Читать книгу The Greatest German Classics (Vol. 1-14) - Various - Страница 1492

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The transition from literature, even from the highest things that have been expressed in word and language, from poetry and rhetoric, to the plastic and graphic arts is difficult, indeed almost impossible. For there lies between the two a tremendous chasm, over which only a specially adapted nature can help us. 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. In this manner originated his treatise Concerning the Imitation of Greek Masterpieces in Painting and Sculpture, with two appendices, published while he was still in Dresden.

However much Winckelmann appears, even here, to be upon the right path; however many delightful, fundamental passages these writings contain, however correctly the final aim of art is already defined in them, they are nevertheless, both as regards form and subject, so baroque and curious, that one would in vain seek their meaning, unless he had definite information concerning the personality of the connoisseurs and judges of art at that time assembled in Saxony, and concerning their abilities, opinions, inclinations and whims. These writings will therefore remain a sealed book to posterity, unless well informed connoisseurs of art, who lived nearer those times, should soon decide either to write or cause to be written a description of the then existing conditions, in so far as this is still possible. Lippert, Hagedorn, Oeser, Dietrich, Heinecken and Oesterreich loved, practised and promoted art, each in his own way. 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.

Although not sufficiently prepared, yet with some practical experience, he at length began his journey, and reached that country where for the receptive mind the time of real culture begins—that culture which permeates the entire being, and finds expression in creations which must be as real as they are harmonious, because they have, as a matter of fact, proved powerful as a firm bond of union between most different natures.