Re-dressing the balance: Winckelmann, Greek costume and the Ideal

Abstract

The paper explores the overlooked attention Johann Joachim Winckelmann gave to clothing and clothed statues. It engages with Winckelmann’s self-fashioning, the costume-based analysis through which he traced the cultural trajectory of antique peoples, and his descriptive and rhetorical passages on dress. It identifies the invisible and immaterial qualities which Winckelmann attributed to ‘tasteful’ clothing, and proposes that the elegance of Greek clothing was a signifier for the manifestation and transposition of perfect bodily form to the Greek ideal. This re-thinking seeks to address the focus on the Greek male nude figure as his emblem of ideal beauty and proposes that we should integrate draped statues as well as nude ones into Winckelmann’s historic and aesthetic framework.