This article treats representations of victors in the Greek athletic games in the artistic and poetic media of the early classical age, and argues that fifth-century sculptors, painters and poets similarly constructed the athlete as an object designed to arouse desire in audiences for their works. After reviewing the very scanty archaeological evidence for the original victory images, I seek to recover something of the response elicited by these monuments by looking to visualizations of athletes in contemporary vase-painting and literary (...) sources, and most particularly in the epinician odes of Pindar. Poets and painters, I suggest, both place their subjects within an erotically-charged atmosphere which replicates that surrounding actual athletes in the city gymnasia and at the games, and encourage audiences to regard the youthful bodies on display as "spectacularized" objects, sources of both aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The makers of monumental images work within the same paradigm, also prompting the viewer to transfer the sentiments aroused by the real-world athlete and victor to his re-presentation in bronze. Through an examination of the conventions used for victor images, and a close study of the so-called Motya charioteer, I propose that the sculptor deploys techniques analogous to those of artist and poet to highlight the appeal of the athlete's body, and displays the victor in a mode calculated not only to mark him as the alluring target of the gaze, but even to cast him as a potential erômenos. The concluding section of the article investigates the impetus behind this mode of representation, and seeks to place the dynamic between the viewer and the viewed within the context of the early fifth-century polis. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationships between Goethe's morphology and his ideas on aesthetic appraisal. Goethe's science of morphology was to provide the method for making evident pure phenomena [Urphänomene], for making intuitable the necessary laws behind the perceptible forms and formation of living nature, through a disciplined perception. This emphasis contrasted with contemporary studies of generation, which focused upon hidden formative processes. It was his views on aesthetic appraisal that informed these epistemological precepts of his science. His study of antique (...) artefacts convinced Goethe that these should be prototypes for all art, since they made perceptible the ideal of art, its archetypes or objective forms. His ambition was to eliminate the subjective elements he contended were leading contemporary art astray. He argued that the techniques he developed for cultivating the perception of the ideal exemplars of art could become a model for science, enabling the intuition of the objective forms of nature through a similar disciplined and cultivated perception. This paper also examines some of the wider motivations for the particular emphases Goethe gave to his science and aesthetics, noting a similar impulse to discipline unruly forces in his life -- in his work as an administrator for the Weimar court and Jena University, in his vision of an ideal German culture centred on the aristocracy, and in his literary productions and biographical writings. Finally it discusses the extent to which those unruly elements nevertheless remained a potent and disturbing presence in his understanding of nature, his art and his life. (shrink)

There are three “scandals” that appear in most discussions of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the so-called father of modern Art History: his allegedly careerist conversion to Catholicism in 1754; his semi-secret homoerotic discourse while under Vatican employ in the early-to-mid 1760s; and his shocking murder in Trieste in 1768. Of the three, Winckelmann's sexuality has garnered the most attention in recent scholarship. A little-known story reported by Casanova during his second visit to Rome in 1761 has something to do with (...) that. In this essay, I argue that we make too much of sexuality these days and, in so doing, fail to register the far more radical religious activities in which Winckelmann was involved, most notably the creation and curation of the Vatican Museums, with their almost casual display of naked statues of pagan divinities. Winckelmann's “profanity,” not his sexuality, constitutes the revolutionary core of his life's work and enduring influence. The statues he discussed so passionately were not simply naked; they were pagan. (shrink)

Much has been published on the career and scholarly achievements of Bernard Smith (1916–2011) since his retirement from teaching in 1977 and has predictably gathered pace after his death. It is clear that the reception of his very substantial body of writings, addressing so many fields within the humanities, critical thought and art history in particular, is only just beginning. The present study focuses on a large recent collection of Smith’s studies in which critical responses are integrated. I argue that (...) the profoundly personal nature of historiography, necessarily incorporating praise and blame in its rhetorical structure, requires that the critic position oneself openly in relation to the life and work of the subject undergoing scrutiny. Smith’s antipodean experience was in many ways distinctive. But those of us who knew him personally, or felt his influence as a teacher and writer, will need to reassess honestly their own genesis in order to deal effectively with the challenges embedded in his work. (shrink)

This paper examines the points of disagreement between Petrus Camper and J. W. von Goethe regarding the existence of the inter-maxillary bone in humans as the link between man and the rest of nature. This historical case illustrates the fundamental role of aesthetic judgements in scientific discovery. Thus, I shall show how the eighteenth century discovery of the inter-maxillary bone in humans was largely determined by aesthetic factors—specifically, those sets of assumptions and criteria implied in the aesthetic schemata of Camper (...) and Goethe. I argue that the relevance of scientifically ascertainable morphological properties that count as evidence for the existence of bona fide anatomical structures depend on the aesthetic schema adopted by the communities assessing the classification. At the same time, I propose and explain mechanisms by which aesthetic considerations might determine the acceptability of empirical claims about the world. Based on the reconstruction of the arguments of Camper and Goethe, I conclude that aesthetic considerations play a substantive role in both the generation and preliminary evaluation of scientific hypotheses. This paper suggests a complementary relation between the mediation of aesthetic criteria in theory choice and in scientific discovery in that while aesthetic considerations in theory choice lead to conservatism; in the context of discovery they often lead to innovation. (shrink)