In that eternity from whence we came Perhaps correlative to high desire The Universal Soul's undying fire, The Growth-Law which is God, informs us still. The all-embracing Mind, the Super-Soul. C. L. MARSH. THE TWO-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF T THE BIRTH OF WINCKELMANN. HE year 1917 is not only the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Reformation, but also the two-hundredth of the birth of Winckelmann, the founder of scientific archeology and the father of modern art criticism. There is more of similarity in the work of Luther and Winckelmann, if both are judged by the influence which they wrought on posterity, than appears at first sight. While the one brought a complete change into the attitude of men's minds toward religion, teaching that an independent judgment is the inalienable right of every religious man, the other effected no less complete a change in the world of esthetics, by overthrowing the false taste in art and wrong conception of classical learning which obtained throughout Europe in his day, and by laying the foundations of a wholly new science. In reading the biography of Winckelmann by Karl Justi' one feels that he is in the presence not only of one of the greatest scholars, but one of the greatest of men. His greatness as a scholar is indubitably attested by the scientific work which he left behind him, as well as by the influence which he exerted not only over his immediate contemporaries, but over the whole world of learning and culture since; his greatness as a man is no less clearly discernible in the infinite capacity which he possessed for 1 Winckelmann, sein Leben, seine Werke und seine Zeitgenossen, 3 vols. Leipsic, 1865-72. 2d ed. 1898. overcoming the almost insuperable difficulties of his early career until he reached his life's ambition. Nor was he only concerned with books and monuments, but with men, constantly seeking the help and inspiration of true friends, since he believed that friendship was the greatest of human virtues. For one born and schooled in adversity in an age and in an environment whose ideals were out of harmony with his very nature; for one who not only lacked the means to properly prosecute his studies, but the inspiration of contemporary science and art; for one who had never seen a genuine monument of ancient art until he had passed his thirtieth year; for such a one to have raised himself by sheer ability and industry to the highest place in European scholarship and to have been the means of completely reversing the attitude of his day toward art-all this discloses greatness of a rare order. For Winckelmann was not one of those fortunate mortals who are born in the lap of luxury, whose genius is slowly but easily unfolded throughout a long life and at the end crowned with great rewards; on the contrary he was of lowly birth and only with incredible difficulty accomplished his life work, and then was suddenly cut off by an appalling calamity after having barely passed his fiftieth year. His brief life was one of great contrasts in which the shadows and lights were about equally balanced-his journey to Rome in his thirtyeighth year dividing it into two distinct parts. It was the contrast of want and competence, of removal from the rudest environment to association with the world's best collections of art and intercourse with the greatest personalities of Italy and Europe, of being the teacher of recalcitrant village school children to becoming the preceptor of Europe and posterity. It is surely a life story well worthy our study and emulation. To understand the character and significance of the change in the esthetic view-point wrought by Winckel mann's influence, we must understand how it was that Italian taste with its prejudice in favor of Latin studies over Greek and indifference to the latter had dominated Europe for two hundred years before his time. The study of Greek, which had been so enthusiastically begun by the Greek immigrants and Italian humanists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as the great period of Italian art beginning with 1300 and so intimately connected with the commercial prosperity of the free states of central and northern Italy, began to languish after the first quarter of the sixteenth century. This decline was primarily due to the loss of political independence in these states during the disasters which befell them in the time of Michelangelo. Italy, the fairest and richest of countries, then became the prey of foreign armies and could no longer under the leadership of the popes present a united front against invasion. An army of Charles V sacked the eternal city in 1527 and took Pope Clement prisoner; two years later Florence was besieged by another imperial army and by its surrender in 1530 lost its liberty, and by the reestablishment of the Medici in 1532 as hereditary dukes of the capital and later of all Tuscany, Italian freedom was doomed. From then on until 1796-over two hundred and fifty years-Italy had no political history of its own: its annals were filled with records of dynastic changes and redistributions of territories, and it became the theater of desolating wars fought for the most part by the armies of contending foreign princes and for ambitions in which the Italian people had no share. The brilliant aristocracies which had long cultivated humanistic studies were ruined and the predominant influence of the reformed Catholic Church looked with no friendly eye on the worship of pagan ideals, an attitude which was bound to divert Italy from classical learning. The Greek elements and influences in Roman art and letters had been so thor oughly assimilated at the end of antiquity by the Imperial Age of Rome that there were few Italians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were aware of their independent Greek origin. The Mohammedans were holding Greek lands in thraldom, and no one visited them to bring back a truer knowledge to counteract the growing tendency to treat Roman studies as superior to Greek and to look upon them as original. Patriotism, moreover, naturally led Italian scholars to exalt their own country as the center of the old Empire of Rome. They knew Italy's debt to the Romans in both literature and art and enthusiastically imitated them without any critical idea that the Romans had largely copied the Greeks. The fact that Italian was descended from the language of Rome made it easy for them to unlock the treasures of Latin literature. Thus, generally speaking, it had come to be customary in Italy to ignore Greek studies and to prefer everything Roman, and this way of looking at things spread over all Europe until finally, in Winckelmann's century, Italian taste, founded upon a wholly mistaken historical conception, ruled all cultivated nations. The great Italian humanist, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, long before had declaimed against Greek in favor of Latin, and his book of Latin verses the Poetice - which appeared posthumously in 1561, remained a standard of taste down into the eighteenth century. Though the French historian de Thou exalted him above all scholars ancient and modern for his learning and talent, we know that he only looked upon classical studies as an agreable relaxation from the severer pursuits of life. In fact his chief amusement in later years was the composition of Latin verses. Thus within a century of Byzantium's fall, the Renaissance had already begun to take on in Italy its characteristic Roman bias. In France the sixteenth-century Greek tradition inaugurated by Stephanus and Turnebus soon began to wane. |