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February 12, 1963. THE QUEST FOR BEAUTY AND THE PITFALLS OF SUBLIMATION. Gustav Bychowski, M.D.
The author presents a pathography of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, leader of the renaissance in the study of classic antiquity in mid-eighteenth century Europe. His life ended dramatically by murder in 1768, in Vienna, while returning to Rome after a brief visit to his native Germany. The murderer, a criminal of lower-class origin, claimed that the great man had befriended him. Winckelmann was then at the peak of his fame, having been appointed Director of Antiquities in Rome, and for the previous two years had been anticipating his return to his homeland with both excitement and forebodings of death.
The only son of a poor cobbler, Winckelmann initiated the science of modern archaeology by his explorations of Herculaneum and Pompeii. He became a leader in the revolution of style and taste, from the existing rococo to the classicism of antiquity, opposing the ideal of simplicity and the idealistic outlook on life to the then current taste for ostentation.
Winckelmann's enthusiasm for beauty in classic art meant at the same time his own love, as he said of the Greeks, for the beautiful, male, human body. The sublime epitome of beauty to him was the Greek ephebus, (a bisexual