Race and the Invention of the Greek Profile: From Winckelmann to Warhol

The NYU Department of German and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “Race and the Invention of the Greek Profile: from Winckelmann to Warhol,” a lecture by Éric Michaud.

We owe to Winckelmann the invention of the Griechische Profil which he assumed to be “as peculiar to the ancient Greeks, as flat noses and little eyes to the Calmuks and Chinese.” This Greek profile rapidly became an obsessional leitmotiv in his inquiry into compared virtues of populations and their arts throughout Antiquity. Later, the Greek profile became an essential anthropological operator: even more than a division between Man and animals, it established sharing between the mere nature and the highest degree of human culture. The presentation will explore the fate of this ambivalent paradigm, constantly waving between fiction of art and human reality.

From Deutsches Haus NYU,