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Updated: June 14, 2025
It may be said that the school of art-criticism in Germany owes its origin to the studies of Winckelmann. The critical writings of Herder were more remarkable for the impulse which they gave to the studies of authors than for their intrinsic merits. Goethe in his prose writings showed with what grace and precision the German language might be written.
Poems were sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate which seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and subversive.
A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again. Goethe's fragments of art-criticism contain a few pages of strange pregnancy on the character of Winckelmann.
"Of course you have read Cicero's article on the soul. The bishops don't know which way to turn." "So the political article in the Quarterly is Cicero's?" "Of course you know the art-criticism in the Times this year is Tully's doing?" But that would probably be a bounce. And then what letters he would write!
This, it will perhaps be admitted, is not very good art-criticism. Though in justice to its author it must be said that he did not wish to be regarded as Keene's critic as well as biographer. An artist does not argue with himself that he will shun the representation of one particular side of life. He simply leaves it alone because he cannot help it; it does not attract him.
And Sam came to be less feverishly anxious about his own monopoly of public esteem; less nettled at art-criticism; perhaps less vivacious in his talents and well-doing, but more manly and serene in his triumph, as Will Locke had been manly and serene in his failure. Will Locke's life and death, so devoid of pomp and renown, might be beyond lamentation, after all.
ERNEST. You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, what is the use of art-criticism?
They cannot be checked by blame, nor guided by instruction; they are merely the necessary result of whatever defects exist in the temper and principles of a luxurious society; and it is only by moral changes, not by art-criticism, that their action can be modified.
And yet, of this work an English critic wrote, on its first London presentation: "Bellini has soared too high; there is nothing of grandeur, no touch of true pathos in the common-place workings of his mind. He cannot reach the opera semiseria; he should confine his powers to the musical drama, the one-act opera buffa." But the history of art-criticism is replete with such instances.
After reading it, one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper subject-matter for the artist.
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