But the violence of the paradox does not stop here. For one must add that this very separation between the reasons of art and those of beauty make art exist as such, as its own world, and not simply as the skill of the painter, sculptor, architect or poet. The singularity of the analysis of the Torso cannot be dissociated from the singularity of the genre to which Winckelmann’s book lays claim: not a history of the sculpture, monuments or paintings of antiquity, but a History of Art in Antiquity. A ‘history of art’ assumes that art exists in the singular and without any qualifiers. For us this is obvious. But Winckelmann was one of the first, if not the first, to invent the notion of art as we understand it: no longer as the skill of those who made paintings, statues or poems, but as the sensible milieu of the coexistence of their works. Before him, the possibility of a history of art in antiquity was barred because its elements belonged to two separate histories: the history of artists and the history of antiquities. On the one hand, there were the lives of artists whose genre had been created by Vasari, modelled on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. These Lives took on meaning within a universe where the arts – forms of savoir-faire – were divided into ‘liberal’ arts practised and enjoyed by men of the elite, and mechanical arts, devoted to useful tasks practised by men in need. In this context, they were destined to justify the entry of painters and sculptors into the world of liberal arts. Hence anecdotal tales and moral lessons were given as much room as the analysis of works. The genre had been elevated since then, notably by the Vite de pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects), published in 1672 by Bellori. These were situated within a polemic concerning the principles of the art of painting. Bellori sought to show how these principles, brought to perfection by Raphael, then corrupted by Michelangelo’s mannerist heirs, had been restored in the seventeenth century by Carraci and the Bolognese, and developed by the Roman school and Poussin. This argument required the genre of lives to be displaced towards the analysis of works. Yet Bellori and his French emulators did not attach these artists’ lives to the general concept of a history, nor did they associate the art of any given painter or sculptor to the idea of Art as a proper sphere of experience. Such an idea was equally foreign to the work of those who used to be called ‘antiquarians’. They brought fragments of antiquities from Italy and published detailed catalogues of medals, cameos, busts and other sculpted stones thus collected. For them these objects were ‘monuments’ – that is to say, testimonies of ancient life in addition to those found in texts. The Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon formulated the principle: the monuments of arts ‘like a painting’ represented a good part of what the ancient authors had described, and moreover taught ‘an infinite number of things that the Authors did not’ about the uses and ceremonies of ancient peoples.11 No doubt this kind of history had been displaced, by the passion of artist–collectors, from simply functioning as a textual supplement to the consideration of objects themselves, their materials, and their modes of production. The Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines (‘Catalogue of Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities’), published in Paris in 1752 by the Comte de Caylus, shows the detailed attention to materials and techniques that makes historians of archaeology pay homage to ‘antiquarians’ of his kind.12 But Caylus’s inventory went against any will to ‘art history’: in his passion for antiquity, Caylus primarily took interest in the testamentary value of objects, stronger in the ‘tatters’ of useful objects than in the cold statues of Apollo or Venus;13 he described these objects one after another, refusing to constitute their collection into an autonomous totality, just as he refrained from any extrapolation from these fragments ‘that would fail to indicate the totality from which they are taken’.14
In order to provide a history of art in antiquity, it was not enough simply to unite the divergent interests of theorists of ideal Beauty and collectors of antiquities. Above all, it was necessary to extract the concept of Art from the dual limitations of those who studied the art – that is, the conception and the savoir-faire – of any one artist, and of those who studied the arts, that is to say, the knowledge and the techniques that produce objects and draw the portrait of a civilization. It was necessary to break down the separation between the singularity of ‘the life of the artist’ and the anonymity of the development of the arts, by revoking the social separation between the liberal and mechanical arts. A concept carried out this work – history. History does not come to take the constituted reality of art as its object. It constitutes this reality itself. In order for there to be a history of art, art must exist as a reality in itself, distinct from the lives of artists and the histories of monuments, freed from the old division between mechanical and liberal arts. Yet reciprocally, for art to exist as the sensible environment of works, history must exist as the form of intelligence of collective life. This story must emerge from the narrative of individual lives modelled on the exemplary lives of antiquity. This story must therefore involve a temporal and causal scheme, inscribing the description of works into a process of progress, perfection and decline. But this scheme itself implies that the history of art should be the history of a collective form of life, the story of a homogenous milieu of life and of the diverse forms it brings about, following the model Montesquieu developed for political regimes. History thus signifies a form of coexistence between those who inhabit a place together, those who draw the blueprints for collective buildings, those who cut the stones for these buildings, those who preside over ceremonies, and those who participate in them. Art thus becomes an autonomous reality, with the idea of history as the relation between a milieu, a collective form of life, and possibilities of individual invention.
The historicist concern is surely shared by all those who want to break with the conventions of the representative order. Ballet, according to Noverre, and theatrical performance, according to Talma, must teach the life and the mores of the peoples that make history far more than the glorious acts of a few individuals. But there is something more radical about the history of art as practised by Winckelmann. It is not merely a matter of accurately representing the ways of life and expression of people from the past. What matters instead is to think about the co-belonging of an artist’s art and the principles that govern the life of his people and his time. A concept captures this knot in his work: the concept of ‘style’. The style manifested in the work of a sculptor belongs to a people, to a moment of its life, and to the deployment of a potential for collective freedom. Art exists when one can make a people, a society, an age, taken at a certain moment in the development of its collective life, its subject. The ‘natural’ harmony between poiesis and aisthesis that governed the representative order is opposed to a new relation between individuality and collectivity: between the artist’s personality and the shared world that gives rise to it and that it expresses. The progress of primitive sculpture up to its classical apogee, then its decline, thus follows the progress and the loss of Greek freedom. The first age of a collectivity massively subjected to the power of aristocrats and priests corresponds to the rigidity of forms, due both to the awkwardness of art in its infancy and the obligation of following codified models. The golden age of Greek freedom corresponds to great and noble art with ‘flowing lines’. The retreat of this freedom translates into the passage to an art of grace, where style gives way to manner – that is to say, to the particular gesture of an artist working for the particular taste of a narrow circle of art-lovers. This history of art, understood as a voyage between the two poles of collective absorption and individualistic dissolution, was destined for a very long future. During the revolutionary period, it would nourish dreams of the regeneration of art, recast in the antique model of the expression of collective freedom. Yet, more discreetly and