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COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 400 pp.; 35 b/w illus. $39.50
For most of the past two centuries, much of Germany's culture - its literature, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture - has been profoundly influenced by a continued confrontation with the classical past. To be sure, the arts of all European nations have been inflected by neo-classicism to varying degrees, at one time or another. Germany, however, has always believed that it has had a special relationship to the ancient world, a relationship that was memorably (if somewhat drastically) summarized in the title of E. M. Butler's famous work, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935). Whereas Butler focused on the works of great writers, Suzanne Marchand examines the professional purveyors of classical studies, the philologists and archaeologists who turned enthusiasm for the ancient world into an academic science. According to Marchand, their efforts were, in the long run, self-defeating, inasmuch as the humanist enthusiasm that gave rise to classical studies was destroyed by the professionalization of the field: "the triumph of historicist classical scholarship over poetry and antiquarian reverie gradually eroded the very norms and ideals that underwrote philhellenism's cultural significance" (p. xviii).
Marchand begins her tale with the dual legacies of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann put forth a novel image of Greek art as being marked by "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur," an aesthetics of restraint that stood in marked contrast to the Baroque and Rococo styles of the day. Half a century later, Humboldt persuaded the Prussian state to adopt Greek and Latin as the curricular fundamentals of the Gymnasium, the secondary school that was a prerequisite for entrance to the university and, consequently, the professional civil service. Humboldt saw classical languages and literature as a key element of personal Bildung, a concept of self-formation marked by rationality, self-control, and civic engagement. Politically, it was supposed to avoid the excesses of both absolutism and populist democracy: classically educated citizens would neither kowtow to tyrants nor be fooled by demagogues. The traditions of Winckelmann and Humboldt, which dominated German thought in the early 19th century, thus had pronounced aesthetic, ethical, and political implications.
Alas, says Marchand, these traditions soon were sapped of their vital energies as professional and institutional "self-interest" - by her own account, the primary motive force of her narrative (p. xix) - took over. Study of classical texts became not a means to a civic end, but an increasingly erudite and self-centered academic end in itself, resulting in the "dominance of elite, expert, and philosophically unadventurous university philologists over the study of the ancient past" (p. 24). In particular, philologists looked down upon archaeologists and all...
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