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Updated: May 13, 2025
But when, in especially gifted men, appears the need common to all of us of seeking in the external world a corresponding realization for all the gifts with which Nature has endowed them, thereby raising their inner being to a self-relying whole, we may be assured of the development of a character in which both the present and the future world will rejoice. Winckelmann was a man of this kind.
They are addressed to a man who had the happiness of counting himself among your servants, and soon afterward of living in close relation with Your Highness, at the time when Winckelmann found himself in the most embarrassing circumstances, the straightforward and touching narration of which one cannot read without sympathy.
And so Winckelmann was recognized by the cultured nations of Europe at a time when he was sufficiently established at Rome to be honored with the important position of Director of Antiquities. Notwithstanding his recognized and often vaunted happiness, Winckelmann was always tortured by a restlessness which, as its foundations lay deep in his nature, assumed various forms.
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.
He gave me his funeral oration on Prince Eugene, and in return I sent him the 'Pandects'." "Has he accepted them?" "I think so, Holy Father." "If he has, he will send Winckelmann to pay you for them." "That would be treating me like a bookseller; I will not receive any payment." "Then he will return the volume of the 'Pandects'; we are sure of it, he always does so."
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.
Goethe illustrates that union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of Beauty that marriage of Faust and Helena of which the art of the nineteenth century is the child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him, on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in harness as for victory," his brows bound with light.* Goethe illustrates, too, the preponderance in this marriage of the Hellenic element; and that element, in its true essence, was made known to him by Winckelmann.
Winckelmann himself explains the motive of his life when he says, "It will be my highest reward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written worthily." For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first book appeared, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and Sculpture.
In the case of very many men, especially in the case of scholars, their achievements seem the important thing, and in these their character finds little expression. With Winckelmann the reverse was the case. All that he produced is principally important and valuable because his character is always revealed in it.
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.
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