WINCKELMANN abbé Histoire de l’art chez les anciens. Traduit de l’allemand avec de notes historiques et critiques de différens auteurs.

PMM, 210 (1764 German edition) ; Brunet, V, 1463.

First complete edition of this important work for the history of classical art.  

Johann Winckelmann was German archaeologist and art historian whose writings directed popular taste toward classical art, particularly that of ancient Greece, and influenced not only Western painting and sculpture but also literature and even philosophy.

Winckelmann’s general Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764; “History of the Art of Antiquity”) is virtually the first work to define in ancient art an organic development of growth, maturity, and decline; to include such cultural and technical factors as climate, freedom, and craftsmanship in explaining the art of a people; or to attempt a definition of ideal beauty. This work inaugurated the division of ancient art into periods—a pre-Phidian (or archaic), the high or sublime style of the great Greek sculptors Phidias and Polyclitus of the 5th century BC, the elegant or beautiful style of the sculptor Praxiteles and the painter Apelles (both flourishing in Greece in the 4th century BC), and the imitative period, corresponding to the Greek-tinctured Hellenistic and the Roman—that have passed into the common parlance of Greek art history. But his fame rests chiefly upon his descriptions of individual works of art, combining meticulous, firsthand observation with a warm and spontaneous style. His remarks on the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, the Niobids, and the Belvedere Torso have become landmarks alike in the history of German literature and art criticism. The study of art history as a distinct discipline and of archaeology as a humane science may be said to date from Winckelmann.

A very fine copy on laid paper, complete with its 65 plates and the required frontispieces. The illustration is complemented by a large number of vignettes reproducing works from antiquity.