Nöthenitz. 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 a new
channel of communion with the Greek life was opened for him.
Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred
indeed and roused by them, yet divining beyond the words some
unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly [184] 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 that more
liberal mode of 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 have they really
emancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the
lost proportions of life right themselves. Here, then, in vivid
realisation we see 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 may 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.
[185] 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--wholeness, unity with one's self,
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 this
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 [186] 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
so 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 Roman ecclesiastics. Probably
the thought of a profession of the papal 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 Nöthenitz. He suggested
Rome as the fitting stage for Winckelmann's accomplishments,
and held out the hope of a place in the Pope's library. Cardinal
Passionei, charmed with Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing,
was ready to play the part of Maecenas, if the indispensable
change were made. Winckelmann accepted the bribe, and visited
the nuncio at Dresden. Unquiet still at the word "profession," not
without a struggle, he joined the Roman Church, July the 11th,
1754.
[187] 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 Bünau 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 ennui 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 [188] 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 [189] 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
true 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
soul against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions,*
[190] 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 Staël, "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 exécute mal ce
qu'on n'a pas conçu soi-même*--are true in their measure of
every genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm,--that, in the broad
Platonic sense of the Phaedrus, was the secret of [191] 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 into contact with the pride of human form, and staining the
thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation to 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.
"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--idea te kalon, hôra 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: [192] 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."
The following passage is characteristic--
"As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived
under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are
observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at
all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn
instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art
will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather
male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher
sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art,
like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must
be awakened and repaired by culture. 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."
[193] Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated
Winckelmann's friendships, it could not be said that it gave no
pain. One notable friendship, the fortune of which we may trace
through his letters, begins with an antique, chivalrous letter in
French, and ends noisily in a burst of angry fire. Far from
reaching the quietism, the bland indifference of art, such
attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any others of
equal strength of a purely intellectual culture. 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 around the mute Olympian family. The
impression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those
about him was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather
than the contemplative evolution of general principles. The
quick, susceptible enthusiast, betraying his temperament even in
appearance, by his olive complexion, his deep-seated, piercing
eyes, his rapid movements, apprehended the subtlest principles of
the Hellenic manner, not through the understanding, but by
instinct or touch. A German biographer of Winckelmann has
compared him to Columbus. That is not the aptest of comparisons;
but it reminds one of [194] a passage in which Edgar Quinet
describes the great discoverer's famous voyage. His science was
often at fault; but he had a way of estimating at once the slightest
indication of land, in a floating weed or passing bird; he seemed
actually to come nearer to nature than other men. And that world
in which others had moved with so much embarrassment, seems
to call out in Winckelmann new senses fitted to deal with it. He
is in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes part of his
temperament. He remodels his writings with constant renewal of
insight; he catches the thread of a whole sequence of laws in
some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair; he seems to
realise that fancy of the reminiscence of a forgotten knowledge
hidden for a time in the mind itself; as if the mind of one, lover
and philosopher at once in some phase of pre-existence--philosophêsas
pote met' erôtos.+--fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its
intellectual career over again, yet with a certain power of
anticipating its results. 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 für die Lebendigen geschrieben, ein
Leben selbst.
In 1758 Cardinal Albani, who had formed in his Roman villa a
precious collection of antiquities, became Winckelmann's patron.
Pompeii had just opened its treasures; Winckelmann [195]
gathered its first-fruits. But his plan of a visit to Greece remained
unfulfilled. From his first arrival in Rome he had kept the
History of Ancient Art ever in view. All his other writings were a
preparation for that. It appeared, finally, in 1764; but even after
its publication Winckelmann was still employed in perfecting it.
It is since his time that many of the most significant examples of
Greek art have been submitted to criticism. He had seen little or
nothing of what we ascribe to the age of Pheidias; and his
conception of Greek art tends, therefore, to put the mere elegance
of the imperial society of ancient Rome in place of the severe and
chastened grace of the palaestra. 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. Admiring Germany had
made many calls to him. At last, in 1768, he set out to revisit the
country of his birth; and as he left Rome, a strange, inverted
home-sickness, a strange reluctance to leave it at all, came over
him. He reached Vienna. There he was loaded with honours and
presents: other cities were awaiting him. Goethe, then nineteen
years old, studying art at Leipsic, was expecting his coming, with
that wistful eagerness which marked his youth, when the news
[196] of Winckelmann's murder arrived. All his "weariness of
the North" had revived with double force. He left Vienna,
intending to hasten back to Rome, and at Trieste a delay of a few
days occurred. With characteristic openness, Winckelmann had
confided his plans to a fellow-traveller, a man named Arcangeli,
and had shown him the gold medals received at Vienna.
Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he entered
Winckelmann's room, under pretence of taking leave.
Winckelmann was then writing "memoranda for the future editor
of the History of Art," still seeking the perfection of his great
work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals once more. As
Winckelmann stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord
was thrown round his neck. Some time afterwards, a child with
whose companionship Winckelmann had beguiled his delay,
knocked at the door, and receiving no answer, gave the alarm.
Winckelmann was found dangerously wounded, and died a few
hours later, after receiving the last sacraments. It seemed as if the
gods, in reward for his devotion to them, had given him a death
which, for its swiftness and its opportunity, he might well have
desired. "He has," says Goethe, "the advantage of figuring in the
memory of posterity, as one eternally able and strong; for the
image in which one leaves the world is that in which one moves
among the shadows." Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret that
his proposed [197] meeting with Goethe never took place.
Goethe, then in all the pregnancy of his wonderful youth, still
unruffled by the "press and storm" of his earlier manhood, was
awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the worthiest kind. As
it was, Winckelmann became to him something like what Virgil
was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with his fiery friendships, had
reached that age and that period of culture at which emotions
hitherto fitful, sometimes concentrate themselves in a vital,
unchangeable relationship. German literary history seems to
have lost the chance of one of those famous friendships, the very
tradition of which becomes a stimulus to culture, and exercises an
imperishable influence.
In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael has commemorated
the tradition of the Catholic religion. Against a space of tranquil
sky, broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great
personages of Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst.
Another fresco of Raphael in the same apartment presents a very
different company, Dante alone appearing in both. Surrounded
by the muses of Greek mythology, under a thicket of laurel, sits
Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. On either side are
grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the
classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia
[198] come down, a river making glad this other "city of God."
In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste,
that Raphael commemorates. Winckelmann's intellectual history
authenticates the claims of this tradition in human culture. In the
countries where that tradition arose, where it still lurked about its
own artistic relics, and changes of language had not broken its
continuity, national pride might sometimes light up anew an
enthusiasm for it. Aliens might imitate that enthusiasm, and
classicism become from time to time an intellectual fashion. But
Winckelmann was not further removed by language, than by
local aspects and associations, from those vestiges of the classical
spirit; and he lived at a time when, in Germany, classical studies
were out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels after
the Hellenic world, divines those channels of ancient art, in
which its life still circulates, and, like Scyles, the half-barbarous
yet Hellenising king, in the beautiful story of Herodotus, is
irresistibly attracted by it. This testimony to the authority of the
Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of
the intellect, which Winckelmann contributes as a solitary man of
genius, is offered also by the general history of the mind. The
spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted and informed
the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture,
but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic element
alone [199] has not been so absorbed, or content with this
underground life; from time to time it has started to the surface;
culture has been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and
corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our
intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it.
Again, individual genius works ever under conditions of time and
place: its products are coloured by the varying aspects of nature,
and type of human form, and outward manners of life. There is
thus an element of change in art; criticism must never for a
moment forget that "the artist is the child of his time." But
besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of
them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste,
which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely
intellectual tradition. It acts upon the artist, not as one of the
influences of his own age, but through those artistic products of
the previous generation which first excited, while they directed
into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme
artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of
elevated points, taking each from each the reflection of a strange
light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and
above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The
standard of taste, then, was fixed in Greece, at a definite
historical period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it
originates in a spontaneous [200] growth out of the influences of
Greek society. What were the conditions under which this ideal,
this standard of artistic orthodoxy, was generated? How was
Greece enabled to force its thought upon Europe?