[347]. It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly the opposite course.
[348]. British Museum.—Tr.
[349]. Pinakothek, Munich.—Tr.
[350]. Art Gallery, Vienna.—Tr.
[351]. Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the middle of the 19th century than its absurd rendering of acts by masses; the deeper meaning of act-study and the importance of the motive have been entirely forgotten.
[352]. By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and Böcklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann, Rayski[Wasmann, Rayski] and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th Century, gain. And Marées passes to the rank of the very greatest.
[353]. Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona.—Tr.
[354]. National Gallery, London.—Tr.
[355]. Museo Nazionale, Florence.—Tr.
[356]. It is the same “noble simplicity and quiet greatness”—to speak in the language of the German Classicists—that produces such an impression of the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion of peace is one of an infinite peace. We feel the “Rest in God” to be an expanse of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing whatever in common.