Amongst his contemporaries voices were not wanting to point out how fatal this programme was. Notably, Wilhelm Heinse, in 1776, wrote this golden sentence: “Art can only direct itself to the people with whom it lives. Every one works for the people amongst whom fate has thrown him, and seeks to plumb its heart. Every country has its own distinctive art, just as it has its own climate, its scenery, its own taste, and its own drink.”
Similarly, Klopstock opposed Winckelmann’s theories in these lines—
| “Nachahmen soll ich nicht und dennoch nennet, Dein ewig Lob nur immer Griechenland. Wem Genius in seinem Busen brennet, Der ahm’ den Griechen nach!—der Griech’ erfand.” |
Again, in the German Republic of Letters, in the chapter “On High Treason”: “It is high treason for any one to maintain that the Greeks cannot be surpassed.” In a letter to Goethe, in the year 1800, Schiller wrote: “The antique was a manifestation of its age which can never return, and to force the individual production of an individual age after the pattern of one quite heterogeneous, is to kill that art which can only have a dynamic origin and effect.” Madame de Staël, in her book on Germany, says: “If nowadays the fine arts should be confined to the simplicity of the ancients, we should not then be able to attain to the original strength which distinguished them, while we should lose that intimate, composite feeling for life which is especially found in us. Simplicity in art would easily turn with the moderns into coldness and affectation, whereas with the ancients it was full of life.” In 1797 Counsellor Hirth published in Schiller’s Horæ his well-known treatise on Beauty in Art, which, in opposition to the inanimate type of beauty of Winckelmann, upheld the characteristic as the first principle in art. Most remarkable, however, is the breadth of historical outlook which was peculiar to Herder, and the stern actuality with which in his Plastik, and in the Vierten Kritischen Wäldchen, he turned against “those pitiful critics, those wretched and narrow rules of art, that bitter-sweet prattle of universal beauty, through which the younger generation is being ruined, which is nauseating to the master, and which, nevertheless, the rabble of connoisseurs takes in its mouth as words of wisdom.... Shadows and sunrise, lightning and thunder, the brook and the flame the sculptor cannot model; but is that therefore to be a reason why it should not be done by the painter? What other law has painting, what other power and function, than to depict the great scheme of nature with all her manifestations, in their great and beautiful aspect? And with what magic it does this! They are not clever who despise landscape painting, the fragments of nature of the great harmony of creation, who depreciate it or entirely forbid it to the sincere artist. Is a painter not to be a painter? Is he to turn statues with his brush, and fiddle with his colours, just as it may please their antique taste? To represent the scheme of creation seems vulgar to them; just as though heaven and earth were not better than an old statue.... Doubtless Greek sculpture stands in the sea of time like a lighthouse, but it should be only a friend and not a commander. Painting is a scheme of magic, as vast as the world and as history, and certainly not every figure in it can or ought to be a statue. In a picture no single figure is everything; and if they are all equally beautiful, no one then is beautiful any longer. They become a dull monotony of long-limbed Greek figures with straight noses, who all stand there and parade and take as little part in the action as possible. Now, when this misrepresentation of beauty cries scorn at the same time upon the whole conception, upon history, upon character, upon action, and this openly attacks that as a lie, there comes a discord, something insupportable, into painting, which certainly the antique pedant is unaware of, but which is felt all the more by the true friend of the antique. And finally, our own actual age, the most fruitful subjects of history, the liveliest characters, all feeling of a simple truth and precision, will be antiquarianised away. Posterity will stand and gape at such fantasies in practice and theory, and will not know what we were, in what age we lived, nor what brought us to this wretched folly, to the wish to live in another age, in another nation and climate, and thereby to abandon, or vitiate deplorably, the whole order of nature and history.”
These sentences, however, stood in isolation, or else they came too late. Immediately after it had been heralded by the literary movement, after the archæologists had verbally announced its aim, formulated its principles and laws, German art turned into the new paths. “It happened for the first time in the history of art,” wrote Goethe, “that important talents took pleasure in disciplining themselves by the past, and so founding a new epoch in art.”
| “Des Deutschen Künstler’s Vaterland, Ist Griechenland, ist Griechenland” |
was sung in the academies. And this violent grasping after the ideal of a foreign race brought a bitter revenge, since not one of the artists who now appeared had the genius to create anything new out of the old.
| Photo Union, Munich. |
| MENGS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF. |
The disciples of Winckelmann had not been, like Goethe and Schiller, vigorous naturalists until the spirit of ancient times had looked upon them, and they were consequently still less able to resist her glance. They entered upon the new road not with that generative impulse of the creative mind, whose superabundance did not know what course it should take, what stream it should find. They adopted the forms, as they had been provided by the greater ages, without any doubt as to their absolute excellence, or the least attempt at any happy innovation. And if they “have better understood” the Greeks than their predecessors in Italy and France were able to do, then one is never less like an original nature than when one imitates them faithfully. Winckelmann’s road to inimitability led not only to a more hollow and lifeless Classicism than there ever had been, to a more cheerless and unpleasant art than any which the school of Bologna had produced. It tended, above all, since the thinking people had thought out the classic idea—which the other nations had not—to the sacrifice of all pictorial technique, of the whole knowledge which the age had up till then possessed. There is a legend in the history of the Church, that at the time of the donation of Constantine a voice was heard from Heaven: “This day has poison entered into the body of the Church.” To the German art of our century this poison was the writings of Winckelmann.
First of all it was Anton Rafael Mengs, whose originally strong and great talent was distorted by the counsels of the learned. As in the works of the Caracci, those only are to-day of any interest which reveal themselves least as eclectics and most as children of the seventeenth century, so with Mengs—he is only enjoyable now where he did not try to be antique, but sympathised without too much reflection on the traditions of his age. He is particularly so in his fine pastel portraits in the Dresden Gallery, which are wholly influenced by the taste for rococo, and are its last expiring manifestation. They are a testimony that it was not without some justice that the Apelles of Dresden was called by his contemporaries the most remarkable German painter of the eighteenth century. Rosalba Carriera and Liotard seem weak and insipid beside him; Reynolds only at his best had that characteristic clearness, that plastic energy of modelling, and that life-like colouring. There is nothing insipid or affected, nothing of that simpering affability that his successors brought into vogue. And when we remember that they proceeded from a youth of sixteen, the strength and simplicity of intuition seem incredible. In his later portraits, too, painted in oil, the better ones are directly classic; very noble in their clear, subtile, grey tone, strikingly alive, and, withal, of an extraordinary independence which shows no leaning upon any other master whatever. Mengs belongs to those portrait painters who look into the souls of their sitters, and he ranks, in works like his portrait of himself, in the Munich Gallery, amongst the best portrait painters of the eighteenth century.