Angelika Kauffmann – Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann
By Sarah Baur
During her Grand Tour of Italy, the painter Angelika Kauffmann received numerous commissions to paint portraits of fellow travellers, who purchased them as a kind of souvenir. Shortly after her arrival in Rome, Johann Caspar Füssli, the father of Johann Heinrich Füssli, commissioned her to paint the antiquarian and librarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
Winckelmann was in the service of Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Albani and became superintendent of antiquities in Rome in 1764. He developed the theory of the Hellenic ideal of purity, which he believed rested on “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.”[1] In his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, he describes the “great and composed soul” that masters its emotions and knows how to reveal them neither in posture nor in facial expression. He considered it more important that the viewer should be able to recognise the sitter’s “sincerity of heart.” In keeping with this ideal, he also emphasised the use of noble, pure, classical materials such as white marble and bronze. The same principle applied to colour, which was to take second place to line and contour. This aesthetic was fundamental to Neoclassicism and marked its departure from the Baroque.[2]
Angelika Kauffmann was particularly adept at translating into her paintings the sensibility so strongly emphasised by Winckelmann—this “pursuit of an art oriented towards harmony.”[3] Winckelmann himself also praised her artistic ability:
“My portrait has been painted for a foreign gentleman by an exceptional person, a German woman painter. She is very accomplished in portraits in oils, and mine costs 30 zecchini; it is a seated half-length figure. She has etched it in quarto format, and another artist is working on a mezzotint of it, intending to present me with the copper plate as a gift.”[4]
The portrait, produced in the same year as his principal work, History of the Art of Antiquity, shows the forty-seven-year-old Winckelmann, with his high forehead and thinning hair, seated at a writing desk. He wears a greenish garment with an open shirt collar and a yellowish scarf loosely draped around his neck. He appears to pause for a moment while writing, gazing past the viewer into the distance. He holds a quill in his right hand, which rests on an open book. Beneath it lies a relief depicting the Three Graces. This relief alludes to his work On Grace in Works of Art, published in 1759.
The soft colours and delicate facial features of the contemplative scholar fully embody the ideal of human beauty advocated by Winckelmann. Two years later, he once again expressed his admiration for Angelika in a letter:
“Füssli, […] had my portrait painted in oils in Rome by the skilful hand of a beautiful young German woman.”[5]
Rudolf Füssli also admired the work, mentioning Angelika in his General Dictionary of Artists as early as 1767. The portrait was so well received in Zurich, where it remains today, that—as Winckelmann’s letter quoted above describes—it was promptly reproduced in prints and circulated throughout Europe.
“With this portrait, she created a lasting monument both to herself and to him. It continues to shape our image of Winckelmann to this day and was copied repeatedly after his death,” says Dr Kathrin Schade, curator at the Winckelmann Museum.[6]
This painting suddenly opened up the international art market to Kauffmann and is now regarded as her “most significant work in terms of cultural history.”[7]
[1] Winckelmann, Johann Joachim: Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst [Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture], text of the second edition, 1756, p. 17.
[2] Katz, Gabriele: Angelika Kauffmann. Künstlerin und Geschäftsfrau [Angelika Kauffmann: Artist and Businesswoman], Stuttgart, 2012, p. 31.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Daßdorf, Karl Wilhelm: Winckelmanns Briefe an seine Freunde [Winckelmann’s Letters to His Friends], Part 1, Dresden, 1777, p. 121.
[5] Nicolai, Friedrich: Johann Winckelmanns Briefe an einen seiner vertrauten Freunde in den Jahren 1756 bis 1768 [Johann Winckelmann’s Letters to a Close Friend, 1756–1768], Part 1, Berlin and Stettin, 1781, p. 63.
[6] Quoted in Nora Knappe: Die Frau, die Winckelmann malte [The Woman Who Painted Winckelmann], Stendal, 2016, a report on the special exhibition “Grace and Enlightenment – A Collection of Prints after Works by Angelika Kauffmann.”
[7] Maierhofer, Waltraud: Angelika Kauffmann, Leipzig, 1997, p. 31, quoted from Oscar Sandner: Hommage an Angelica Kauffmann [Homage to Angelica Kauffmann], p. 15.
Angelika Kauffmann – Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann
1764, oil on canvas, 97 × 71 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich
Angelika Kauffmann – Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann
1780, copperplate engraving, 21.6 × 15.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, London
