Sexual Underworlds Of The Enlightenment by G.S. Rousseau

Vision, desire, touch, experiment, and knowledge are invoked equally in both genres, in strikingly parallel ways, while thecompeting claims of ‘théorie’ and ‘pratique’ invoked here were staples of contemporary polemics around artistic, sexual, and religious knowledge-production. While the mise-en-scène of this episode recalls the peephole scenes of notorious pornographic works such as L’histoire de Dom Bougre and Memories of a Woman of Pleasure, the words Casanova places in Winckelmann’s mouth conspicuously deploy the same topoi of aesthetic knowledge – ‘connoissance’ – found in Winckelmann’s writings on Greek art. This paper departs from previous interpretations of this passage as a piece of near-documentary testimony, using it instead as a starting-point for analysis of the proximity and interrelation of the connoisseurial and the pornographic in the eighteenth-century discourses concerning Greek and Roman art. According to Casanova the young ‘Bathyllus’ fled and Winckelmann, laughing, delivered a homily justifying his pursuit of paederasty as part of a turn away from ‘cold theory’ (‘la froide théorie’) in his quest for knowledge of Greece and Rome, towards a new methodology of ‘enlightening myself through practice’ (‘m’éclaircer par la pratique’). In a famous passage of his Histoire de ma vie, Giacomo Casanova tells of entering Johann Winckelmann’s Roman apartment to find him in flagrante with a prostitute. Katherine Harloe (London), Practical Enlightenment: Pagan Pornotopia in Casanova’s Encounter With Winckelmann Panel 1: What Aroused Our Forefathers and Foremothers? Antiquity in 18 th and 19 th Century Eroticism

The Reception of Antiquity in Eroticism and Pornography

Sexual Underworlds Of The Enlightenment by G.S. Rousseau