History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) was influential for the development of art history, and foundational for the discipline of Altertumswissenschaft as a whole. With his twin emphasis on charting the historical development of style while highlighting aesthetic experience as a component of scholarly expertise, Winckelmann lent himself as an appropriate founding figure of classical scholarship, elevated as its heros ktistes, to use Katherine Harloe's words. 1 In part, the continuing fascination of Winckelmann, and of his classicism, arose from the narrative of his own biography: humble origins, learned isolation, exposure to classical art works at the court of Saxony, conversion to Catholicism to attain a position in Rome, and his early death in Trieste after a stabbing that was the result of a robbery as much as it carried implications of a homosexual crime of passion, adding to the lore accruing around Winckelmann. 2 At the same time, his 'Greeks', at least at the moment of the fifth-century height of Athenian art, were representative and literal embodiments of the confluence of a gently temperate South, political freedom, and a celebration of beauty, producing artworks that the scholar approached with care and desire as much as they, ostensibly, expressed such affects.By the same token, and precisely because of Winckelmann's 'heroic' status as a historian of Greek art, he could also be increasingly superseded as Wissenschaft tried to shed what it perceived as its antiquarian eggshells. 1 K. Harloe, Winckelmann, esp. pp. 1-25, here p. 7. On Winckelmann and art history, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 2 On the biographical traditions of Winckelmann that set in immediately after his death, see Chapter 5. 'Hellenic Fantasies: Aesthetics and Desire in John Addington Symond's A Problem in Greek Ethics', Dialogos 7 (2000), 99-123, and D. Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 This is not to say that same-sex desire and the language of 'queering' isn't fruitful and highly appropriate for getting a new and well-theorized handle on the history of disciplinary expectations and practices. It is, and this is an exciting growth area in the study of Classics. See, for example, aside from Orrells,
