Eduard Gerhard: Founder of Classical Archaeology?

It is difficult for us to imagine that archaeology is a relatively recent discipline, whose establishment dates to the middle of the nineteenth century. Its development has been so rapid and the interest elicited by its discoveries so strong that it seems to be a science as ancient as it is canonical. We should not be misled, however: if the taste for the past, the passion for collection, the observation of the earth, are practices as ancient as the earliest humans, archaeology in the modern sense of the term was only constituted as an autonomous and recognized discipline at the moment it was able to emancipate itself from bric-a-brac, from the impossibility of dating objects and monuments with certainty, from the barrier that separated the history of man from the history of nature. The moment of that rupture, which transformed the old antiquarian quest into actual archaeology, coincides with the middle of the nineteenth century and the advent of the positive sciences. It consists in an upheaval of the first order affecting the humanist domain as well as the natural sciences, anthropology as well as geology or paleontology. It is interesting to examine the conditions under which research in Antiquity, traditionally dependent on philology, was able to elaborate its own model of development by freeing itself from the primacy of text over monument, from the cult of the work of art in favor of the history of material culture, from the centrality of universal history in favor of the diversity of regional and local histories.

This work, begun in Germany with Johann Winckelmann, in France with the Comte de Caylus, in England with the "Society of Dilettanti," took shape in a private international society founded in Rome in 1829. The "Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica," created by Christian von Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador to Rome, and supported by a host of scholars and aristocrats including the crown prince of Prussia (the future Friedrich Wilhelm IV), Count Metternich, the Duc de Blacas, and a young German scholar, Eduard Gerhard, is the ancestor of all our modern archaeological institutions. It embodies a universal model of knowledge that owes its style to Alexander von Humboldt and its tradition to Gerhard.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, passion for Antiquity was expressed by collection, imitation of ancient works of art, and study of literary sources: the collector, the artist, and the philologist were the three symbolic figures of antiquarian curiosity. Gerhard, born in 1795, knew this milieu well, having frequented it first while studying in Breslau and Berlin, and then especially during his numerous stays in Italy. A student of Friedrich August Wolf and August Boeck, he displayed impeccable philological erudition (in April 1815 he was the first doctor "rite promotus" of the brand new University of Berlin). Above all this admirer of Goethe and close friend of Alois Hirt and Ernst Toelken at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts exhibited an obvious sensitivity for art. In this city which openly claimed its royal destiny, the fine arts were one of the elements of urban and political development. The Hohenzollern family was moreover heavily involved in the development of museums and the support of the study of Antiquity. The patronage of the crown prince and the close friendships that Gerhard had formed with the milieu of Roman connoisseurs naturally played a decisive role in this context.

Gerhard was at once a dedicated scholar, a museum curator, and a university professor. His professional career lived out the different stages of the institutionalization of the discipline: he was first a secondary school instructor, then a simple Prussian grant holder in Rome, before becoming the secretary of the Institute he had founded, returning to Germany in 1833 as "archaeologist" of the Berlin museum, and finally being named professor at the prestigious university in 1844. But his uninterrupted activity did not exhaust the man's ardor: a member of the Berlin Academy, he promoted great learned enterprises like...