Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image - Review

"Aesthetic education" thus entails a different response associated most obviously with Friedrich Schiller's famous essay "Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen." Morrison makes the interesting move of deriving this idea from earlier 18th-century ideas, however; Schiller is hardly present. His book situates the origins of such education in the Grand Tour, particularly travel to Italy, in which a visit to Rome and its monuments assumes a central importance. And here is where art history and theory enter, for they were essential in preparing for this aspect of the Italian experience. Here, too, Winckelmann played a key role not only through his actual presence in Rome and his landmark history of ancient art, a book read by many travelers. He helped transform this experience into an aesthetic one; according to Morrison, Winckelmann redefined the nature of aesthetic experience. In his history of ancient art and especially in his other writings, Winckelmann originated notions of a productive reception of art, which, in Morrison's account, Johann Herbert run Riedesel, Johann Jacob Volkmann, and finally Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe further developed in the later 18th century, taking us to the time and milieu (in Weimar), if not the person, of Schiller.

Morrison seems to see the aesthetic as surpassing historical contingency and as contributing to the development of modern subjectivity - what can also be called relativity in the face of history. He develops his interpretation of Winckelmann's notion of aesthetic reception by reading Winckelmann through the Polish philosopher of aesthetic reception, Roman Ingarden, best known as the author of the concept of aesthetic concretization. This approach does not directly deal with another central historiographic question - Winckelmann's claim in his history of ancient art that previous works had used the term "history of art" but had not penetrated into an understanding of art itself. Nevertheless, its merit is that it explains without saying so what Winckelmann could have meant by it.

Morrison's argument might nevertheless have been set into relief, and strengthened, if he had drawn out several historical parallels, contrasts, and connections. Recent literature on travel by northerners in Italy, particularly on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Italy, is lacking. Lessing was, however, notably unresponsive to art on his Italian visit.(5) In this regard, as in his Laocoon, he consequently provides a challenge for a Winckelmann-centered discussion of aesthetic reception. Morrison could also have adduced more discussion on the relation of aesthetic experience to the literature of travel and art history. For example, Volkmann was not just an author of a guide book and a follower of Winckelmann, but the editor of Joachim run Sandrart's Teutsche Academie, a book he gravely altered. It would have been instructive to have compared how Volkmann's treatment of the two German historians, both of whom wrote what may be considered guides to a response to monuments, is implicated in his remarks on travel and aesthetic response. Accordingly, it would have been even more interesting to investigate how, in general, the older historiographic tradition represented by Sandrart may be involved in the determination of aesthetic and educational standards that Winckelmann supposedly set.(6)