WINCKELMANN’S APOLLO AND THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF RACE

The taste for classical art that induced museums in the West to acquire masterpieces from ancient Greece and Rome for their collections was stimulated largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the past decade, a number of articles have claimed that Winckelmann’s glorification of marble statues representing the white, male body promotes notions of white supremacy. The present article challenges this view by examining theories prevalent in the eighteenth century (especially climate theory) that affected Winckelmann’s views on race. Through an examination of different types of classicism, the article also seeks to demonstrate that Winckelmann’s aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic use of ancient models typical of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

In an article in this journal from 2017, Nicholas Mirzoeff proposed extending the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which decried monuments of white colonialism, to Western museums. 1 The campaign, which started with the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue from the university campus in Cape Town in 2015, later spread to Oxford, where a statue of Rhodes is placed on the facade of Oriel College's Rhodes Building. Mirzoeff saw the appeal of removing symbols of white sovereignty in relation to the demands for decolonisation of the curriculum, which "is not simply a question of revising reading lists." 2 With reference to a famous phrase from the art critic John Berger, Mirzoeff called for a critical engagement with "ways of seeing" that could counter the aesthetics of white supremacy. This means that we must challenge the aesthetic canon that until now has dominated the major museums in the West. As an example of such dominance, he mentioned New York's Metropolitan Museum, where "the white marble statues of Greece and Rome … are placed in light, highceilinged rooms right next to the entrance. African objects, of which the Met has an amazing collection, appear in dark, gloomy spaces." 3 In this article, I will discuss whether said canon is as oppressive as Mirzoeff asserts, or whether, as I believe, it was originally Winckelmann," Painter claimed, "museums all over the world copied classical art for purposes of education" using plaster, which they purposefully left unpainted. 4 The problem with Winckelmann's studies, Painter stated, is that he only had access to Roman copies in marble of Greek originals that were often made in bronze. Painter claimed that not knowing that Greek statues were originally painted in bright colours, the aesthetics of Winckelmann was founded on ignorance of the original polychromy of ancient art. 5 The idea held by ordinary people, as well as scientists, about bodily perfection was shaped by what they saw in museums, private collections, and books. Like Mirzoeff, Painter referred to Josiah Nott and George Gliddon's well-known Types of Mankind, from 1854, as an example of the use of Western ideals of human beauty in science 6 ( Fig. 1) . To illustrate the idea that it is possible to judge the intellectual capacity of a race by the volume of the cranium, Nott and Gliddon's book used a chart that compared the head and skull of a chimpanzee with that of an African and a European-looking person. Or, to be precise, the European was not a real person, but a drawing of the head of the famous statue Apollo Belvedere-a Roman copy in marble of a lost Greek bronze original, probably executed sometime between 350 and 325 BC by the Greek sculptor Leochares (Fig. 2) .  It is easy to see the racist assumptions behind an illustration that shows the portrait of a person of African origin midway between an ape and a classical bust. In the nineteenth century, illustrations like these were frequently used to demonstrate principles of racial supremacy. The race ideal promoted by Nott  Even though Camper himself never embraced a racist view like that advocated by Nott and Gliddon, Painter maintained that his body ideal, inspired by Winckelmann's studies of Classical Antiquity, can be described as a "fetishization of white male beauty" that excludes non-European races from its aesthetic canon. 8 For Camper, the Apollo Belvedere represented the embodiment of perfect human beauty, while the flat noses of Chinese and Kalmucks were defined as an offence against beauty. 9 The connection between aesthetics and science that Painter denounced was also observed by Martial Guédron, who proposed that the raciological taxonomies of physical anthropology were based on aesthetic prejudices drawn from the histoire de l'art archéologisante that Winckelmann represented. 10 Painter, Mirzoeff, and Guédron's critiques of the alleged racist implications of neoclassical aesthetics has a precursor in Eliza Marian Butler's influential The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935). Butler saw Winckelmann as the key figure in a philhellenic movement that exposed German society to the influence of Ancient Greek literature and art in a way that inspired Nazi ideology's dream of the Übermensch. Butler's studies were followed up in the 1980s and '90s by scholars such as Martin Bernal  and George L. Mosse (1918Mosse ( -1999. According to Mosse, the ideas of a pure and powerful race, propagated by anthropological studies and quasiscientific disciplines such as physiognomy and phrenology, were based on the transcendental beauty ideal of the Enlightenment period. Mosse said that the body stereotypes that emerged from Winckelmann's analyses of ancient art "have a direct bearing upon the appeal of racism, and upon its relation to nationalism …" for "racism from its origin to modern times adopted a neoclassical male aesthetic, encouraged by anthropologists who liked to contrast natives and Europeans based on their resemblances to or differences from the idealized Greeks." 11 If we exclude those who mainly see Winckelmann as a forefather of modern art history as an academic discipline, it is striking how the perception of his contributions to the understanding of art and society changed in 200 years. Today's tendency to see his theories as "awkward" 12 marks a strong contrast to the far more positive influence he exercised on prominent persons of his own time, such as Goethe, Herder, Lessing, and Kant. At that time, many saw Winckelmann's studies of ancient art as a demonstration that works like the celebrated Apollo Belvedere were the natural product of a society where people enjoyed individual freedom. In fact, one of Winckelmann's basic assumptions was that great art could only arise in a free society. After the expulsion of the tyrants, Winckelmann said, the city of Athens adopted a democratic form of government in which the entire people had a share. It is freedom of the individual that caused the proliferation of good taste among the Greeks; a fact proven by the analogous situation in Florence much later, "where, after a long interval of darkness, the arts and sciences began, in modern times, to be relumined." 13 Winckelmann was convinced that the glorious era of Greek art was a result of Athens's democratic constitution. More than anything else, it was this that convinced people at his time that a viable model for political reform could be found in ancient Greece.
With reference to Winckelmann, Herder concluded that Pericles did more for the arts "than ten kings of Athens would have done" 14 for statesmen in democracies need to please the public. Hence, there could be no better avenue "than such kinds of expense, as ... were calculated to gratify the eyes of the people, and afford subsistence to many." 15 One of the problems with much of today's scholarship on Winckelmann is that it almost exclusively focuses on the intellectual horizon of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century

THE GREEK BODY AND CLIMATE THEORY
The reason why Greek artists were able to produce the most beautiful art ever seen was that they lived in a free society that allowed them to use their artistic creativity. Moreover, beauty was inevitably linked to the image of the human body. Some see Winckelmann's choice of the male nude as the true vehicle of beauty to be a reflection of his homosexuality. 19 However, the main reason for Winckelmann's occupation with the body was the idea that the human spirit expressed itself by means of the body. The body would thus reveal the inner state of a person; his thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This is also why the human body was so central to Greek art.
To the ancient Greeks, art reflected the virtues of heroes and the deeds of the Olympian gods. Whereas Egyptians represented the god Isis in the shape of a cat, "the Greeks, on the contrary … made use of no signs but such as had a true relation to the thing signified, or were most agreeable to the senses: all their deities they invested with human forms." 20 While architecture was particularly important to the Egyptians, among the various forms of artistic expression the Greeks appreciated sculpture the most, for "sculpture is the medium in which the spiritual visibly 'makes itself at home' in the sensuous shape of matter." 21 Prevalent in classic Greek sculpture is the mimetic representation of humans and the human body as part of a polytheistic religion that worships gods in human guise. Art is the depiction of gods and heroes, but, as an idealisation of what is supposed to be found in human beings, it represents the concept of perfection and, thus, also virtue in a wide sense. Art is the exaltation, "above the pitch of material models," of certain ideas that are expressed by means of the body. 22 Paradoxically, Winckelmann's profoundly humanist exaltation of the body was turned into the opposite as a result of nineteenth-and twentieth-century nationalism. The explanation for this was obviously that he glorified the Greek body, particularly at the expense of the Kalmuck. However, there was a reason why Winckelmann elevated the Greeks to a special status, and it had to do with climate, for the special climatic conditions of the country-not too cold, not too warm-offered the prerequisites to develop a complex and well-balanced society. I will soon return to the discussion of how climate affects the body, but let us first look at the part of the body that we use most when we communicate our inner state. For the most part, spiritual qualities are expressed through the face; thus, the head and face of gods and humans were particularly important. From Winckelmann's analysis of innumerable ancient statues, he deduced that the Greeks had arrived at a very precise formula apt to express the moral values of "their gods and heroes: the profile of the brow and nose of gods and goddesses … is almost a straight line." 23 In other words, if you see the head from the side, it is possible to draw a straight line from the top of the forehead over the rim of the nose (Fig. 3) .
There is no depression between the forehead and the nose at the As we see, this was not only a discussion of art, for issues related to aesthetics and ethics were tightly interwoven in Winckelmann's philosophy. There are also statements about race in his writings, Despite the many difficulties that French society was confronted with, Bodin took a positive view of the situation. The special French mentality (or "humor," as Bodin would have said), would help these people in their task, for the French, living in a climate that was not too hot, not too cold, were of a well-tempered kind. 28 If they, like some races, had been subject to a very harsh climate, they would probably have developed an irascible character that hampered efficacious negotiations. Based on his study of the relation between climate and national character, Bodin even claimed that the most suitable form of government for France was the hereditary monarchy.
What is important here is that Bodin and Montesquieu thought that a well-governed society could only exist when inhabited by people with a special temperament, and this they found in the French people. Winckelmann thought analogously about the Greeks. Here, too, special climatic conditions had created a form of society that was superior to anything seen before: a city-state characterised by freedom of the individual.
For Winckelmann, the Apollo Belvedere was more than just an example of supreme beauty; it was an embodiment of the virtues that he believed to be the foundation of political freedom. Hence, when he described the Greek profile he sought to trace the contour of a certain anatomy or, rather, a physiognomy, which he believed to be the material embodiment of specific spiritual qualities related to the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" (edle Einfalt und stille Größe) that typified the Greek people. 29 Many, including Winckelmann, believed that it was possible to make judgments about the moral quality of persons by analysing their facial traits (the shape of the nose, the measure of the forehead, the size of the chin, and so on). Key here is finding out exactly how Winckelmann believed climate affects man's anatomy, facial features, and, consequently, moral dispositions. The advocates of climate theory believed that just as our skin is tanned and becomes darker when exposed to the rays of the sun, so too do temperature and humidity affect our body and cause physiological changes that are inherited through successive generations. Like   being theory, according to which all beings are organised in a strict hierarchy that proceeds from God the Almighty at the top, through the angels, the stars and planets, to humans, animals, and plants on the lower steps. Camper, Meijer says, harboured no intentions of racial hierarchy. Rather, "the fact that he put the African skull next to the ape was intended to demonstrate the falsehood behind the consensus that these two resembled each other the most. Camper believed that their difference would offer overwhelming proof that the ape and the African were in fact unrelated." 45

THE APOLLONIAN AND THE DIONYSIAN
Besides discussing likenesses and differences between the ape and the human, there was a second reason for comparing these species, namely the age-old notion of a relation between the ape and the satyr. The connection between apes and satyrs has been examined by at least two ancient works-Pliny's Naturalis Historia and Solinus' De mirabilibus mundi-both of which enumerate the satyri as one of five kinds of apes. 46 This idea was passed on to the medieval imagination as testified by the numerous Bestiaries, which almost always describe the two creatures-the ape and the satyr-together as variants of the same species. One example is the Bestiary in the Bodleian Library, which shows a satyr with a human face, beard, and tail and a staff, alongside a tailed callitrix (Fig. 5) .
The kinship between the two species is revealed in the face.
When seen in profile, the satyr is depicted with a snub nose and a pronounced depression between the forehead and the nose.
These features are practically the opposite of the Greek profile as described by Winckelmann, and, bearing in mind that the satyr is a mythological creature, the contrast between it and ideal, facial beauty, as represented by the Apollo Belvedere, was no doubt construed to suggest that the character traits typically associated with the rustic, woodland-dwelling satyr were the opposite of those belonging to civilised human beings. In fact, the faun, which Winckelmann said is a young satyr, lacks the "grandeur [which] is produced by straightness and fullness" and is typical of "ideal heads." 47 According to Winckelmann, the reason why the Greeks represented fauns with a depressed nose was that, because of their savage nature, the sculptors aimed "less at facial beauty." 48 The profile of the satyr's head recalls the mask that was used in the ancient satyr play, a burlesque type of drama of which two are known to us in substantial form, the Ichneutai of Sophocles and Cyclops of Euripides. The satyrs are described as drinking to excess, acting with cowardice, playing, dancing, and bothering nymphs; most crucially, they "are the companions and henchmen of the great god Dionysos. Since the satyr was traditionally seen as a kind of ape, what was true of the satyr would also be true of the ape. In fact, this characteristic is reflected in the name of the ape itself, for, according to some medieval bestiaries, the word for monkey, simia (in Italian scimmia, usually thought to mean "similar") is a Greek word meaning "with squashed nostrils. Hence, we call monkeys this because they have turned-up noses." 52 Consequently, the same excesses and lack of control over bodily desires that the Greek attributed to satyrs could, according to the anatomists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also be found in apes. According to Pliny, the "satyrs got their name from … the membrum virile, because they were always prone to lust." 53 Likewise, it was believed that monkeys fell in love with women and tried to seduce them. Nicolaes Tulp, the and Dionysian elements in culture. However, the relationship between these two opposites is not symmetrical, for it is only the Apollonian that represents the edle Einfalt und stille Größe.

Winckelmann never had any doubt that the mentioned Apollo
Belvedere was the work of antiquity that best embodied this ideal, so he was astonished when he heard that the art collector Philipp that Winckelmann took it from thyrsos, which was a wand or staff covered with leaves of ivy and vine. 58 As we have seen, this staff, a symbol of fertility and pleasure that originally belonged to the cult of Dionysus and its orgies that featured masked dances and animal sacrifices, was also associated with the ape-an animal found on various continents, but not in Europe. It is worth noting that, during Winckelmann's time, the Dionysian cult was believed to have originated in Asia, whereas that of Apollo was endemic to Europe.

With regard to Winckelmann's analysis of the said works in
Roman collections, we must remember that fauns, satyrs, and centaurs were fellows of Dionysus and that his assessment of the quality of these works of art is based on a dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies; a contrast that he believed was fundamental to ancient Greek culture. Among the German intellectuals who picked up the thread from Winckelmann in the following century, the most famous was Friedrich Nietzsche. 59 According to Nietzsche, to fully understand this opposition we must realise that the origin and essence of the Greek tragedy can be found precisely in the synthesis of the two artistic impulses that we call the Apollonian and the Dionysian. associated with appetite. Nietzsche, putting the Dionysian on equal foot with the Apollonian, reminds us that man is not reason alone, but also will, desire, and emotions.
The contrast between Nietzsche and Winckelmann reminds us that there has been more than one form of classicism in the history of Europe. There are at least two, and if these include the Apollonian and the Dionysian, we must return to George L.
Mosse's claim that that twentieth-century nationalism adopted a neoclassical male aesthetic that was sponsored by pseudosciences that compared Europeans with indigenous groups "based on their resemblances to or differences from the idealized Greeks." 65  Yet, having seen that there is more than one "classicism," it is by no means evident that it was the Apollonian version of it that inspired the Nazi rulers. It could just as well have been Nietzsche's Dionysian mysticism. An important link between Nietzsche and Nazi ideology was the philosopher Alfred Bäumler Nietzsche, who died in 1900, was not a Nazi, and his popularity among the Nazis is largely due to the promotion activity of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who assumed the role as editor of his Nachlass following the philosopher's breakdown in 1889, and her husband, Bernhard Förster, a leading German anti-Semite. Still, some key Nietzschean concepts, like Übermensch and "blond beast," were far more useful to Nazi ideology than were the ideals of Apollonian restraint promoted by Winckelmann.
Nietzsche's emphasis on "will" paved the way for a re-evaluation of man's irrational nature in a way that was useful for the Nazis.
Hitler considered "will" and "power" as … more important to a leader in directing the masses than appealing to objective intelligence. The great leader must be a "psychologist," not a "theoretician," a "man of little scientific education but physically healthy, with a good, firm character, imbued with the joy of determination and willpower" rather than a "clever weakling." Intellectual appeals to objective truth and fairness have little effect in swaying the masses when compared to the art of propaganda, which incites emotion and stirs conviction through the constant repetition of its half-truths. 68 A philosophy that considers "will" as more important than "intellect" is often referred to as "voluntarism." Important representatives of this movement include Nietzsche himself and the philosopher who probably inspired him most, Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's idea of "will," a central concept in his From this, we may conclude that there was a neoclassic trend, stemming from Winckelmann, that emphasised the significance of the Apollonian element in European art and history, and a romantic trend from Nietzsche that sought to promote Dionysus as, at least, equally important. The idea that there are two quite distinct currents of classicism in European history was also shared by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Brian Holmes. In an interesting article titled "The Nazi Myth" these three authors distinguished between a French variant (the "neoclassic") and a German, deriving from psychosis and schizophrenia (the malady that seems "always to have menaced Germany is schizophrenia, to which so many German artists would appear to have succumbed"). 69 At the dawn of romanticism and speculative idealism, the three authors said, German poets and philosophers discovered that "Greece, in reality, had been double." 70 On one hand was the reign of Apollo, characterised by light, clarity, beauty, law, and civilisation; on the other, the nocturnal, sombre, archaic, and savage Greece of religious rituals and sacrifices, intoxications and mysticism (in short: the Greece described by Nietzsche).
In addition to this divide comes that between logos and mythos.
It is well known that Plato excluded poets, artists, and mimesis from his ideal state. To create a harmonic society, education had to be free from the negative influence of fantasy, storytelling, and myth, which, according to Plato, had the effect of inducing unacceptable behaviour. Conversely, one must believe that the political leader of a people that lacked a common identity (the situation of the Germans during most of the 1800s) who wanted to create a state very different from the Platonic utopia would find myth useful as a tool to construct elements such as national unity.
The myth-making activity of some German Romantics (including Schlegel (1772-1829), originator of the modern concept of "Aryan") is opposed to the rationality and abstract universality of the logos that characterised eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. with "the monkey of his land?" 71 As strange as it may seem, there is no racism behind this observation. As mentioned, Winckelmann had no idea of evolution, so the statement that a similarity exists did not imply any thoughts about genetic relationship. Instead, the resemblance can perhaps be explained by reference to climate. Since the African and the ape live on the same continent, they are affected by the same climatic conditions-humidity and high temperatures. When the body is exposed to very high temperatures, "external heat … draws out the moisture of the body, and with that the 'spiritus' or breath of life that courses with the blood through the veins." 72 Here, Winckelmann was in line with common opinion about Africans in the eighteenth century.

ETHICS AND BODILY HUMOURS
In his essay Von der verschiedenen Rassen, Kant stated that "the extreme, humid heat of warm climate caused the spongy parts of the body [of the Negro] to increase … This growth produced a thick, turned up nose and thick, fatty lips." 73 As heat and humidity can cause parts of the body to swell and increase in size, they also affect man's personality. Kant argued that the "humid warmth [that] generally promotes the strong growth of animals" and makes people "strong, fleshy, and agile" also makes them "lazy, soft, and dallying. In contrast, the peoples of the far north were said to exhibit the opposite qualities, being fair and slow-moving-signs of a phlegmatic complexion.
The perfect habitat for human beings is offered by the temperate zones. At this point we may reflect on the etymology of the word "temperate," which derives from Latin temperare ("to moderate, regulate") and in Italian can mean "mix" or "water down." A person who is "temperate" is moderate and self-restrained, and well suited to occupy important positions in society. For this reason, "temperance" is seen as one of the cardinal virtues, which, not surprisingly, are four in number. In art, the allegorical figure of Temperance is often depicted as a female person who pours a fluid from one cup or container into another.
Thus, "temperate" is an adjective that applies to climate as well as to human temper. To the advocates of classic climate theory, it was evident that temperate regions offered better conditions for life and social coexistence than did the extremes of the far north and the far south. "In the less rigorous climate of the temperate regions," said Bodin, "where the temperature was such as to conserve the heat of the body without preventing the evaporation of surplus moisture, occurred the better-balanced, choleric, and sanguine types." 76 Therefore, political freedom first occurred in Greece due to climatic influences. It was quite natural that democracy was born here, where people thrived on a well-balanced mixture of warm and cold winds. In contrast, the willingness of Egyptians to let themselves be governed by severe laws, and their inability to exist without a king, was, according to Winckelmann, a result of their temper of mind. 77 Similarly, Bodin said that "the black bile of the melancholic temperament predisposes southerners to contemplation, religion and the occult sciences." 78 Just as there were said to be four bodily fluids and four tempers, the human races were posited to essentially be divided into four groups; according to Linné, these were the Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Afer. The African could be distinguished not only by his outward appearance (black skin, dark, curly hair, flat nose, and thick lips), but even by a "phlegmatic, lazy, sly, and inapprehensive" character. 79 Similarly, Kant said that one is only compelled to assume four races of the human species in order to be able to derive from these all the easily distinguishable and self-perpetuating differences, They are 1) the race of the whites, 2) the Negro race, 3) the Hunnish (Mongolian or Kalmuckian) race, 4) the Hindu or Hindustani race. 80 According to Kant, the best conditions were offered between 31-and 52-degrees latitude in the "Old World." Kant's hometown, Königsberg in Prussia, was slightly north of this area. All of Greece is well within this zone, and Winckelmann was never in doubt that people in this region of Europe had a well-balanced personality that distinguished them from people in other parts of the world.
Considering what was commonly accepted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century regarding race and environment, we also understand why climate theory was so important to Winckelmann. In it, he found a correspondence between the personality type that characterised people in the northern part of the Mediterranean, and that "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" that was so emblematic to ancient Greek statues. When he described ancient art, Winckelmann looked for precisely the old masters' eagerness to avoid excessive display of emotions. Even when they depict a subject of utmost drama, they show moderation. One instance is the story of Niobe, queen of Thebes, who challenged Leto, Zeus' lover, and was punished by Apollo and Artemis, who slaughtered all of her 14 children. In a sculpture group of Niobe and her Daughters, now in the Uffizi, the "indescribable anguish" that they must have felt before the "approach of inevitable death" is transformed in the statue into an instance of highest beauty. 81 In the famous marble group that represents a similarly dramatic event-the story of Laocoön, priest of Poseidon, who is killed along with his two sons by serpents-the signs of suffering are more palpable. The reason for this, according to Winckelmann, is that it is from a later period; yet, even if muscles, sinews, and veins reveal anguish, the artist avoided "audible manifestations of pain." 82 This restraint is visible when we look at Laocoön's mouth, which is almost closed, suggesting a whisper rather than a loud cry.
In the case of Laocoön, as in the Niobe, the artist did not permit any expression of feeling that would contrast and make impossible art's main purpose: the pursuit of beauty. What we see is a marked contrast between the poetic narration of a story and the depiction of it in visual art. 83 Winckelmann maintained that painters and sculptors had less license than did poets, for in their pursuit of beauty, the visual artists had to subdue the expression of passions in order to "not conflict with the physical beauty of the figure which he models." 84 It is the close relationship between ethics and aesthetics, combined with the physiognomic conviction that moral qualities are made visually manifest in a person's facial traits, that guided Winckelmann's search for signs of nobility in the human anatomy.
This he found in the Greek profile, as well as in the restraint that characterises much of ancient art. For the same reason, he condemned "the mixture of new kinds of expression typified by excessive passion-Raserei and Leidenschaften"-reflected in the faces of Bernini. 85 Winckelmann's defence of Poussin and criticism of Bernini was modelled on the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He endorsed what he believed to be Apollonian virtues, contrasting these with the Dionysian. In this, he had a totally different view of Greek antiquity than did Nietzsche. When we assess the role that the glorification of classical antiquity played in Winckelmann's contribution to thoughts on race, we must remember that there were two contradictory views on classical heritage in Germany. Winckelmann believed that climate shaped people mentally and physically, and that the straightness and fullness of the Greek profile was a sign of