The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Fig. 4.9. Henri Matisse, Odalisque with Red Culottes. Painted in Nice, 1921. Oil on canvas, 26 3/8 x 33 1/8 in.

  Today’s Orientalism no longer caters to Europeans and Americans who might gaze lustily at naked white women. Scholars have rediscovered commentary from Ottomans quite able to speak for themselves, such as Zeyneb Hamm’s A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, whose letters subject the West to scrutiny, and Melek Hamm’s Abdul Hamid’s Daughter, the harem as seen from inside, both published in 1913.24 Furthermore, in 2005 an international coalition of individuals and organizations set up a “Circassian World” website to strengthen Circassian “national” identity and teach about its past. The website includes photographs of Circassians, otherwise still hard to find.25

  Fig. 4.10. Jacket of Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978), showing a detail of Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, early 1860s. Oil on canvas, 84 x 122 cm.

  Fig. 4.11. Jacket of Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (1995), featuring detail of Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Great Bath at Bursa, 1885. Oil on canvas, 27.6 x 39.6 in.

  NOWADAYS, BOTH the reality of harem white slavery and the figure of the odalisque have largely disappeared, gone the way of that slavery itself.* Just as the Norman conquest of England’s small kingdoms dampened slavery there, so European and Turkish imperial power closed down long-range slaving out of the Black Sea region. In the west, an abolitionist movement ended the Atlantic slave trade by the mid-nineteenth century. In the east around the same time, Russia abolished slavery and severely curtailed the eastern European and Caucasian slave trade. As this slavery faded, so did its iconography, but ideals of white beauty endured. They had become firmly embedded in the science of race.

  5

  THE WHITE BEAUTY IDEAL AS SCIENCE

  Historians reckon Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) to be the father of art history, a fitting tribute to his importance to the field. And while Winckelmann did not contribute directly to theories of race, he does play a large role in this story by passing along assumptions on the ideal form and color of human beauty that inspired much eighteenth-and nineteenth-century racial theorizing. The hard, pure, white aesthetic that Winckelmann popularized rested on the authority of the Renaissance, making the issue of whiteness versus color more than simply a question of taste. (See figure 5.1, Anton Raphael Mengs’s Johann Joachim Winckelmann.)

  Born a poor cobbler’s son in Prussia, Winckelmann began his career as a librarian in Dresden, the capital of Saxony in eastern Germany. Converting to Catholicism in order to study ancient art in Rome, he lived with and worked for Alessandro Cardinal Albani, a politically powerful aristocrat and renowned collector of ancient art. At that time the study of art history was centered in Rome, for access to the glories of Egypt and Greece was severely constricted by Ottoman imperial control. Travel was perilous. Moreover, Italy was a sunny, welcoming place, and a great deal of fun, all of which appealed to eighteenth-century German scholars.

  Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764–67), Winckelmann’s towering, two-volume work, quickly became the international gold standard in the history of ancient art. This book, both a chronology and a canon of ancient art loaded with Winckelmann’s knowledge, also seeks to correlate differences of style with history and archaeology. Such ambition laid the basis for scientific art historical investigation and lasted far longer than the details of his dating.

  Winckelmann’s main thesis held that Greek art, the finest of all time, grew out of the freedom of its culture. Going further, Winckelmann advanced the notion that modern Westerners should embrace the Greek way of life and freedom, to achieve Greek excellence in art and, presumably, all of culture. Not only did he establish a chronology and a canon of ancient art; he also championed an ideology of ancient Greek beauty based on his own gay male aesthetic.1 At the heart of this work were beautiful boys, themselves central to making ancient Greeks into timeless, universal paragons of beauty.

  The fetishization of ancient Greek beauty is not of Winckelmann’s invention. But as the icon of cultural criticism, he quite easily deepened it. For instance, Winckelmann declared the Apollo Belvedere, already the most famous statue in Europe, the embodiment of perfect human beauty. (See figure 5.2, Apollo Belvedere.)

  Like many of his contemporaries, Winckelmann had to balance his Eurocentrism against a certain cultural relativity.2 He admits that various peoples display different body types, thus causing tastes to vary. Clearly, human beings find people like themselves beautiful. Even so, trapped in his German-Italian aesthetic, he pronounces Chinese eyes “an offense against beauty” and Kalmucks’ flat noses “an irregularity” equal to deformity.3 In the final analysis, however, relativity loses out as he adopts the Kantian notion of a single ideal figure for all humanity—“the Greek profile is the first character of great beauty in the formation of the visage.” White skin, he adds, makes bodily appearance more beautiful. Throughout the Western world, these rules soon became as carved in stone as the statues that inspired them.

  Fig. 5.1. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, by Anton Raphael Mengs, shortly after 1755. Oil on canvas, 25 x 19 3/8 in.

  Winckelmann’s appreciation of whiteness initially sprang from his distance from Greece. In Rome, he had near at hand a great many Roman copies of ancient Greek sculpture translated into an Italian sculptural medium. Unaware that the Greek originals were often dark in color, he did not know—or glossed over the knowledge—that the Greeks routinely painted their sculpture. He saw only Roman versions of beautiful young men carved of hard Italian marble that shone a gleaming white. Thus, Winckelmann elevated Rome’s white marble copies of Greek statuary into emblems of beauty and created a new white aesthetic. It would apply not only to works from antiquity, not only to Greek art, but to all of art and all of humanity.*

  For Winckelmann and his followers, color in sculpture came to mean barbarism, for they assumed that the lofty ancient Greeks were too sophisticated to color their art.

  The equation of color with primitivism meant that experts often suppressed and removed color when they found it in the Greeks. Even now, the discovery of ancient Greek polychromy can still make news, for the allure of Winckelmann’s hard, white, young bodies lives on.4*

  Fig. 5.2. Apollo Belvedere (detail). Roman marble copy of Greek bronze original.

  Long after Winckelmann, students and museums all over the world copied classical art for purposes of education. Copying Greek art perforce employed a more common medium—white plaster—which, following Winckelmann, they purposefully left unpainted. Thus Winckelmann’s white aesthetic marched on, trampling the fact that smooth white Italian marble was neither the original medium nor the original color of ancient Greek statuary.5†

  We owe this knowledge to a Scot, Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, British ambassador extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Ottoman court at Constantinople. Bruce’s admiration of Winckelmann’s Greeks extended to decorating his new house in Fife, Scotland, with Greek art in order, he said, to elevate the standard of British art. On his way to Constantinople in 1799, he stopped at Athens, then a neglected Ottoman backwater, intending to draw and to take away a few smaller sculptures. But Bruce’s desire soon grew into lust for larger pieces, and he started removing sculpture from the Parthenon, Greece’s symbol of Athenian democracy.

  When local Turkish authorities balked, Bruce appealed to central Ottoman authorities far away in Constantinople. Swayed by his argument that the Parthenon was already prey to vandals, the Ottoman court finally allowed him to pry off and ship huge pieces of the Parthenon’s architectural sculpture—metopes, friezes, and pedimental figures—between 1802 and 1806. The cost ultimately exceeded Bruce’s pocketbook, forcing him to sell the sculpture to the British government in 1816 for exhibit in the British Museum, where it remains, despite Greek campaigns for its return.

  The Parthenon marbles Elgin took to Britain do consist of marble, but a darkly pitted Greek marble rather than the smooth, snowy w
hite variety more common in Italy. Here lay an aesthetic problem: whiteness versus color. The alarming history of European marble “cleaning” includes a chapter on this statuary describing a drive to make ancient Greek art white that nearly destroyed the art itself. In the 1930s workers in the British Museum were directed to remove the dark patina with metal tools on the mistaken assumption that their proper color should be white. Such a “cleaning” seriously damaged the Parthenon marbles, prompting an inquiry by the museum’s standing committee that halted the work.6 Clearly, Winckelmann’s obsession with whiteness had a large and lingering downside.

  WINCKELMANN WAS murdered in Trieste in 1768 under questionable circumstances on his way back to Dresden from Rome. His most recent biographer contends that the murder occurred in the course of a robbery that Winckelmann was resisting, but other authorities suspect that Winckelmann, an older gay man with a taste for adventure, ran afoul of rough trade.7

  When Winckelmann died, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Germany’s towering intellectual and the quintessence of German romanticism, was twenty-one years old. Before Goethe, German aristocrats had studied the ancient Greek language as one facet of a classical education. But Greek culture overall lacked mythic status, and after centuries of Ottoman rule, modern Greeks were considered little more than Turks. Sharing Winckelmann’s love of ancient Greek beauty, Goethe eventually added to it an adoration of Greek intellectual superiority in what an English scholar termed the “Tyranny of Greece over Germany.”8* Goethe’s dear friend Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) wrote several poems on Greek themes, notably Die Götter Griechenlandes (The Gods of the Greeks, 1788), and Goethe published Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (Winckelmann and His Century, 1805). Over time, Goethe’s prestige made ancient Greek intellectual superiority so dominant that German intellectuals began to claim ancient Greek bodies and culture as their true ancestors.

  Goethe first encountered Winckelmann’s work as a student in Leipzig in the mid-1760s. During his 1786–88 visit to Italy, Goethe employed Winckelmann’s letters and books as guides, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson would rely on Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Travels, 1817) half a century later. Also like Winckelmann, Goethe never actually went to Greece; in the same way, Emerson adored Goethe and the Saxons without ever setting foot on German soil.

  In his own work, Goethe repeatedly addressed Greek themes, such as those in Iphigenia in Tauris (1787) and in the unfinished Achilleis, abandoned in 1800. Faust (1808, 1832), his masterpiece, includes an implausible section featuring Helen of Troy, herself an embodiment of perfect human beauty. In Faust’s second part, Helen takes refuge from an angry Menelaus in Germany. There she meets Faust, who seduces her, and they have a son, Euphorion, an allegorical Lord Byron. The most famous of the English Romantics and a martyr to the Greek war for independence, Byron synthesized Nordic and Greek ideals. Like Lord Byron, Euphorion must die. Helen follows Euphorion back to the underworld, and Faust returns to Germany.* Here we see in Goethe how the mythologies of Germany and ancient Greece tightly intertwine and how, through Goethe, Winckelmann’s aesthetic dominated nineteenth-century German thought.

  IN THIS Grecomanic epidemic the anthropologists of Europe played a big role. Anthropological charts proliferated during the eighteenth century, many featuring images of whiteness borrowed from fine art. Two of the best-known illustrators—Petrus Camper (1722–89) of the Netherlands and Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) of Switzerland—intended their elaborately illustrated books for artists as well as for natural scientists.

  Camper’s solid academic background in anatomy and art at the University of Leiden made him a formidable figure in both worlds. Over time he taught at the Universities of Franeker, Amsterdam, and Groningen and traveled widely to demonstrate the theoretical soundness of his facial angle, an angle between two lines drawn on a face. One line ran vertically from the forehead to the teeth; the other line went horizontally across the face through the opening of each ear. The result was a quantification of the relationship between the projection of the forehead, mouth, and chin, a relationship that was visual rather than functional.* The popularity of so simple and beautifully illustrated a method of human classification took Camper quite a long way. Welcomed in England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society.

  Camper’s most famous chart (likely drawn in the 1770s but not published until 1792, after his death) delivers sharply conflicting messages in a deeply confusing manner.† (See figure 5.3, Petrus Camper’s chart of contrasted faces.) Apparently comparing faces and skulls as viewed straight on with lines drawn through several points on each skull and face, the chart is intended to depict the “facial angles” of an orangutan (chimpanzee), at top left, a Negro, a Kalmuck, over to a European, and Apollo Belvedere, in that order. One source of confusion lies in the use of frontal views to illustrate measurements reckoned in the profile. The facial angles shown are 58 degrees for the orangutan/chimpanzee, whose mouth projects beyond his forehead; 70 degrees for both the Negro and the Kalmuck, whose faces are more vertical; 80 degrees for the European; and 100 degrees for the Greek god. Camper’s order introduces a further, crucial ambiguity.

  As an advocate of human equality, Camper held all along that this chart demonstrates the near parity of the human races. The numbers associated with the chart—58, 70, 80, and 100—do, in fact, reveal Negro and Kalmuck facial angles closer to the European than to the orangutan/chimpanzee and less separate from the European than the European is from the Greek god. This, Camper maintained, was his message, whose fundamental meaning lay in his numbers. He insisted on the unity of mankind, even going so far as to suggest that Adam and Eve might well have been black, because no one skin color was superior to the others. Brotherhood, however, was not the meaning the chart conveyed to others.

  Fig. 5.3. Petrus Camper’s chart of contrasted faces, 1770s.

  A far different message emerges from Camper’s chart’s visual layout, one that completely undercut his egalitarian beliefs. Circulating at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century, his image places the Negro next to the orangutan/chimpanzee and the European next to the Apollo Belvedere. Position, not relative numbers, came across most clearly. The apparent pairing in this visual architecture soon embodied anthropological truth among laymen.

  European scholars, meanwhile, were asking harder questions.* In France and Germany, Camper faced mounting criticism, and in the long run his paltry record of publication hindered his scholarly reputation. While he produced hundreds of papers and drawings, he published no one dominant book, and the “facial angle” lost credibility in academic science. By the mid-nineteenth century, methodical measurers of skulls had denounced Camper’s simplistic reliance on a single head measurement. But even as Camper lost scholarly standing in continental Europe, scientific racists in Britain and the United States such as Robert Knox, J. C. Nott, and G. R. Gliddon went on reproducing his images as irrefutable proof of a white supremacy that Camper himself had never embraced. Johann Kaspar Lavater of Switzerland traveled a somewhat parallel trajectory.

  AS A PROTESTANT clergyman and poet in Zurich, Lavater firmly believed that God had decreed one’s outer appearance, especially the face, to reflect one’s inner state. His illustrated books Von der Physiognomik (On Physiognomy, 1772) and Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntis und Menschenliebe (Essays on Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind, 1775–78) were immediately translated and widely circulated. Familiar among scholars and laymen alike, these works lavishly demonstrate the supposed correlation between personal beauty and human virtue, between outer looks and inner soul—an attractive and simpleminded notion.

  Lavater amplified Winckelmann’s views on the ancient Greeks, dedicating sections of his masterwork, On Physiognomy, to “the Ideal Beauty of the Ancients.” He also repeated the commonplace that modern Greeks differed fundamentally from the ancients: “The Grecian race was then [in antiquity] more beauti
ful than we are; they were better than us—and the present generation [of Greeks] is vilely degraded!”9 Although Lavater, like Camper, saw Greek beauty as typically European, he disagreed with Camper over the ideal facial angle, and this was an important feature in their minds. The forehead of Lavater’s Apollo sloped backwards rather than rising vertically. Of course, none of these (to us) trivial disagreements undermined the central concept of white beauty’s embodiment in the same Greek god.

  Opinions swept back and forth across Europe on these racial matters. At first Lavater (like Camper) impressed practically everyone, including the young Goethe, with his vivid illustrations, and his books became best sellers. But Goethe and other supporters soon fell away as Lavater faced critics led by Blumenbach’s friend, the Göttingen intellectual Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), known then for his witty epigrams (none understandable in English and now remembered mainly in Germany). Lichtenberg had excellent reasons for mistrust. According to Lavater’s theories, he—being humpbacked and uncommonly ugly in the popular view—would thereby lack inner worth: there was nothing Grecian about Lichtenberg. Camper, too, viewed Lavater’s work skeptically, even though the two men shared the same conceptual weaknesses.