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Updated: May 3, 2025
Of passion, of physical excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These friendships, often the caprices of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light for the mute Olympian family.
He devoted himself for a considerable time after his arrival in London to the daily toils of literature translations, essays, and critiques. Among other works, he translated Winckelmann's book on Painting and Sculpture. One day Bonnycastle said to him, after dinner, "Fuseli, you can write well, why don't you write something?"
Hegel, in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art, estimating the work of his predecessors, has also passed a remarkable judgment on Winckelmann's writings: "Winckelmann, by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened a new sense for the study of art.
In my childlike enthusiasm I determined to read all the books that Goethe says that he read as a boy, and thus commenced and finished Winckelmann's collected works, Lessing's Laocoon and other books of artistic and archaeological research; in other words, studied the history and philosophy of Art in the first instance under aspects which, from the point of view of subsequent research, were altogether antiquated, though in themselves, and in their day, valuable enough.
In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raffaelle commemorates. Winckelmann's intellectual history authenticates the claims of this tradition in human culture.
So comes the truth of Goethe's judgments on his works; they are a life, a living thing, designed for those who are alive ein Lebendiges fuer die Lebendigen geschrieben, ein Leben selbst. In 1785 Cardinal Albani, who possessed in his Roman villa a precious collection of antiquities, became Winckelmann's patron. Pompeii had just opened its treasures; Winckelmann gathered its first-fruits.
Foremost among the ladies were the two rival beauties, equally famous for their conquests in the ecclesiastical as well as the secular nobility, the Princess Santacroce and the Princess Altieri, vying with each other in the magnificence of their diamonds and of their lace, and each upon the arm of a prince of the Church who had the honour of being her orthodox cavaliere servente; the Princess Altieri led in by Cardinal Giovan Francesco Albani, the very gallant and art-loving nephew of Winckelmann's Cardinal Alessandro; the Princess Santacroce escorted by the French Ambassador Cardinal de Bernis, the amiable society rhymester of Mme. de Pompadour, whom Frederick the Great had surnamed Babet la bouquetière.
As lasting evidences of an existence or a condition, such papers are the more important for posterity, the more the writer lives in the moment and the less he is concerned with the future. Winckelmann's letters sometimes have this desirable character.
Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed to what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it." Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated Winckelmann's friendships, it could not be said that it gave no pain.
For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself; and it is not surprising that this turbid medium has left in Winckelmann's actual results much that a more privileged criticism can correct. He had been twelve years in Rome.
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