
The next meeting of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar will take place on Friday 21 February 2025 in Room 349 (third floor), Senate House, University of London, starting at 5.30 pm. As our distinguished guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Professor Katherine Harloe of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, who will present a paper entitled Goethe’s Winckelmann: Puzzling Through a Consequential Classic. This will be followed by a discussion and wine reception. The seminar will be chaired by Rowan Boyson (Kings’s College London).
The event is free and open to everyone, including postgraduates and members of the public.
Katherine Harloe is Professor of Classics and Intellectual History in the University of London and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies. She is an interdisciplinary classicist whose research and public scholarship span the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in transnational European contexts after 1750 in relation to wider cultural classicism, and the history of political thought. She is the author of Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumwissenschaft (OUP, 2013) and of edited collections on the modern reception of Thucydides, ‘Hellenomania’ in modern material and performance culture, and eighteenth-century collecting and connoisseurship, while recent articles have appeared in The London Review of Books, American Journal of Philology and Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Kunstgeschichte. She is currently (deo volente) finishing a monograph on Winckelmann’s Love Letters: Sexuality, Epistolarity and Classical Reception.
Regarding the topic of her paper, Katherine writes:
“I invite colleagues to join me in puzzling through the ambiguities of Goethe’s 1805 publication, Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert in Briefen und Aufsätzen (Winckelmann and His Century in Letters and Essays), which has been a standing provocation during my preparation of an almost-complete monograph on Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s familiar correspondence. Goethe’s edition of Winckelmann’s correspondence with his intimate friend, Hieronymus Dieterich Berendis, had an outsize influence on later 19th-century and 20th-century understandings of Winckelmann that were grounded in reading his personal correspondence because of the cultural authority of Goethe as editor and commentator and the specific image of Winckelmann that it returned. The principal vehicle of this was Goethe’s own contribution to the volume: a biographical essay that has been interpreted variously as an anti-Romantic Streitschrift, the culmination of the classicism expressed by Goethe and Schiller in the Propyläen, and as marking a historical and intellectual caesura, with Goethe presenting Winckelmann as paradigmatic of an era and a form of existence that had definitively ended. My paper will not seek to resolve this debate. Rather, I will turn to other parts of the paratextual material to try to illuminate the character of Goethe’s monumentalization of Winckelmann and indicate the ways in which it appears tendentious read against the eighteenth century epistolary culture in which Winckelmann participated. If time permits I will compare Goethe’s ‘Sketch’ of Winckelmann with another narrativization of his life and character from the end of the eighteenth century: the (in)famous passage of Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie in which he recounts discovering Winckelmann in flagrante with a Roman male prostitute. I suggest that these alternative representations of Winckelmann point to two different modes of approaching interpretation of his familiar letters, as well perhaps as marking some ways in which we might distinguish eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading traditions.”