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Winckelmann is usually seen as the founding figure of the modern academic discipline of art history. Whereas this was once an unproblematically positive assessment, now that the foundations of the discipline have been questioned, its criteria for inclusion and exclusion in the canon of art modified or even overthrown, Winckelmann’s legacy in its turn has been questioned. In terms of the present anthology this is so in particular of claims for a continuous Western canon, rooted in Greek and Roman antiquity, resumed after the hiatus of the ‘Dark Ages’ by the Italian Renaissance, and essentially autochthonous in development. As is well‐known, Winckelmann’s central emphasis, both in his earlier Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) and in his History of Ancient Art, is on the peerless achievement of classical Greek sculpture, its ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’. In the present extracts, taken from the early sections of his History, Winckelmann, like Caylus before him, discusses the legacy of Egyptian art. He readily concedes its chronological priority over Greece. But his key claim is that neither Egyptian art, nor the art of other preceding cultures such as the Persian and the Etruscan, ‘caused’ or ‘influenced’ the emergence of Greek art as such. In essence, his argument is that art has the same beginnings everywhere, but that in Greece its development took on a qualitatively new form; a form that responded to the specificities of Greece and the Greek experience alone: in particular its congenial climate and its distinctive sociopolitical organization. (Whereas Egyptian art was, in Winckelmann’s words, ‘checked and arrested’ by the political and religious imperatives of Egyptian civilization.) Our extracts are taken from The History of Ancient Art [1764], translated by G. Henry Lodge, Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873, vol. 1, Preface and Book 1, Chapter 1, pp. 149–50, 191–4, 196–8, 203–4. (Further extracts from both Winckelmann’s Reflections and his History can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815, IIIA5 and IIIA8, pp. 450–6 and 466–75.)

The History of Ancient Art which I have undertaken to write is not a mere chronicle of epochs, and of the changes which occurred within them. I use the term History in the more extended signification which it has in the Greek language; and it is my intention to attempt to present a system. […]

The History of Art is intended to show the origin, progress, change, and downfall of art, together with the different styles of nations, periods, and artists, and to prove the whole, as far as it is possible, from the ancient monuments now in existence.

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The arts which are dependent on drawing have, like all inventions, commenced with the necessary; the next object of research was beauty; and, finally, the superfluous followed: these are the three principal stages in art.

In the infancy of art, its productions are, like the handsomest of human beings at birth, misshapen, and similar one to another, like the seeds of plants of entirely different kinds; but in its bloom and decay, they resemble those mighty streams, which, at the point where they should be the broadest, either dwindle into small rivulets, or totally disappear.

The art of drawing among the Egyptians is to be compared to a tree which, though well cultivated, has been checked and arrested in its growth by a worm, or other casualties; for it remained unchanged, precisely the same, yet without attaining its perfection, until the period when Greek kings held sway over them; and the case appears to have been the same with Persian art. […]

Art appears to have originated in a similar way among all the nations by which it has been cultivated; and there is no sufficient reason for assigning any particular country as the land of its birth, for every nation has found within itself the first seed of those things which are indispensable; and although Art, like Poetry, may be regarded as a daughter of Pleasure, still it cannot be denied that pleasure is as necessary to human nature as those things are without which existence cannot be continued; and it can be maintained that painting and the forming of figures, or the art of painting and figuring our thoughts, are older than the art of writing them, – as proved by the history of the Mexicans and other nations. But as the earliest essays appear to have been made on figures of the divinities, the era in which art was invented consequently differs according to the age of each nation, and the earlier or later introduction of religious worship; so that the Chaldæans or Egyptians probably represented for worship, under a material form, the higher powers, whose existence they had imagined at an earlier period than the Greeks. For it is the same in this case as with other arts and discoveries, – take, for instance, the example of the purple color, – which were earlier discovered and practised in the East. […] But those who speak of the origin of a custom, as well as of an art, and their communication from one nation to another, commonly err by confining themselves to isolated points between which there is a resemblance, and drawing from them a general conclusion … Even if we were willing to admit that art was introduced from Egypt among the Greeks, we must, at least, also acknowledge that the same thing may have happened to it as to the mythology; for the fables of the Egyptians were seemingly born anew beneath the skies of Greece, and took an entirely different form, and other names. […]

Among the Greeks, art commenced with the same simplicity as in Eastern lands; insomuch that they cannot have derived the first seeds of it from any other people they appear to have been original discoverers. For they had already among themselves thirty divinities, whom they honored under visible forms; and, not having yet learned to fashion them after the likeness of man, they were contented to signify them by a rude block or square stone, as the Arabians and Amazons did; and these thirty stones existed in the city of Pheræ, in Achaia, even as late as the time of Pausanias. This was the shape of the Juno at Thespiæ, and the Diana at Icarus. Diana Patroa and Jupiter Milichus at Sicyon were, like the most ancient Venus at Paphos, nothing more than a sort of columns; Bacchus was worshipped under the form of a pillar; and even Cupid and the Graces were represented merely by blocks of stone….

In course of time, heads were set upon these stones. Among many others, a Neptune at Tricoloni and a Jupiter at Tegea, both places in Arcadia, were of this kind. […] The first images of the Greeks, therefore, manifest originality in the invention and production of a figure … Four‐cornered stones with heads on them were termed by the Greeks, as it is well known, Hermæ, that is, big stones; and artists constantly kept a supply of them.

The accounts in authors and the ancient monuments will enable us to follow the progressive improvement in the conformation of this rough draught and rude beginning of a figure. At the commencement, there was observable on the middle of these stones with heads merely the difference in sex, which an ill‐shaped face probably left doubtful … At last, the upper part of the figure received its form, while the lower portion still retained its previous shape of a Hermes, yet so far modified that the separation of the thighs was denoted by an incision. […]

At last, Dædalus, according to the opinion most commonly received, began to separate entirely the lower half of these Hermæ, in the form of legs; and, as there was not sufficient skill in art at that time to fashion an entire human figure from a single block of stone, he wrought in wood; and from him the first statues are said to have received the name of Dædali….

Among the Greeks the first outlines of these images were simple, and, for the most part, straight lines; and it is probable, that, in the infancy of art, whether among the Egyptians, Etruscans, or Greeks, there was no difference in this respect. […]

In the course of time, increasing knowledge taught the Etruscan and Greek artists how to forsake the stiff and motionless conformations of their earliest essays, to which the Egyptians adhered, – compulsorily adhered, – and enabled them to express different actions in their figures.