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Updated: May 13, 2025
Their purposes were restricted, their maxims were one-sided, yea, very often, freakish. They circulated stories and anecdotes, the varied application of which was intended not only to entertain but also to instruct society. From such elements arose the earliest treatises of Winckelmann, which he himself very soon found unsatisfactory, as indeed he did not conceal from his friends.
Even when Winckelmann first approached the study of art and learned to know the artists in Dresden, appearing in this branch as a beginner, he was fully developed as a writer. He had a comprehensive view of ancient history and, in many ways, of the development of the various sciences.
Which is better? to lay open a new sense, to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to cultivate many types of perfection up to a point which leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming power? Savonarola is one type of success; Winckelmann is another; criticism can reject neither, because each is true to itself.
And what are your impressions when you think of Winckelmann, who, that he might rid his eyes of your grotesque fatuousness, went to beg help from the Jesuits, and whose disgraceful religious conversion recoils upon you and will always remain an ineffaceable blemish upon you? You can even name Schiller without blushing! Just look at his picture!
Winckelmann questioned the works of the Greek chisel with an intelligence full of love, and initiated his countrymen into poetry by a feeling for sculpture!
In the best part of the city, facing the royal gardens in front of the marvellous bay, with Shelley for her guide, who himself made use of Madame de Stael's Corinne as a handbook, Livy for the antiquities, and Winckelmann for art, Mary could enjoy the sights of Naples as no ordinary sightseer would. December was devoted to expeditions Baiae, Vesuvius, and Pompeii.
Even those who believe that they have the best intentions only promote that which they love and know, or, more readily still, what is of advantage to them. Thus it was literary and bibliographical accomplishments which recommended Winckelmann formerly to Count Bünau and later to Cardinal Passione.
Vitruvius speaks at some length on ancient wall paintings. The finest specimens of ancient painting are found in catacombs, the baths, and the ruins of Pompeii. On this subject, Winckelmann is the great authority. It is not from a survey of the material grandeur, or the arts, or the military prowess of Rome that we get the highest idea of her civilization.
It aims at displaying "sensibility so charming" the strange artificial eighteenth-century conception of love which is neither exactly flirtation nor exactly passion, which sets convention at defiance, but retains its own code of morality; at exhibiting the national differences, as Madame de Stael conceived them, of the English and French and Italian temperaments; and at preaching the new cult of æsthetics whereof Lessing and Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schlegel, were in different ways and degrees the apostles.
Painting was, in this manner, confined to a slavish imitation of nature, for whose lowest objects a predilection was evinced until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a style, half Italian, half antique, was introduced into Germany by the operas, by travellers, and more particularly by the galleries founded by the princes, and was still further promoted by the learned researches of connoisseurs, more especially by those of Winckelmann.
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