Echoes of Winckelmann’s Death in Trieste in Mann’s Death in Venice

Abstract

The paper seeks to closely examine the typological similarity and implicit analogies that Thomas Mann’s acclaimed novella Death in Venice (1912) establishes towards the events revolving around the murder of German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann in 1758 in Trieste. What is generally recognized as the link between the novella and Winckelmann’s biography is the chronotope of the journey and tragic death in Italy. The pivotal circumstance connected to both Winckelmann’s factual death and literary death of Mann’s hero Gustav Aschenbach is abandoning the originally planned itinerary: the change of plan will ultimately prove to be fatal. The paper argues that Mann shaped the motif of the journey as a modernist inversion of the Byronic Grand Tour, with the hero everything but a youngster on a formative, coming-of-age voyage. The dialectics of the North and the South appears to be a significant point of the encounter where the biographical and the fictional story meet. We argue that Death in Venice ironically refers to Winckelmann’s attraction to the South. Both Winckelmann and Aschenbach encounter their death somewhere halfway between the North and the South; in a space that is, actually, a substitution for the real South. The paper will pay special attention to the paradox from Winckelmann’s biography: although he was a great Hellenist, he did not seize any of the numerous opportunities to travel to Greece. Instead, the farthest (most southern) that he went was to Rome, where the art is a replica of Greek art and, therefore, “non-authentic” in a certain way. Similarly, Aschenbach, also fascinated by classical beauty, does not reach its source, but arrives in Venice – “Pseudobyzantium”, the city that tends to (re)invent its non-existent ancient and imperial past (in this sense, Venice is twice away from classical Greece). Winckelmann and Aschenbach, both admirers of Hellenic culture, seem to be afraid of the possible disappointment when encountering the space of their own idealization, which may imply the awareness of the discordance between the ideal, classical Greece and Christianized, contemporary (“Byzantine”) Greece, and the necessity of disillusionment and the inability to find what they seek. Particular emphasis is placed on Winckelmann’s murderer, Francesco Arcangeli, a controversial character with whom the German spent his last days. The ambiguity of Arcangeli’s real (vulgar) being and what Winckelmann idealistically projected, both equally encouraging for literalization, made his historical figure suitable for the double literary transposition in Mann’s novella. We propose that Arcangeli’s presence is echoed in the novella in a twofold manner, shaping the work’s recurring demonic characters (“nemesis figures”), as well as Aschenbach’s obsessive (and fatal) fascination for the Polish boy Tadzio. In the light of the encounter of biography and literature, empiric and literary truth, the idealistic and realistic, the aim of the paper is to indicate the parodic and essentially caricatural way in which Mann, having recognised the ironic potential of the tragic “case Winckelmann”, transformed the factual into the fictional.