And why should there be any thing more derogatory to the honour of the Swedes, in my repeating Count Tessin’s relation, than in his giving it? Perhaps, because the learned author of the circumstantial life of Queen Christina omits her indiscreet generosity towards Bourdon, and that bad treatment which the pictures of Corregio met with? or was Härleman[109] himself charged with indiscretion or malice, on his relating that, at Lincöping, he found a college, and seven professors, but not one physician or artificer?
It was my design to explain myself more particularly, concerning the negligences of the Greeks, had I been allowed time. The Greeks, as their criticism on the partridge of Protogenes, and his blotting it[110], evidently shews, were not ignorant in learned negligence. But the Zeus of Phidias was the standard of sublimity, the symbol of the omnipresent Deity; like Homer’s Eris, he stood upon the earth, and reached heaven; he was, in the style of sacred poesy, “What encompasses him? &c.” And the world has been candid enough to excuse, nay, even to justify on such reasons, the disproportions in the Carton of Raphael, representing the fishing of Peter[111]. The criticism on the Diomedes, though solid, is not against me: his action, abstractedly considered, with his noble and expressive contour, are standards of the art; and that was all I advanced[112].
The reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks may be reduced to four heads, viz.
I. The perfect Nature of the Greeks;
II. The Characteristicks of their works;
III. The Imitation of these;
IV. Their manner of Thinking upon the Art; and Allegory.
Probability was all I pretended to, with regard to the first; which cannot be fully demonstrated, notwithstanding all the assistance of history. For, these advantages of the Greeks were, perhaps, less founded on their nature, and the influences of the climate, than on their education.