Zwischen Norm und Geschichte: Winckelmanns Kunsthistoriographie und der Begriff des Klassischen

Abstract Not once does Winckelmann use the word ‘classical’ or any of its derivatives ‘classicism’, ‘neo-classicism’, ‘classicity’. And yet nobody’s œuvre is, or has been, more closely associated with the concept of the classical than his. By the second half of the nineteenth century, at the latest, it is regularly subsumed under the concept of the classical or classicism: a categorization that in the twentieth century has become the norm in all European countries and languages. How valid is this categorization? To what extent can a body of work that manages without the word ‘classical’ be brought under that heading? The present article suggests some answers to this question.