topos in a celebrated genre of early modern literary production and emulation. Likewise, when Paul Derks writes of Winckelmann's first letter to Berg (WB, 2, 488), with its exclusively masculinist cast of ancient heroic models, that here we see homosexuellen Psyche', he overlooks Winckelmann's earlier detour through the feminine, because Ovidian, model of the heroic epistle presented in the 'correspondence' with Lamprecht. 28 *** A very different kind of erotic discourse occurs in several other of Winckelmann's personal letters: those in which, rather than writing to men with whom he professed to be in love, he writes to trusted friends on autobiographical and erotic themes. Most of these letters date from the period after Winckelmann's sojourn in Florence in 1758-59; their addressees include old friends from Germany such as Hieronymus Dietrich Berendis, Swiss supporters such as Konrad Friedrich Uden and Johann Caspar Füssli, and travellers with whom Winckelmann had socialized in Rome and shared a number of antiquarian and connoisseurial interests. Early readers of Winckelmann's correspondence showed particular interest in these letters; Goethe's attention to them is shown in his comments on 'Gesellschaft' in his Winckelmann essay (FA, 1, 19, p. 207). They also offer the richest material for biographers, since they provide numerous, chatty details about Winckelmann's life in Italy. Below we focus on Winckelmann's correspondence with Gian Ludovico Bianconi and Heinrich Wilhelm Muzell-Stosch, two men of higher social standing than himself, upon whom he relied for patronage but with whom he also developed longstanding friendships.
Bianconi was an important figure in Winckelmann's life, yet is someone who has received little scholarly attention. 29 Born, like Winckelmann, in 1717, to a noble Bolognese family, Bianconi studied philosophy, mathematics, physics, and medicine before embarking upon a career as personal physician to the Catholic Princes of northern Europe, serving Joseph von Hessen in Augsburg and, from 1750 onwards, the Electors of Saxony. In Dresden he became a well-known figure in court circles and was particularly close to the short-lived prince-elector Friedrich Christian, the posthumous dedicatee of Winckelmann's Geschichte. Upon Friedrich Christian's death in 1763, Bianconi moved to Rome as the Saxon envoy to the Holy See. He died in Perugia in 1781.
A man of broad intellectual interests, Bianconi was well connected in antiquarian circles. In Augsburg he promoted literary cosmopolitanism by founding the Journal des Savans d'Italie (1748-49) a French-language publication covering subjects from theology to medicine, and especially classical and antiquarian studies. In Rome he founded two further influential periodicals, the Efemeridi letterarie (1772-98) and the Antologia romana (1774-98), both committed to the promotion of neoclassical taste in Rome. 30 1, 105, p. 158). Bianconi continued to support Winckelmann when the latter left for Rome, securing letters of introduction from the Saxon court for his first visit to Herculaneum and working to ensure the continued payment of his stipend during the Seven Years' War. He also furnished new connections for Winckelmann, even arranging his first papal audience (Jacobs, pp. 574-87; Heymann, pp. [52][53][54]. Many aspects of Muzell-Stosch's life and relationship with Winckelmann parallel Bianconi's. Muzell was born in 1723 to a moderately prosperous Prussian family: while his older brother followed a path akin to Bianconi's by training in medicine, eventually serving as personal physician to Frederick the Great, the younger enlisted as a non-commissioned army officer, but deserted and fled to Florence in 1756. There he was adopted as heir by his uncle, Philipp von Stosch, a renowned diplomat and connoisseur with whom Winckelmann was, around the same time, embarking upon a commerce de lettres in hope of patronage. When the elder Stosch died in 1757, his nephew invited Winckelmann to Florence to produce the sale catalogue of Stosch's gem collection: the project grew into a partial catalogue raisonnée, published as the Description des pierres gravées in 1760. 32 During the eight months or so that Winckelmann resided with Muzell-Stosch, the latter facilitated his introduction to Florentine antiquarian circles and the two struck up a friendship that was to continue, via letters, for the rest of Winckelmann's life. Winckelmann's last extant letter, sent from Vienna in May 1768 in a state of disquiet and announcing his decision to abandon his journey and return to Italy via Trieste, was addressed to Muzell-Stosch (WB, 3, 955).
In coming into his inheritance, he lived 'as a man of letters of independent means, in high society, and never married'. 33 This last point of Denina's may allude to Stosch's homosexual preferences; if so, this would give him another point in common with Winckelmann. Certainly, Stosch's library seems to have contained a significant collection of erotica, which (despite his complaints that the challenges of producing the Stosch gem catalogue to a short deadline gave him little time for recreation) Winckelmann took time to peruse. In a 1759 letter to Johann Michael Francke, his old colleague from Bünau's library, Winckelmann talks of reading both the seventeenth-century Italian paederastic fantasy Alcibiade, fanciullo a scola and Cleland's Fanny Hill, and confides that 'in dergleichen Büchern ist die Stoschische Bibliothek vollständig' (WB, 1, 261, p. 443).
What is most interesting about this letter is not Winckelmann's grouping of Alcibiade and Fanny Hill together as examples of 'dergleichen Bücher'. It is that he draws a distinction between them in terms of style. While he characterizes Alcibiade simply as 'ein abgeschmacktes Buch', a judgement that appears resoundingly negative, Winckelmann has more praise for Cleland. Although Fanny Hill is 'das allerunzüchtigste Buch, was die Welt gesehen hat', it is also 'von einem Meister in der Kunst, von einem Kopf von zärtlicher Empfindung und von hohen Ideen, ja, in einem erhabnen Pindarischen Stil geschrieben' (WB, 1, 261, pp. 443-44). Noteworthy is not so much Winckelmann's preference for the apparently heterosexual narrative over the openly homosexual (by virtue of long and enthusiastic descriptions of male bodies and erect phalluses and its author's biography, Fanny Hill has been read as a piece of closeted gay literature), 34 but that the categories by which Winckelmann chooses to commend Cleland's prose ('zärtlich', 'hoch', 'erhaben', 'Pindarisch') are key positive terms of Winckelmannian aesthetic theory, the effects he praises in the greatest works of ancient art and strives for in his own ekphrases. 35 By characterizing Fanny Hill thus, this letter brings the high, philosophical, and aesthetic language of Winckelmannian connoisseurship into the context of the pornographic.
This has the potential to challenge readings of Winckelmann's writings such as those of Paul Derks and Alex Potts, who suggest that the sexual encounters to which Winckelmann freely alludes in his personal correspondence belong in a very different category to his aestheticized, heroic friendships: Though publicly there was a very firm line to be drawn between a way of life that revolved around highly charged male friendship, and one that embraced sexual relations between men, it is clear from Winckelmann's correspondence that, within the social circles in which he moved in Rome and among his more intimate German and Swiss correspondents, little taboo was attached to talking privately about sexual relations with young men. These Winckelmann himself kept in a strictly separate category from his more highly invested male friendships. To Bianconi, the doctor at the Saxon court who had been instrumental in enabling him to get to Rome, Winckelmann was quite explicit about his sexual encounters with youths during his stay in Florence in 1758-9, where, as he put it, he advanced beyond 'the surface of Platonism . . . I bent my head and submitted to an act analogous to b . .. Potts might be forgiven for his mistake, not just because Rehm published Winckelmann's letter to Michelangelo Bianconi out of chronological series in the third volume of the Briefe, but because the language is so sexually suggestive. Winckelmann characterizes himself as on the brink of a Platonic (code for paederastic?) act of heresy, before describing himself as subjected to a physical act, the precise character of which is left for the reader to fill in but which involves the surrender of his 'verginità'. These, plus the general reputation of Florence as a sodomitical city support a sexual interpretation (Potts,p. 209). 37 This, upon our reading, is precisely Winckelmann's joke: a witticism that assumes his friend's knowledge of his homoerotic preferences but does not place this letter in the category of the confessional.
Such jokes, when Winckelmann sends up both his own same-sex preferences and his high-falutin' connoisseurship, are to be found elsewhere in the correspondence with Bianconi. In a letter of January 1763, for (I do not look [upon her] with such an indifferent eye as you imagine, but I am unable to limit my feelings of approbation to the beauty of the opposite sex alone. The eye, taste, and passions of the connoisseur should not be partial and narrowsighted, but should extend to wherever they find beauty.) This clear joke depends on Winckelmann's addressee being aware of his samesex preferences, but is also a satire on the notion that a true connoisseur should be alive to beauty in all its shapes and forms. 'Occhio' is repeated twice, alluding to the empiricism beloved of connoisseurs, just as 'gusto' and 'passione' are qualities associated with the true 'Conoscitore'. Winckelmann continues to speakostensibly in pragmatic fashionof how such faculties should not be 'parziali' and 'ristretti', appreciative of masculine or feminine beauty to the exclusion of the other. Ultimately, however, it is the masculine that wins out in this battle of the sexes. When Winckelmann goes to muse that the imagination of the artist of the Apollo Belvedere would not have been 'riscaldata' ('ignited') if he had sculpted a Venus insteadimagery of heat suggestive of passionhe intimates that, in his view, more passion is involved in sculpting a male nude such as Apollo. Winckelmann elaborates similar principles, albeit in a decidedly more serious mode, in the Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, the epistolary treatise on aesthetic education dedicated to Reinhold von Berg that he was composing around the same time. 39 *** This article has aimed to demonstrate that Winckelmann used a variety of erotic personae and discourses in his personal correspondence and that paying attention to its social, cultural, and literary-rhetorical contexts is necessary in order to appreciate the correspondence as a demonstration of literary art. both of which are indebted to pre-existing literary-rhetorical conventions. In the Lamprecht correspondence the key genre is the Ovidian 'heroic epistle'; in the Bianconi letters we enter the realms of libertine freedom of expression and of worldly satires on the base of physical desires that underlie the philosophical discourses of connoisseur and antiquarian, which were also a theme in mid-eighteenth-century visual arts. 40 These motifs from Winckelmann's correspondence also find echoes in his published writings: in the Geschichte's Ovidian conclusion and the Abhandlung's recasting of Winckelmann's jokey treatment of Vittoria Cheroffini's marriage prospects. This does not mean that Winckelmann's letters provide the key that enables us to decode hidden, homoerotic truths veiled in the published works. Rather, it recommends treating Winckelmann's familiar correspondence as on a continuum with his published writings as the productions of a man who was, as Rehm put it, a 'Sprachkünstler'. Like his published writings, Winckelmann's letters should be treated as works of literary art. original manuscripts, either in the eighteenth century or in subsequent acts or periods of destruction (for example the major damage during World War II to the holdings of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek, where a significant number of Winckelmann letters, including the first and third translated below, were held). We have followed the text of Rehm's critical edition of the 1950s, but he was forced to rely on early printed editions, which were themselves sometimes epitomized or bowdlerized, or earlier transcriptions made by himself (as in the case of 1, 270) or others (as in the case of 1, 270a, transmitted through a transcription in Justi's hand in the archives of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften). We have indicated in footnotes some places where we made translation choices which may seem controversial, or where we adopted one of a number of possible readings.
In preparing these translations we have benefited from the generosity of Professor Nicoletta Momigliano of the University of Bristol and Professor Ingrid Rowland of the University of Notre Dame, each of whom advised us on numerous cruces of interpretation. Any errors that remain are entirely our responsibility.
1: WB, 1, 270 (to G. L. Bianconi) Florence, 31 March 1759 Most excellent sir and most noble master, I cannot but be concerned by your long silence, although I can imagine various reasons for it, 41 and being most certain of your patronage I accept it in good faith: showing my limited capacities in the face of your much revered signs of instruction and hoping for nothing but to be useful to you in some way. I am just about to finish my laborious work, which until now has not allowed me to draw breath, and has held me back from all social intercourse. When printed it will be a large octavo volume. 42 On my suggestion, the proprietor 43 will dedicate it to his Eminence Aless. Albani. Over the last six months, draining my last energies, I have completed a task that all the same astounds me. I feel the effect of it, however, and am obliged to take a very strict abstinence (from food) dictated by an unsettled stomach. This indisposition has made me feel that Buzara 44 is no laughing matter, not at all! It claims a certain right 45 over those who breathe the Tuscan air. Having tempted me at first with some itching below, and finding myself floating on the surface of Platonism and walking on the brink of heresy, but never inclined either 46 to Part A. . . nor P. . ., thiswhether it was this influence or some other occult power -finally came to bend my head and to subject me to a similar act of the M. . .. 47 Take heed! But don't be shocked! I have been reduced to taking enemas and I made use of one again this morning. Thus to the genius of Florence I have paid the tribute of my virginity (a word that does not seem to me good Tuscan and I would be amazed if it were so).
Chatter aside, most excellent sir, would you be so kind as to pass this on to Mr Walther, bookseller to the King, 'don't rush to start printing my work, 48 which will remain postponed until I have more time at my disposal, and when departing for the Leipzig Trade Fair, leave the manuscript with your good brother, so that you may contact him[?] 49 if need be. I'm counting on this.' It is of the utmost importance to me; you will hear why in the next post. I'm in no mood to put up with the superciliousness 50 of a bookseller: a Roman man of letters does not want to be treated with pedantry. Straight after Easter I will prepare myself to return to my most longed-for mistress, the city of Rome, 51 where I yearn for your news. I remain from the bottom of my heart, most excellent sir, your most humble and obedient servant, Johann Winckelmann. Florence, 31 March 1759 Most excellent sir and most revered master, I sent a letter in this post to your good brother in Dresden, asking him to assert his authority to prevent a dirty trick being hatched against me by the bookseller to the King, as I have reason to believe. Yet having held off from explaining myself in more detail until the next post, I am eager to know what your good brother has planned about his departure, so that I can be sure that the letter that I am going to send him, franked for travel to Bayreuth, will reach him. My work is reaching its completion, 52 awaiting its second revision to be done in Rome with the whole collection of engravings already sent in advance. Printed it will be a large octavo volume. The dedication is to his Eminence Aless. Albani, at my suggestion. I will leave for my most longed-for mistress, the city of Rome, straight after Easter, anxious to again enjoy the air pregnant with antiquity and to return to the bosom 53 of literature. I hope to rest at his Em. Passionei's residence in Camaldoli, of which I am in need. I feel a great discomfort in my stomach and bowels, so much so that I have been reduced to a rigorous abstinence from food and to taking enemas for the first time in my life; I am eating what is compatible with my stomach. 54 A tribute one owes to the genius of Florence. I remain from the bottom of my heart, most excellent sir, your most humble and faithful servant, 3: Extract from WB, 2, 531 (To G. L. Bianconi) Rome 8 January 1763 Dearest friend, A brief sojourn in Ostia in the company of his Eminence Spinelli explains in part the reason for my delay in responding to you, that is, two posts later than I should have done, but your letter also matured en route. First and foremost, thank you for the interest that you showed for my health and for remembering me to His Royal Highness, upon whom, as upon you, may God bestow all his heavenly blessings for many years to come. In these well wishes I am in accord with his Eminence my master, who fondly sends his regards, as does the venerable House of Cheroffini and the beautiful Vittoria, upon whom I do not look with such an indifferent eye as you imagine, but I am unable to limit my feelings of approbation to the beauty of the opposite sex alone. The eye, taste, and passions of the connoisseur should not be partial and narrow-sighted, but should extend to wherever they find beauty. If the great master of the Vatican Apollo had shared your genius, inclined as it is to the feminine, 55 he would have poured his energies into sculpting a Venus; his imagination would not have been ignited by those sublime forms of a more perfect nature and we would now lack that marvel. The various opportunities to marry her off have vanished. 56 55 As Rehm notes, 'scuffesco' is most probably taken from 'scuffia', which can mean 'infatuation' or 'crush'. 56 This letter was written in 1763 and Vittoria did not marry until 1764; see Casanova, VII, 320 n. 44.