Winckelmann et l’invention de la Grèce

Abstract

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) is often regarded as the first art historian and the precursor of modern archaeology. Yet he is also, and perhaps first of all, one of the last mythographers of Antiquity. His writings indeed construct the fiction of a Greece whose main characteristics correspond to those which will be assigned to the notion of civilization during the last third of the 18th century. For Winckelmann, who situates it in a remote and mythical past, Greece was built after and against a primitive state of nature and savagery, which it overcame. In this context, the responsibility of historians and artists is not only to tell the truth about Greece’s past, but to give the past the opportunity to survive in remembrance, despite the ruin and destruction of the modern world.

Keywords

• history
• art history
• archaeology
• civilization
• Greece
• Winckelmann