Analogy shows that individuals and peoples extremely seldom invent when they do not have to, that they always, except in dire necessity, choose to make do with tradition, inheritance, imitation, learning from others rather than thinking things up for themselves. However little this redounds to the honour of mankind, it is so. We can see it in ourselves, in every child of every people. We invent extremely little on our own account: the most highly praised inventions are mere flashes of inspiration generated by the friction between the most carefully prepared circumstances and, as it were, prior inventions, but even here humankind discovers far more often than it invents. The chain of culture among the few peoples of the world shows how much a people can achieve through contact, tradition, looking beyond its own boundaries, and how little by itself, idle and isolated. A self‐enclosed people can remain uncultured in the least expected areas. By making do alone it will hardly, or only with difficulty, progress even in the bare necessities of life and those on plainest view, let alone in the habits and pleasures of the mind. Why has that which we call art and science taken hold in, and made an impression on, such a narrow swathe of the Earth? Clearly, climate, government and so on cannot be responsible for everything because they vary greatly across the small number of cultivated nations. Tradition, learning from others, the chain of instruction do the most – and above all, no doubt, where the mechanical aspects of art are concerned.
Every people is capable of inventing its own language, but does this mean that each one has necessarily invented its own? Do not ties of family, clan, race, the most natural bonds in the world, take precedence here? Every people is capable of inventing its own gods, but has each one therefore done so? And if, according to even Herodotus (invoked here as the presumed oldest historian, who was at least more familiar with these matters than we are), most of the Greek gods were Egyptian or bore a resemblance to the Egyptian gods, whence can they have emerged but from a common origin and fatherland? Moreover, could the gods, from wherever they hailed, have come to Greece without any idea of the images and form in which they were adored, given that idols were fashioned and fixed by the image? Thus tribal and religious connections were accompanied from the outset by notions of art, for the Greeks had not simply risen up out of their own soil. Above all in their culture, they signal to Asia and Egypt. These had idolatry, art and architecture before Greece had progressed beyond barbarism, and if Greece obtained something from these lands, it must have been in a vehicle and outward form that were customary and sacred there.
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I would just like to say a word about Egyptian art by way of a second test. That Winckelmann considered the art of the Egyptians not as a Greek, but within the context of his theoretical system for Greek art, is undeniable, after all beauty and the essence of art are everywhere the same, resting on a common set of rules. However, it is another matter altogether if we are to view the history of art as history pure and simple rather than as a system. The Egyptians are older than the Greeks and need to be judged not against the latter but on their own merits. What was art to the Egyptians? How, in their great antiquity, did they light upon the idea of it? And what was its purpose among them? Had they nothing in common with the Greeks in all of this, the works of the two should not be seen as part of the same framework but should each be allowed to serve its particular time and place. After all, going back to their origins, the Egyptians most likely intended working neither for the Greeks nor for us.
For whom, then, were they working? For themselves, and their art in all likelihood developed exclusively out of their mummies. Because they felt such an antipathy towards decay (and for that very reason invented embalming) and because, according to an ancient report, they had, to start with, simply amassed the bodies of their ancestors, visiting them frequently, indeed apparently almost living with them, a need no doubt arose to transform them into stone and to embalm them. And this explains the peculiarities of Egyptian artistic production. Their statues naturally needed to radiate a sense of serenity, of death, precisely because they were images of the departed and their temples were, so to speak, holy catacombs. To expect Greek swordsmen or athletes would make no sense at all, moreover these would have struck the Egyptian character as indecorous. The Egyptians, like the Orientals, especially those of the earliest times, appreciated serenity and a modesty of attitude and action – as it were an eloquent silence. These qualities they also appreciated in life, where each moment of an attitude or action nevertheless soon passes and the more heated or impassioned it is, the quicker it inevitably comes and goes. How, then, could such a simple epoch have wanted to immortalize such attitudes in stone? Were an Egyptian of the day to set foot in a gallery of Greek art, he would take fright, he would be astounded, and ultimately, perhaps, turn away in contempt. What tumult, he would exclaim, what impudence! For how long, swordsman, have you been lunging? And you, youth, been battling for the victor’s wreath? Venus, will you be climbing out of your bath for all eternity? Wrestlers, have you never triumphed? How different things are at home! We depict only that which endures forever, a state of peacefulness, of holy silence. We are enveloped by peace upon entering our temples, and each of our allegories is a simple but eternal meditation on nature, modelled on or from it. Such things would the Egyptian say, desiring to see in statuary nothing but the realm of the departed set in stone, and this it is that determines the attitude of the hands and feet. Their statues are at rest just as their mummies are at rest, and in many cases, as I recall from one such figure in Caylus’s collection, the casket itself is more or less fashioned with them. Those who would explain these statues’ arms and legs tightly pressed to the body with reference to general rules governing the invention of art can truly explain everything, which is no cause for envy on my part. This also helps us to understand the feet projecting forward in a straight line: because it was the accepted idea of how gods and demons trod, or, as it were, glided along, this gait was soon to become a sacred rule of art, which originally depicted only the gods and the ancestors who dwelled among them. Even the question of how the Egyptians developed the notion of idolatry and why their statues were so important to them seems to derive from this because it was but one small step from the venerated images of their ancestors to godhead, as can be seen in their use of symbols expressing the general and the elevated, which sanctioned that idea. It is also certain that their most ancient mythology, of Osiris, Isis, Harpocrates and Horus, is cloaked in abundant human and funerary history, out of which, in particular, their notion of art seems to have emerged. Finally, the precise detailing of their statues is thoroughly mummy‐like because the mummy itself is, with the greatest of care, painted on the coffin.
I could propose another, similar test concerning the Egyptians’ depiction of animals and why their art attained such excellence in this field. The above suffices, however, to demonstrate that just like Greek art, Egyptian and Etruscan art need to be dealt with quite individually, rather than simply negatively or privatively on the basis of comparison. In all of this a fine laurel wreath awaits whoever is capable of seeing the history of art not as a system but as history, showing clearly, in every instance, on the basis of which writings and about which periods and monuments of which specific people he is speaking. And this is something we do not really find in Winckelmann. His history of art has few points of support, and indeed as a theoretical system can do no more than hang in the air.
IIC11 Samuel Johnson (1709–84) On the state of nature
Samuel Johnson was at the centre of literary London in the late eighteenth century, the presiding figure of The Club, which numbered among its members Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick and many others. A lifelong Tory, he was also possessed of a sort of curmudgeonly humanism that saw him a convinced supporter of the pivotal Mansfield ruling of 1772. This was actually a relatively limited judgement, preventing the forced return of erstwhile slaves from England to the Caribbean, but was widely taken to amount to a proclamation of emancipation for black people in England. His own black manservant, the freed slave Francis Barber, became a friend in later life and was awarded a portion of Johnson’s estate and an annuity on his death, an amount sufficient to cause a scandal in contemporary London. Johnson had a long interest in the world beyond Europe. His first literary work in 1735 had been a translation of the Portuguese Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo’s account of his mission to Abyssinia, and in 1759 Johnson himself had written a successful