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  • Pathos, Ausdruck und Bewegung. Zur Ästhetik des Weimarer Klassizismus 1796-1806
  • Peter J. Schwartz
Pathos, Ausdruck und Bewegung. Zur Ästhetik des Weimarer Klassizismus 1796–1806. Von Martin Dönike. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. xiii + 430 Seiten + 62 Abbildungen. €108,00.

In 1935, the British Germanist E.M. Butler remarked irritably of Winckelmann's seminal description, based on the Vatican Laokoon sculptural group, of "the universal, dominant characteristic" of ancient Greek art as "noble simplicity and serene greatness" (edle Einfalt und stille Größe): "Why he should have chosen this particular group as an example of the very qualities it lacks, is no easy question to answer" (47). [End Page 571] Butler's own explanation—that Winckelmann, "dazzled by the flash of a great revelation" regarding Greek art, "like many another clairvoyant, was uttering truths which did not apply to the object before him, but were associated with it in his mind"—is no explanation at all, though I am not certain whether anyone since has come up with a better. The question why is notoriously difficult to address, whether with regard to the actions of individuals or to those of groups. As conversation with any child will reveal, every given because yields a series of whys ending only on recognition of the limits of one's own knowledge, strength, or honesty.

Yet the question is still worth asking, especially when what is questioned is as central a dogma as this to a national culture. Whatever Winckelmann's reasons for reading the Laokoon group as he did, the fact remains that in 1755 this reading launched a debate of utmost importance to German aesthetics, and of some longevity. The issue was how Greek plastic art had represented moments of violence, pain, or intense pathos. Winckelmann's thesis (which would become a normative tenet of neoclassical aesthetics) was that the great masterworks of Greek sculpture had avoided realistic or emphatic depictions of suffering, instead showing the sufferer, e.g. Laokoon, in a state of calm and endurance that revealed beauties of soul and form otherwise muddied by the contortions of agony. The canonic sequence of German adjustments to Winckelmann's thesis—Lessing's Laokoon (1766), the first essay in Herder's Kritische Wälder (1769) and his Plastik (1770/78), Christian Gottlob Heyne's "Prüfung einiger Nachrichten und Behauptungen vom Laocoon im Belvedere" (1779), a passage in Wilhelm Heinse's novel Ardinghello (1787), Karl Philipp Moritz's essay "Die Signatur des Schönen" (1788), two essays by Aloys Hirt ("Über Laokoon," 1797; "Nachtrag zu Laokoon," 1798) and from Goethe ("Über Laokoon," 1797/8; Der Sammler und die Seinigen, 1798)—has been much discussed since, two notable recent syntheses being Simon Richter's Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain (1992) and Richard Brilliant's My Laocoön (2000). (Intriguingly, the latest scholarship, including Brilliant and Dönike, has found a topical point of connection in Aby Warburg's derivation from this debate of the notion of Pathosformeln, a concept apparently headed for widespread use.)

With the book under review, Martin Dönike makes a contribution that exceeds prior scholarship in two respects: he integrates into the canon significant non-canonical texts, thus shedding new light on old questions, and he investigates in unprecedented detail the relationship of these texts to the works of art that inspired them. He is thus also able to show the degree to which not only Winckelmann, but also those who disagreed with him, departed from what could be seen in the art in order to see in it what they wanted. As Sigmund Freud recognized, the whys of human action are often best seen in such projections and slips. Dönike does not answer Eliza Butler's question; this is not the task he has set himself. Yet he adds a great deal of data regarding the shape of the German investment in edle Einfalt und stille Größe, thereby changing the picture we have of that shape.

The star of Dönike's book is Aloys Ludwig Hirt (1759–1837), a professional cicerone and writer whom Goethe, having made use of his services in Rome, first recommended to Wieland as...

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