Goethe's fragments of art-criticism contain a few pages of strange
pregnancy on the character of Winckelmann. He speaks of the teacher who
had made his career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of an
abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into
the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a
passionate intellectual life. He classes him with certain works of art,
possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may
return again and again with renewed freshness. 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.
He is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have
known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit." That it has
given a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that
can be said of any critical effort. It is interesting then to ask what
kind of man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what conditions
was that effected?
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal, in Brandenburg, in the
year 1717. The child of a poor tradesman, he passed through many
struggles in early youth, the memory of which ever remained in him as a
fitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emancipation of his
spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman prospect, he writes--"One gets
spoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much."
Destined to assert and interpret the charm of the Hellenic spirit, he
served first a painful apprenticeship in the tarnished intellectual world
of Germany in the earlier half of the eighteenth century. Passing out of
that into the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of exhilaration
almost physical. We find him as a child in the dusky precincts of a
German school, hungrily feeding on a few colourless books. The master of
this school grows blind; Winckelmann becomes his famulus. The old man
would have had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of the master's
library, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek classics.
Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his warmest
enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted to them; disturbing dreams
of an Odyssey of his own come to him. "He felt in himself," says Madame
de Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the South." In German
imaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of the
sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried
the northern peoples away into those countries of the South. A fine sky
brings to birth sentiments not unlike the love of one's Fatherland.
To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in
spite of its intense outlines, its perfect self-expression, still remains
faint and remote. To him, closely limited except on the one side of the
ideal, building for his dark poverty "a house not made with hands," it
early came to seem more real than the present. In the fantastic plans of
foreign travel continually passing through his mind, to Egypt, for
instance, and to France, there seems always to be rather a wistful sense
of something lost to be regained, than the desire of discovering anything
new. 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.
At twenty-one he enters the University at Halle, to study theology, as
his friends desire; instead, he becomes the enthusiastic translator of
Herodotus. The condition of Greek learning in German schools and
universities had fallen, and there were no professors at Halle who could
satisfy his sharp, intellectual craving. Of his professional education he
always speaks with scorn, claiming to have been his own teacher from
first to last. His appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source
of culture was within their hands. Homo vagus et inconstans!--one of them
pedantically reports of the future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side
his irony was whetted. When professional education confers nothing but
irritation on a Schiller, no one ought to be surprised; for Schiller, and
such as he, are primarily spiritual adventurers. But that Winckelmann,
the votary of the gravest of intellectual traditions, should get nothing
but an attempt at suppression from the professional guardians of
learning, is what may well surprise us.
In 1743 he became master of a school at Seehausen. This was the most
wearisome period of his life. Notwithstanding a success in dealing with
children, which seems to testify to something simple and primeval in his
nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in this
work, he writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attain
to the knowledge of beauty--sehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des Schoenen
zu gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours, to
gain time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in
culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all
flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading
had been considerable,--all but the literature of the arts. Nothing was
to enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this
time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that
flimsier, more artificial, classical tradition, which Winckelmann was one
day to supplant, by the clear ring, the eternal outline of the genuine
antique. But it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's that it
allures and wins even those born to supplant it. Voltaire's impression on
Winckelmann was never effaced; and it gave him a consideration for French
literature which contrasts with his contempt for the literary products of
Germany. German literature transformed, siderealised, as we see it in
Goethe, reckons Winckelmann among its initiators. But Germany at that
time presented nothing in which he could have anticipated Iphigenie, and
the formation of an effective classical tradition in German literature.
Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann protests against
Christian Wolff and the philosophers. Goethe, in speaking of this
protest, alludes to his own obligations to Emmanuel Kant. Kant's
influence over the culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not have
been resisted by him without loss, consisted in a severe limitation to
the concrete. But he adds, that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann,
constant handling of the antique, with its eternal outline, maintains
that limitation as effectually as a critical philosophy. Plato, however,
saved so often for his redeeming literary manner, is excepted from
Winckelmann's proscription of the philosophers. The modern student most
often meets Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato into a
world no longer pagan, based on the conception of a spiritual life. 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.
This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could not fail to increase
his desire to visit the countries of the classical tradition. "It is my
misfortune," he writes, "that I was not born to great place, wherein I
might have had cultivation, and the opportunity of following my instinct
and forming myself." A visit to Rome probably was already purposed, and
he silently preparing for it. Count Buenau, the author of an historical
work then of note, had collected at Noethenitz a valuable library, now
part of the library of Dresden. In 1784 Winckelmann wrote to Buenau in
halting French:--He is emboldened, he says, by Buenau's indulgence for
needy men of letters. He desires only to devote himself to study, having
never allowed himself to be dazzled by favourable prospects of the
Church. He hints at his doubtful position "in a metaphysical age, when
humane literature is trampled under foot. At present," he goes on,
"little value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted myself
so far as I could penetrate, when good books are so scarce and
expensive." Finally, he desires a place in some corner of Buenau's
library. "Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become more useful to the
public, if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find means to
maintain myself in the capital."
Soon afterwards we find Winckelmann in the library at Noethenitz. Thence
he made many visits to the collection of antiquities at Dresden. He
became acquainted with many artists, above all with Oeser, Goethe's
future friend and master, who, uniting a high culture with the practical
knowledge of art, was fitted to minister to Winckelmann's culture. And
now there opened for him a new way of communion with the Greek life.
Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred indeed
and roused by them, yet divining beyond the words an unexpressed
pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly he is in contact with that life,
still fervent in the relics of plastic art. Filled as our culture is with
the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how deeply the human mind was
moved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the
buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann here
reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a sudden
the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to
say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have
apprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life we have been
seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabout
have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic
reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little they have
emancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lost
proportions of life right themselves. Here, then, we see in vivid
realisation the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract
theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the
Laocoon, has theorised finely on the relation of poetry to sculpture; and
philosophy can give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture
should be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By a
happy, unperplexed dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the
concrete. It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen
Kunst, his FINDING of Greek art.
Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence of
Winckelmann is always discernible, as the strong, regulative
under-current of a clear, antique motive. "One learns nothing from him,"
he says to Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask what the
secret of this influence was, Goethe himself will tell us--elasticity,
wholeness, intellectual integrity. And yet these expressions, because
they fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly to
describe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckelmann. Doubtless
Winckelmann's perfection is a narrow perfection: his feverish nursing of
the one motive of his life is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. But
what affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered to his culture,
was the integrity, the truth to its type, of the given force. The
development of his force was the single interest of Winckelmann,
unembarrassed by anything else in him. Other interests, practical or
intellectual, those slighter talents and motives not supreme, which in
most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, he
plucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of his youth is not
a vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for, what he wills.
Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava. "You know," says
Lavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardour
and indifference by no means incompatible in the same character. If ever
there was a striking instance of that union, it is in the countenance
before us." "A lowly childhood," says Goethe, "insufficient instruction
in youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the burden of
school-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single favour
of fortune: but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of
freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the
ancient sense."
But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached the south. The
Saxon court had become Roman Catholic, and the way to favour at Dresden
was through Romish ecclesiastics. Probably the thought of a profession of
the Romish religion was not new to Winckelmann. At one time he had
thought of begging his way to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the
pretence of a disposition to change his faith. In 1751, the papal nuncio,
Archinto, was one of the visitors at Noethenitz. He suggested Rome as the
fitting stage for Winckelmann's attainments, and held out the hope of a
place in the papal library. Cardinal Passionei, charmed with
Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing, was ready to play the part of
Maecenas, on condition that the necessary change should be made.
Winckelmann accepted the bribe, and visited the nuncio at Dresden.
Unquiet still at the word "profession," not without a struggle, he joined
the Romish Church, July the 11th, 1754.
Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan, that the landmarks of
Christendom meant nothing to him. It is clear that he intended to deceive
no one by his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes visible
during his life in Rome; he entered Rome notoriously with the works of
Voltaire in his possession; the thought of what Count Buenau might be
thinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the other
hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan
grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed
Protestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he might
reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the
Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme
tradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with its
simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must
have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this
sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann
may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one
incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or
political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was
that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the
mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless
routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the
intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high
motive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and the aim of our
culture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life as
possible. But often the higher life is only possible at all, on condition
of the selection of that in which one's motive is native and strong; and
this selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved for others.
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. 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. Full of obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled but
did not offend Goethe when he first turned to art-criticism, its purpose
was direct--an appeal from the artificial classicism of the day to the
study of the antique. The book was well received, and a pension supplied
through the king's confessor. In September 1755 he started for Rome, in
the company of a young Jesuit. He was introduced to Raphael Mengs, a
painter then of note, and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter,
in a place where he could "overlook, far and wide, the eternal city." At
first he was perplexed with the sense of being a stranger on what was to
him, spiritually, native soil. "Unhappily," he cries in French, often
selected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling, "I am one of those whom
the Greeks call opsimatheis.--I have come into the world and into Italy
too late." More than thirty years afterwards, Goethe also, after many
aspirations and severe preparation of mind, visited Italy. 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. His delicate
constitution permitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned by
many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour, but only to
see his merits acknowledged, and existence assured to him. He was simple
without being niggardly; he desired to be neither poor nor rich.
Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of an
intellectual situation of the highest interest. The beating of the
intellect against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the
still barbarous literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are
adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokens
of the advent of the new German literature, with its broad horizons, its
boundless intellectual promise. 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. Hellenism, which is the principle
pre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have more
colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is
pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by
those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the
sombre elements predominate. 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. "There had been
known before him," says Madame de Stael, "learned men who might be
consulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a
pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." "One is always a poor
executant of conceptions not one's own."--On execute mal ce qu'on n'a pas
concu soi-meme*--words spoken on so high an occasion--are true in their
measure of every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm--that, in the broad
Platonic sense of the Phaedrus, was the secret of his divinatory power
over the Hellenic world. This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great
degree on bodily temperament, has a power of re-enforcing the purer
emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his
affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler
threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic,
fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men
more beautiful than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him in
contact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts with its
bloom, perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture.
A letter on taste, addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich von
Berg, is the record of such a friendship.
*Words of Charlotte Corday before the Convention.
"I shall excuse my delay," he begins, "in fulfilling my promise of an
essay on the taste for beauty in works of art, in the words of Pindar. He
says to Agesidamus, a youth of Locri--ideai te kalon, horai te
kekramenon--whom he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt
paid with usury is the end of reproach. This may win your good-nature on
behalf of my present essay, which has turned out far more detailed and
circumstantial than I had at first intended.
"It is from yourself that the subject is taken. Our intercourse has been
short, too short both for you and me; but the first time I saw you, the
affinity of our spirits was revealed to me: your culture proved that my
hope was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful body a soul created
for nobleness, gifted with the sense of beauty. My parting from you was
therefore one of the most painful in my life; and that this feeling
continues our common friend is witness, for your separation from me
leaves me no hope of seeing you again. Let this essay be a memorial of
our friendship, which, on my side, is free from every selfish motive, and
ever remains subject and dedicate to yourself alone."