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The sole means for us to become--ay, if possible, inimitably great--is the imitation of the ancients.
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In Greek sculpture the painter can attain to the most sublime conception of beauty, and learn what he must lend to nature in order to give dignity and propriety to his imitation, writes Solomon Gessner in 1759. In 1762 Hagedorn of Dresden deplored, in his _Treatise on Painting_, that
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Terburg and Metsu never showed us fair Andromache amongst her industrious women, instead of Dutch sempstresses. In 1766 Lessing wrote his _Laocoön_, and, like Winckelmann, saw in the sculpture of the Greeks the ideal to be imitated. From this point forward he despised landscape and _genre_ painting, and especially everything which illustrates intimate emotions and actions, and would confine the composition of pictures to an arrangement of two or three
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Soon afterwards, with almost astonishing partiality, Goethe intervened in a notable manner on behalf of Classicism with the most flagrant contradiction of the ideas of his youth.
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Nature alone, he had said in _Werther_,
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; and in his essay upon _German Method and Art_ he aimed this sentence at Winckelmann and his followers:
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You yourselves, admirable beings, to whom it was given to enjoy the highest beauty, you are hurtful to genius; it will be raised up and borne along on no strange wings, were they even the wings of the dawn. In the same essay occurs the beautiful passage:
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If art is produced out of an inward, single, independent conception, untroubled by, unconscious indeed, of, all that is extraneous, then whether she be born of rough wildness or of cultivated sensibility, she is complete and living. Soon afterwards he wrote again these great words:
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Rembrandt appears to me in his biblical subjects as a true saint who saw God present everywhere, at every step, in the chamber and in the fields, and did not need the surrounding pomp of temples and sacrifices to feel drawn towards Him, --an observation made at a time when the academic and erudite writer on art was still for years to perceive in the biblical pictures of the great Dutchman only a crude conception of form. In another passage, upon the frescoes of Mantegna, in the Church of the Anchorite, at Padua, there occur the following sentences, showing the deepest historical perception:
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How sharp and sure a modernity stands out in these pictures! From this modernity, which is quite real, and not merely seeming, with factitious effects, speaking only to the imaginative faculty, but solid, detailed, and conscientiously circumscribed, and which at the same time has something austere and industrious and painstaking--from this issued subsequent painters such as Titian; and now the liveliness of their genius, the energy of their nature, enlightened by the spirit of their predecessors, built up through their strength, was able to soar ever higher and higher, to rise from earth and create divine but real figures. But, alas! later on he did not draw the conclusion which followed quite logically from these observations for the judgment of contemporary German art. He came back from Italy as a disciple and follower of Winckelmann's writings on art.
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Art has once for all, like the works of Homer, been written in Greek, and he deceives himself who believes that it is German.
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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.
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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.
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On High Treason :
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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:
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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:
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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
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It happened for the first time in the history of art, wrote Goethe,
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Des Deutschen Künstler's Vaterland, Ist Griechenland, ist Griechenland