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Updated: May 13, 2025
Magna Græcia, Sicily, Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Ionia, and Egypt all of them are, so to say, offered to the inhabitants of Rome, and awaken an inexpressible longing in one who, like Winckelmann, was born with the desire to see.
This epoch is marked by that style which Winckelmann describes as the still harsh and severe, from which the next or lofty style was able to develop itself by the mere enhancement of the Characteristic into the Sublime and the Simple.
One becomes accustomed to regard such collections as completed, instead of being reminded of the necessity of constant acquisition and of the fact that, in art as in life, nothing is completed but is constantly changing. Winckelmann found himself in a fortunate position.
It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence of the primitive and inchoate known in England and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It has escaped also that almost abject worship of classic models which Winckelmann and Canova made universal in Germany and Italy not to speak of its echoes elsewhere.
Heinecken, on the contrary, could not be honorably mentioned, partly because he devoted himself too assiduously to the ever-childish beginnings of German art; which Oeser little valued, partly because he had once treated Winckelmann shabbily, which could never be forgiven him.
I spoke to her one day about this unpleasant obligation, and she said that her confessor had charged her to fulfil it, "for," said he, "if your husband has another woman for a model he will be sure to enjoy her before painting her, and that sin would be laid to your charge." After supper, Winckelmann, who was as far gone as all the other male guests, played with Mengs's children.
We have now a sufficiently large number of documents lying before us to enable us to judge how far Winckelmann succeeded in doing this. Through the joy of appreciation he was first attracted to the treasures of art; but in order to use and judge them, he required artists as intermediaries, whose more or less authoritative opinions he was able to comprehend, revise, and express.
But the element of affinity which he presents to Winckelmann is that which is wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian world, represented by that group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by any spiritual sickness, finding the end of all endeavour in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and motion of a comely human life.
It was then a fine period in literature, when eminent men were yet treated with respect; although the disputes of Klotz and Lessing's controversies already indicated that this epoch would soon close. Winckelmann enjoyed an universal, unassailed reverence; and it is known how sensitive he was with regard to any thing public which did not seem commensurate with his deeply felt dignity.
But Winckelmann might have groped a long time among the multitudes of antique survivals in search of the most valuable objects and those most worthy of his observation, if good fortune had not immediately brought him into contact with Mengs.
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