The decline and fall of Virgil in eighteenth-century Germany

"In the early modern period, the culture of Rome, with Virgil as its greatest figure, was the model for emulation. But in eighteenth-century Europe, a shift occurred in favor of Greece, a trend that was most pronounced in Germany. Led by Winckelmann, German poets and thinkers extolled Greek art, dismissing all Roman art as derivative and Virgil as second rate and incapable of understanding true beauty. The export of this new view of Virgil and, more generally, Roman culture to the rest of Europe in the nineteenth century soon made it the reigning dogma, and it formed the point of departure for Virgil scholarship in the twentieth century. This, however, did not prevent German poets from using Virgil, although neither they nor later scholars called attention to it. Virgil has a continued, unexamined presence in the epic and idyll of Klopstock, Wieland, Goethe, and Novalis. This comparative investigation of the relation of modernity to antiquity through Virgil and his twofold reception provides a new perspective on this issue."--BOOK JACKET.