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Updated: May 3, 2025
Goethe has told us how, in his eagerness actually to handle the antique, he became interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which the neighbourhood of Strasburg contained. So we hear of Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. Such a conformity between himself and Winckelmann, Goethe would have gladly noted.
Dante, passing from the darkness of the Inferno, is filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, removed at last, gave force and glow to Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic spirit.
But, broadly speaking, we must admit the loss of that "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" the phrase is Winckelmann's which stamped the creations of the age of Phidias. Greek sculpture gained immensely in variety, but at the expense of its elevation of spirit. It is a question whether the best of them were not produced before the end of the period covered by the last chapter.
This peculiarity of mind passed by me unnoticed at the time; I knew and understood too little, nay, indeed, almost nothing of myself as yet, even as regards the actions of my every-day life. Thirdly, I studied Winckelmann's "Letters on Art."
Goethe, then nineteen years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his coming, with that wistful eagerness which marked his youth, when the news of Winckelmann's murder arrived. All that "weariness of the North" had revived with double force. He left Vienna, intending to hasten back to Rome. At Trieste a delay of a few days occurred.
In early manhood, just as he too was FINDING Greek art, the rumour of that high artist's life of Winckelmann in Italy had strongly moved him. At Rome, spending a whole year drawing from the antique, in preparation for Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's memory ever active. Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval, Greek.
One result of this temperament is a serenity Heiterkeit which characterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality; it is the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan manner; and what is implied in that?
It became bankrupt when, under Winckelmann's direction, a return was made to the antique school. Another example is supplied in the painting belonging to the first quarter of this century. Art was regarded merely as a means and instrument of mediaeval religious feeling, and consequently ecclesiastical subjects alone were chosen for its themes.
After him it is natural that we should have a reversion to quasi-severity and imitation of the antique just as David succeeded to the Louis Quinze pictorial riot and that the French contemporaries of Canova and Thorwaldsen, those literal, though enthusiastic illustrators of Winckelmann's theories, should be Pradier and Etex and the so-called Greek school.
Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of an intellectual situation of the highest interest.
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