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of laborious study, all of it in poverty except for the last few years in Rome, he might not have survived his despair if the stones on the top of the Acropolis in Athens failed to fulfill his expectations. And it would be even worse if somehow those mute stones disproved his theories. When the pressure to go to Greece became too great, he made the bizarre choice—in 1768, when he was fifty-one years old—to return to Germany instead.
Munich, Vienna, the Tyrol—he found them all so appalling that he took to bed with a fever that left him almost delusional. Determined to return to Rome, early that June he made his way alone to Trieste, where, as evasive as he had been with Casanova, he registered in a dockside hotel using an assumed name and began looking for a ship to take him to Venice.
A man namedFrancesco Arcangeli had the neighboring room. He and Signor Giovanni, as Winckelmann was calling himself, took to having coffee and meals together. Signor Giovanni showed his new friend two gold and two silver medals he had received from important patrons. Arcangeli then conceived of a plot.
He entered his new friend’s room around ten o’clock on the morning of June 8, 1768, with a long dagger and a rope knotted into a noose. In a sudden movement he tried to strangle Winckelmann, but the scholar proved to be unexpectedly strong. Arcangeli stabbed him several times with the dagger and even then had difficulty escaping Winckelmann’s grip. When he freed himself at last, Arcangeli fled but was soon captured. Winckelmann, covered with blood, somehow got to his feet and staggered downstairs. “Look what he did to me,” he said to a waiter who had heard the commotion. Then he lost the power to speak. These hyperventilated events, which seem as if they must have come from the final act of an opera, concluded eight hours later when Winckelmann, who had been in agonizing pain all the while, died from his wounds.
Over the years the story grew that Winckelmann had been murdered by a street tough he had picked up on the docks of Trieste. When the directorPier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in Rome in 1975 during a still mysterious incident involving a young ruffian, the newspapers in Italy compared it to Winckelmann’s murder. But Arcangeli’s motive seems to have been pure greed and only greed. He was a petty thief by trade. While testifying at his trial he never accused Winckelmann of making any advances, a charge that might have helped his case. Instead he simply confessed and was condemned to death. On a piazza in front of a large crowd, his body was pulled apart on a wheel.
Perfection by imitation
E VEN BEFORE his death, Winckelmann had destroyed the taste for the baroque and rococo. In their place, classical Greek style became the inspiration for painting, sculpture, architecture, and even fashion. These changes occurred during a time when interest in art began to expand to include a rising bourgeois class as well as the traditional small elite of intellectuals, wealthy nobility,and church officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, salons in Paris might attract more than seven hundred visitors a day, most of them representatives of the new classes, who were serious and high-minded to a fault. In 1720 there were only nineteen art academies in all of Europe; by 1790, when theFrench Revolution had just begun, there were more than a hundred. A new idea—that art could encourage commerce—pushed this steady growth. In time the academies all would teach, in the letter and spirit of Winckelmann, that perfection in art was achieved by imitating the ancients.
Herculaneum and Pompeii, the Roman cities that had been covered in A.D . 79 by a sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius, had been rediscovered in 1738 and 1748, respectively. Now, in the final third of the eighteenth century, voyagers to Greece began to write travelogues and publish prints of drawings for an eager audience. They braved the fleas and other insects that rained
Munich, Vienna, the Tyrol—he found them all so appalling that he took to bed with a fever that left him almost delusional. Determined to return to Rome, early that June he made his way alone to Trieste, where, as evasive as he had been with Casanova, he registered in a dockside hotel using an assumed name and began looking for a ship to take him to Venice.
A man namedFrancesco Arcangeli had the neighboring room. He and Signor Giovanni, as Winckelmann was calling himself, took to having coffee and meals together. Signor Giovanni showed his new friend two gold and two silver medals he had received from important patrons. Arcangeli then conceived of a plot.
He entered his new friend’s room around ten o’clock on the morning of June 8, 1768, with a long dagger and a rope knotted into a noose. In a sudden movement he tried to strangle Winckelmann, but the scholar proved to be unexpectedly strong. Arcangeli stabbed him several times with the dagger and even then had difficulty escaping Winckelmann’s grip. When he freed himself at last, Arcangeli fled but was soon captured. Winckelmann, covered with blood, somehow got to his feet and staggered downstairs. “Look what he did to me,” he said to a waiter who had heard the commotion. Then he lost the power to speak. These hyperventilated events, which seem as if they must have come from the final act of an opera, concluded eight hours later when Winckelmann, who had been in agonizing pain all the while, died from his wounds.
Over the years the story grew that Winckelmann had been murdered by a street tough he had picked up on the docks of Trieste. When the directorPier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in Rome in 1975 during a still mysterious incident involving a young ruffian, the newspapers in Italy compared it to Winckelmann’s murder. But Arcangeli’s motive seems to have been pure greed and only greed. He was a petty thief by trade. While testifying at his trial he never accused Winckelmann of making any advances, a charge that might have helped his case. Instead he simply confessed and was condemned to death. On a piazza in front of a large crowd, his body was pulled apart on a wheel.
Perfection by imitation
E VEN BEFORE his death, Winckelmann had destroyed the taste for the baroque and rococo. In their place, classical Greek style became the inspiration for painting, sculpture, architecture, and even fashion. These changes occurred during a time when interest in art began to expand to include a rising bourgeois class as well as the traditional small elite of intellectuals, wealthy nobility,and church officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, salons in Paris might attract more than seven hundred visitors a day, most of them representatives of the new classes, who were serious and high-minded to a fault. In 1720 there were only nineteen art academies in all of Europe; by 1790, when theFrench Revolution had just begun, there were more than a hundred. A new idea—that art could encourage commerce—pushed this steady growth. In time the academies all would teach, in the letter and spirit of Winckelmann, that perfection in art was achieved by imitating the ancients.
Herculaneum and Pompeii, the Roman cities that had been covered in A.D . 79 by a sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius, had been rediscovered in 1738 and 1748, respectively. Now, in the final third of the eighteenth century, voyagers to Greece began to write travelogues and publish prints of drawings for an eager audience. They braved the fleas and other insects that rained
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