"Como um raio fixo" - Goethe e Winckelmann: O classicismo e suas aporias

Resumen

This paper presents some main aspects of the classical conceptions of two authors: Johann Joachim Winckelmann and W. Goethe. Winckelmann's work is at the origin of both disciplines, Art History and Archeology. One of the main procedures ofhis work was the description of artworks, inside and beyond the rhetorical tradition of the ekphrasis. He idealized a certain Antiquity in his Reflections on the imitation of the Greeks from 1755 and deepened his historical reading of it in his History of the Art of Antiquity from 1764. Goethe was a reader of Winckelmann 's works and tried also to study Antiquity directly by traveling trough Italy. In both authors we see the search for an ideal projected in Antiquity, which is more and more tough under the key of an absence, as a negative of Modernity. In this sense, the notion of the sublime, as an aesthetic category that represents the incommensurability between the objective and the subjective sides of knowledge, and that those thinkers applied to the classical works of art, can be reverted and applied to the relation between Modernity and the classical world. Goethe's description of the Laocoon Group mirrors the scene of Modernity and its wounds, the "birth" of Modernity from the (absent) spÜit of Antiquity.