Alex Potts

This is an extremely interesting exploration of what we, today, might call the sublimated gay consciousness which underlies formal Art History, at any rate in its approach to Classical sculpture, and it manages to deal with this in a way which is entirely appropriate to the sources and their context in the late Enlightenment, and without improper sensation.
Alex Potts starts with the seemingly perverse designation of images of Niobe, the female, as 'sublime', and those of the male - maybe the Laocoon - as 'beautiful', inherently subverting normal gender stereotypes of the object of desire, making it masculine rather than feminine; he goes on to explore the extreme ambiguity of the Apollo Belvedere, which was to become the epitome of ideal manhood in the c18th, but which is in fact an intrinsically troubling image, blurring the sublime and the beautiful (we might say 'queering' it); he teases out from the sources in that period 'its unusually vivid ambiguity, its potential to be the focus of competing fantasies of unyielding domination and exquisite desirability': Winckelmann himself put it this way - '[his] mouth shaped as one from which voluptuous desire flowed to the beloved Branchus', 'disdain sits on his lips'. Winckelmann's own sense of 'outsiderliness' - as a gay Protestant from a poor northern background working in heterosexist Catholic circles in aristocratic Rome - not only meant that his alienation from dominant models of male selfhood were 'radically over-determined', but also provided the key through which he was able to get underneath the anxieties which his culture usually evaded - particularly the 'disturbing psychic dynamics of the sublime' with which his generation was obsessed, but by which it was also threatened.
All of this is very 'queer' - in the widest sense - and Potts traces the way in which, of course, Art History became a means through which Winckelmann transcribed his own homosexual desires - desires which were entirely unacceptable in practice, but which, in this dialogue with antique sculpture, could be rationalised. There is a lovely anecdote about Winckelmann's emphatic denial of any actual pederastic interest when Casanova, of all people, stumbled upon him drawing youths.
So it may be the 'queer eye' which enabled Winckelmann to analyse this art so thoroughly: simply by looking at statues, to question received gender stereotypes, beholding men who are beautiful (and, indeed, often vulnerable: think again of the Laocoon, or the Barberini Faun, for example), and women who are powerful and often rather butch. Undoubtedly repressed in his own life, 'this repression brings into focus precisely what makes Winckelmann such an unusually fascinating and politically resonant figure - his desire to fuse a voluptuary aestheticism with the "naive, rough sense of freedom" which so disturbed Pater' - and indeed continued to disturb much of the c19th. This desire for a fusion of the voluptuous and the free, of course, we continue to seek (look at any fashion magazine) - and the culture continues to resist, riven between a prurient fascination and a prudish sense of disdain, even as it depends disproportionately on gay men as the stylists and interpreters. It is fascinating.… (mer)