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.
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