Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Thoughts about imitating Greek works in painting and sculpture

The good taste, which is spreading more and more through the world, began to form under the Greek sky first. All inventions of foreign peoples came to Greece as the first seed, so to speak, and took on a different nature and form in the country which Minerva, it is said before all countries, instructed the Greeks to live in because of the moderate seasons they encountered here , as a country that would produce bright minds.

The taste that this nation has given to its works has remained its own; he has rarely moved far from Greece without losing anything, and he became known late under the distant lines of the sky. He was undoubtedly a complete stranger under a Nordic sky at the time when the two arts, whose great teachers were the Greeks, found little admirers; at the time when the most revered pieces of Correggio were hung in front of the windows to cover them in the royal stables at Stockholm.

And it must be admitted that the government of the great August is the really happy time when the arts, as a foreign colony, were introduced in Saxony. Under his successor, the German Titus, they became peculiar to this country, and through them the good taste becomes general.

It is an eternal monument to the greatness of this monarch that the greatest treasures from Italy, and whatever else has been accomplished in painting in other countries, are placed before the eyes of the world for the formation of good taste. His eagerness to immortalize the arts has finally not rested until truly unmistakable works by Greek masters, from the first range, have been given to artists for imitation.

The purest sources of art are open: those who find them and taste them are happy. Searching for these sources means traveling to Athens; and Dresden is now Athens for artists.

The only way for us, great, yes, if it is possible to become inimitable, is the imitation of the old, and what someone from Homer said that those who learn to admire him, who have learned to understand him, also applies to the works of art of Ancient, especially Greek. One must have become acquainted with them, as with one's friend, in order to find the Laocoon as inimitable as the Homer. Such a close acquaintance, like Nicomachus of Helena des Zeuxis, will judge: "Take my eyes," he said to an ignorant who wanted to blame the picture, "so she will seem a goddess to you."

Michelangelo, Raffael and Poussin looked at the works of the old with this eye. They have drawn good taste from its source, and Raphael in the country where it was formed. It is known that he sent young people to Greece to draw the remains of antiquity for him.

A statue from an ancient Roman hand will always behave against a Greek archetype like Virgil's Dido, compared in its wake to Diana under her ore, and behave against Homer's Nausicaa, which the latter sought to imitate.

Laokoon was exactly what it is to us in ancient Rome: the rule of Polyklet; a perfect rule of art.

I have no need to mention that there are certain negligence in the most famous works of Greek artists: the dolphin, which is admitted to the Medice Venus, along with the playing children; the work of the Dioskorides, besides the main character, in his cut Diomedes with the Palladio, are examples of this. It is known that the reverse work on the most beautiful coins of the Egyptian and Syrian kings rarely gets the heads of these kings. Great artists are wise in their negligence, they cannot be missing without teaching at the same time. Look at her works as Lucian claims to have looked at Jupiter of Phidias, Jupiter himself, not the footstool of his feet.

The connoisseurs and imitators of Greek works not only find the most beautiful nature in their masterpieces, but even more than nature, that is, certain ideal beauties of the same, which, as an old interpreter of Plato teaches us, of images, merely designed in mind, are made.

The most beautiful body among us might not be more like the most beautiful Greek body than Iphicles was Hercules, his brother. The influence of a soft and pure sky worked with the first formation of the Greeks, but the early physical exercises gave this formation the noble form. Take a young Spartan who was created by a hero with a heroine, who had never been confined to diapers in childhood, who had slept on earth since the seventh year, and had been practicing wrestling and swimming since childhood. Put him next to a young sybarite of our time: and then judge which of the two the artist would take as an archetype of a young Theseus, an Achilles, even a Bacchus. Formed after this, it would be a Theseus, educated by roses, and after that, a Theseus, educated by flesh, as a Greek painter judged by two different ideas of this hero.

The great games were a vigorous incentive for all young Greeks to exercise, and the law required ten months of preparation for the Olympic Games, in Elis, in the place where they were held. The greatest prizes were not always awarded to men, but mostly to young people, as Pindar's Oden shows. To become like the divine Diagoras was the highest wish of the youth.

Look at the fast Indian who is chasing a deer on foot. How volatile are his juices, how flexible and fast are his nerves and muscles, and how light is the whole structure of the body. This is how Homer makes us heroes, and he best describes his Achilles by the speed of his feet.

Through these exercises, the bodies received the large and masculine contour that the Greek masters gave their statues, without haze and unnecessary approach. The young Spartans had to show themselves naked every ten days in front of the Ephors, who put on a stricter diet for those who were beginning to get fat. Yes, it was one of the laws of Pythagoras to be careful above all of the unnecessary approach of the body. Perhaps it was for the very reason that young people among the ancient Greeks who competed in wrestling were only allowed to eat milk during the practice period.

All malaise of the body was carefully avoided, and since Alcibiades did not want to learn to blow the flute in his youth because it made a face, the young Athenians followed his example.

After that, the whole suit of the Greeks was made in such a way that it did not do the slightest coercion to the educational nature. The growth of the beautiful shape suffered nothing from the different types and parts of our today's pressing and pinching clothes, especially on the neck, hips and thighs. The fair sex, even among the Greeks, knew of no fearful compulsion in his plaster: the young Spartans were so light and short that they were called hip pointers.

It is also known how careful the Greeks were to father beautiful children. Quillet in his callipedia does not show as many ways to do this as was common among them. They even went so far that they tried to turn blue eyes into black ones. Beauty contests were also established to promote this goal. They were kept in Elis; the price was for weapons that were hung in the Temple of Minerva. There was no lack of thorough and learned judges in these games, since, as Aristotle reports, the Greeks taught their children to draw, mainly because they believed that it was more skillful to look at and judge the beauty in the bodies.

The beautiful blood of the inhabitants of most Greek islands, which is nevertheless mixed with so different foreign flowers, and the excellent irritation of the fair sex there, especially on the island of Skios, also give a well-founded conjecture of the beauties of both sexes among their ancestors, the boasted of being originally, yes older than the moon.

There are still whole peoples for whom beauty is not an advantage because everything is beautiful. The travel writers unanimously say this about the Georgians, and the same is said about the Kabardinski, a nation in the Crimean Tartarei.

The diseases which destroy so much beauty and spoil the noblest formations were still unknown to the Greeks. There are no traces of leaves in the writings of the Greek doctors, and no Greek indication of education, which one often sees in Homer after the slightest traits, has such a distinctive mark as leaf pits have been attached. Nor did the venereal evil and its daughter, the English disease, rage against the beautiful nature of the Greeks. In general, everything that was instilled and taught from birth to the fullness of growth for the formation of the body, for the preservation, elaboration and decoration of this formation had been worked and used to the advantage of the beautiful nature of the ancient Greeks, and can most likely give reason to assert the exquisite beauty of their bodies before ours.

The most perfect creatures of nature, however, would only have become partially and imperfectly known to artists in a country where nature was inhibited in many of its effects by stricter laws, such as in Egypt, the pre-determined fatherland of the arts and sciences. In Greece, however, where the joy and joy were consecrated from a young age, where a certain modern bourgeois prosperity of freedom of manners never made an entry, beautiful nature was revealed undisguised for the great teaching of the artists.

The school of artists was in high schools, where the young people, who covered the public bashfulness, did their physical exercises very naked. The wise, the artist went there: to teach Socrates, Charmides, Autolycus, Lysis; a Phidias to enrich his art from these beautiful creatures. There one learned movements of the muscles, turns of the body; the contours of the bodies or the contours were studied from the imprint that the young wrestlers had made in the sand.

The most beautiful neck end of the body is shown here in such varied, true and noble stands and positions, in which a hired model, which is set up in our academies, cannot be put.

The inner feeling forms the character of truth, and the draftsman who wants to give it to his academies will not receive a shadow of truth without replacing what an unmoved and indifferent soul of the model does not feel, nor by an action that one expresses certain sensation or passion.

The entrance to many of Plato's conversations, which he started at the high schools in Athens, gives us a picture of the noble souls of the youth and also leads us to conclude that there are uniform actions and positions in these places and in their physical exercises.

The most beautiful young people danced naked in the theater, and Sophocles, the great Sophocles, was the first to do this spectacle to his citizens in his youth. Phryne bathed in the Eleusinian games before the eyes of all the Greeks and became the archetype of a Venus Anadyomene for the artists when he got out of the water, and it is known that the young girls in Sparta danced naked at certain festivals before the eyes of the young people . What might seem strange here will be more bearable if you consider that even the Christians of the first church, without the slightest concealment, both men and women, were baptized or immersed at the same time and in the same baptismal font.

So every festival for the Greeks was an opportunity for artists to get to know the beautiful nature in great detail.

The humanity of the Greeks, in their flourishing freedom, had not wanted to introduce bloody spectacles, or if such things were common in Ionian Asia, as some believe, they had been stopped for some time. Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, prescribed fencers from Rome and let the Greeks see spectacles of these unfortunate people who were initially disgusted with them. Over time, human feeling was lost, and these spectacles also became schools for the artists. Here a Ktesilas studied his dying fencer, "from which one could see how much of his soul was left in him."

These frequent opportunities to observe nature prompted Greek artists to go further. They began to form certain general concepts of beauties of both individual parts and whole relationships of the bodies, which should rise above nature itself; her archetype was merely a mental nature designed in the mind.

So Raphael formed his Galatea. You can see his letter to Count Baldasare Castiglione: "Since the beauties," he writes, "are so rare among women, I use a certain idea in my imagination."

The Greeks formed gods and men according to such terms, which were higher than the ordinary form of matter. Forehead and nose made almost a straight line on gods and goddesses. The heads of famous women on Greek coins have the same profile, although it was not arbitrary to work according to ideal terms. Or one could speculate that this formation was as peculiar to the ancient Greeks as the flat noses of the Kalmyks and the small eyes of the Chinese. The big eyes of the Greek heads on stones and coins could support this speculation.

The Roman empresses were formed by the Greeks on their coins according to precisely these ideas. The head of a Livia and an Agrippina has the same profile as the head of an Artemisia and a Cleopatra.

In all of these, one notices that the law prescribed by the Thebans to their artists "to imitate nature in punishment in the best way" has also been observed as a law by other artists in Greece. Where the gentle Greek profile could not be applied without the disadvantage of similarity, they followed the truth of nature, as can be seen on the beautiful head of Juliet, Emperor Titus' daughter, from the hand of Euodus.

But the law "to make people look similar and at the same time more beautiful" was always the highest law that Greek artists recognized about themselves, and necessarily presupposes an intention of the master towards a more beautiful and perfect nature. Polygnot has constantly observed the same.

So when it is reported by some artists that they act like Praxiteles, who formed his Knidische Venus after his co-sleeper Kratina, or like other painters, who took the Lais as a model of the Graces, I believe that it was done without deviating from reported general great laws of art. The sensual beauty gave the artist beautiful nature, the ideal beauty the sublime features; he took the human from that, the divine from this.

If someone has enlightenment enough to look into the innermost of art, by comparing the rest of the structure of the Greek figures with most of the newer ones, especially in which one has followed nature rather than old taste, there will be many little-discovered beauties.

In most figures of recent masters, the parts of the body that are pressed together show small, even too marked folds of the skin; on the other hand, where the same folds lie in the same pressed parts of Greek figures, a gentle sweep ripples one from the other in such a way that these folds only seem to make a whole and together only a noble print. These masterpieces show us a skin that is not tense, but gently drawn over a healthy flesh, which fills it without bulging expansion and unites the direction of the fleshy parts with all bends. The skin never, as on our bodies, has special small folds separated from the flesh.

Likewise, the newer works differ from the Greek ones by a lot of small impressions and by too many and even too sensual dimples, which, where they are in the works of the old, with an economical wisdom, according to the mass of them in the more perfect and complete nature among the Greeks, gently hinted at and often noticed only by a learned feeling.

There is always the probability that in the formation of the beautiful Greek bodies, as in the works of their masters, more unity of the whole structure, a more noble connection of the parts, a richer measure of fullness, without lean tensions and without many hollow cavities in our bodies.

You cannot go further than probability. But this probability deserves the attention of our artists and connoisseurs of art, and all the more so since it is necessary to free the veneration of the Greek monuments from the prejudices attached to them, so as not to seem to imitate them to merit merit only through the moderation of time.

This point, over which the voices of the artists are divided, required a more detailed discussion than can be done with the present intention.

It is known that the great Bernini was one of those who contested the Greeks' preference for a partly more beautiful, partly ideal beauty of their figures. He was also of the opinion that nature knew how to give all its parts the necessary beauty; the art is to find it. He prided himself on having put down a prejudice in which he had been when it came to the charm of Medice Venus, but which he had perceived on various occasions in nature after a painstaking study.

So it was Venus who taught him to discover beauties in nature, which he previously believed to find only in nature and which he would not have looked for in nature without Venus. Does it not follow that the beauty of the Greek statues is to be discovered sooner than the beauty in nature and that they are more touching, not so scattered, but more united in one than they are? The study of nature must therefore be at least a longer and more arduous way of knowing the perfect beauty than the study of antiquity, and Bernini would not have the shortest route to young artists, whom he always pointed out to be the most beautiful in nature shown.

The imitation of the beautiful of nature is either directed towards a single reproach, or it collects the comments from different individuals and brings them together. That means to make a similar copy, a portrait; it is the way to Dutch shapes and figures. But this is the way to general beauty and ideal images of it, and it is the same that the Greeks took. But the difference between them and us is this: the Greeks obtained these pictures, even if they had not been taken from beautiful bodies, through a daily opportunity to observe the beauty of nature, which, on the other hand, is not shown to us every day, and rarely, as the artist wishes.

Our nature will not easily show such a perfect body as Antinous Admirandus has, and the idea will not be able to form about the more than human condition of a beautiful deity in the Vatican Apollo. What nature, spirit and art have been able to produce can be seen here.

I believe that her imitation can teach you to get wiser, because here she finds the epitome of what is distributed in all of nature, and in the other how far the most beautiful nature is above itself, but boldly wise , can raise. She will teach to think and design with certainty, seeing here the highest limits of human and at the same time divine beauty.

If the artist builds on this ground and lets the Greek rule of beauty guide his hand and senses, then he is on the path that will surely lead him to imitate nature. The concepts of the whole, of perfection in the nature of antiquity, will purify the concepts of what is divided in our nature and make it more sensual. When he discovers the beauties of them, he will know how to combine them with perfect beauty, and by means of the sublime forms that are constantly present to him, he will become a rule to himself.

Then and no sooner, especially the painter, he can abandon himself to imitation of nature in such cases where art allows him to walk away from marble, as in robes, and to give himself more freedom, as Poussin did; because "the one who constantly pursues others will never get ahead, and the one who knows nothing to do with himself will not make good use of other people's things," as Michelangelo says.

Souls to whom nature was dear,


Quibus arte benigna

Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan,


have the path ahead of them here to become originals.

In this sense it must be taken if de Piles wants to report that Raphael, at the time when death was in a hurry, tried to leave the marble and to pursue nature completely. The true taste of antiquity would have accompanied him constantly through common nature, and all remarks in it would have become for him through a kind of chemical transformation what constituted his being, his soul.

Perhaps he would have given his paintings more diversity, larger robes, more color, more light and shadow, but his figures would still be less valuable because of this than through the noble contours and the sublime soul that he learned to form from the Greeks , have been.

Nothing would be able to show the advantage of imitating the old over imitating nature more clearly than if one took two young people of equally beautiful talents and some let antiquity and others let nature be studied. This would form nature as he finds it. As an Italian he might paint characters like Caravaggio, as a Dutch when he is happy as Jacob Jordaens, as a French as Stella; the latter, however, would form nature as required and paint figures like Raphael.

If imitation of nature could give everything to the artist, the correctness of the contour would surely not be preserved by it. This must be learned by the Greeks alone.

The noblest contour unites or describes all parts of the most beautiful nature and the ideal beauties in the figures of the Greeks, or rather it is the highest term in both. Euphranor, who excelled after the times of Zeuxis, is believed to be the first to give it the more sublime manner.

Many of the newer artists have tried to imitate the Greek outline, and almost nobody has succeeded. The great Rubens is far from the Greek outline of the body, and the farthest in those of his works that he did before his trip to Italy and before he studied antiquity.

The line which separates nature's total from its superfluous is very small, and the greatest newer masters have deviated too much on this side, which is not always within reach, on both sides. The one who wants to avoid a starved contour has fallen into the gayness, who wants to avoid it, the lean.

Michelangelo is perhaps the only one who could be said to reach antiquity, but only in strong muscular figures, in heroic bodies, not in tender youthful, not in female figures, who have become Amazons under his hand.

The Greek artist, on the other hand, has set his outline in all figures as if on the tip of a hair, even in the finest and most arduous works, such as on cut stones. Take a look at Diomedes and Perseus des Dioskorides, Hercules with the Iole from the hand of Teucer and admire the inimitable Greeks.

Parrhasius is generally considered the strongest in the contours.

Even under the robes of the Greek figures there is a masterly contour, as the main intention of the artist, who also shows the beautiful structure of his body through the marble, like through a koi dress.

The high-quality Agrippina and the three vests under the Royal Antiquities in Dresden deserve to be listed here as large models. Agrippina is probably not the mother of Nero, but the older Agrippina, a wife of Germanicus. It is very similar to a given standing statue of this Agrippina in the auditorium of the San Marco library in Venice. Ours is a seated figure, taller than nature, with the head resting on the right hand. Her beautiful face shows a soul that is immersed in deep contemplation and seems insensitive to all external sensations with worry and grief. One might speculate that the artist had wanted to introduce the heroine at the sad moment when the relocation to the island of Pandataria had been announced.

The three vestals are worthy of worship under a double title. They are the first great discoveries of Herculanum, but what makes them even more valuable is the great manner in their robes. In this part of art they are all three, but especially the one that is larger than nature, the Farnesian flora and other Greek works from the first range. The other two, as large as nature, are so similar to one another that they appear to be from the same hand; they differ only in the heads, which are not of the same goodness. On the best head, the curled hair is divided in the manner of the furrows, from the forehead to where it is tied at the back. On the other head, the hair goes straight over the top of the head, and the frizzy hair at the front is gathered and bound by a ribbon. It is believable that this head was worked and put on by a newer, though good hand.

The head of these two figures is not covered with a veil, but this does not dispute the title of the vestals, since it is evident that priestesses of Vesta can also be found elsewhere without a veil. Or it seems rather from the strong folds of the robe on the back of the neck that the veil, which is not a separate part of the robe, as seen on the largest vestale, is folded over at the back.

It is worth noting to the world that these three divine pieces showed the first traces for the subsequent discovery of the underground treasures of the city of Herculanum.

They came to daylight, as the memory of them was buried and buried, as it were, like the city itself under its own ruins, at the time when the sad fate affecting this place was only almost entirely through the younger Pliny was informed of the end of his cousin, which also hastily hurried him in the devastation of Herculanum.

These great masterpieces of Greek art were already placed under the German sky and worshiped there, since Naples was not yet lucky enough to have a single Herculan monument as far as one can learn.

They were found in a buried vault in Portici near Naples in 1706, since the ground was dug to a country house of the Prince of Elbeuf, and they came immediately afterwards, along with other statues in marble and ore discovered there, into the possession of Prince Eugene to Vienna.

This great connoisseur of the arts, in order to have an excellent place where they could be placed, has had a sala terrena built primarily for these three figures, where they have been placed along with some other statues. The whole academy and all the artists in Vienna were, as it were, outraged because they were only talking very darkly about the same sale, and everyone watched it with sad eyes as they were continued from Vienna to Dresden.

The famous Matielli, to whom Polyklet gave the measure and Phidias the iron (Algarotti), copied all three vestals with the most painstaking diligence in clay before this happened, in order to replace their loss. He followed them a few years later and filled Dresden with everlasting works of his art, but his priestesses continued to study drapery here, which was his strength up to his age, which is also a not unfounded prejudice of her excellence.

Under the word drapery one understands everything that teaches the art of clothing of the nude of the characters and of broken garments. This science is after the beautiful nature and after the noble contour the third advantage of the works of the antiquity.

The drapery of the vestals is in the highest manner. The small breaks arise from a gentle swing from the largest parts and get lost again in them with a noble freedom and gentle harmony of the whole, without hiding the beautiful contour of the nude. How few new masters are in this part of art without blame!

This justice, however, must be done to some great artists, especially painters of more recent times, that in certain cases they have departed from the path that the Greek masters most commonly used to dress their figures without detriment to nature and truth. The Greek drapery is mostly made after thin and wet garments, which consequently, as artists know, close close to the skin and body and show the bare end of the same. The entire top robe of the Greek woman's room was very thin stuff; it was therefore called Peplon, a veil.

The fact that the ancients did not always make finely broken garments shows the uplifted works of the same, the old paintings and especially the old breast pictures. The beautiful Caracalla under the Royal Antiquities in Dresden can confirm this.

In modern times one has had to put one robe over the other, and sometimes heavy robe, which cannot fall into the gentle and flowing breaks that the old ones are. This consequently gave rise to the new manner of the large parts in robes, in which the master can show his science no less than in the usual manner of the old.

Carl Maratta and Franz Solimena can be considered the greatest in this way. The new Venetian school, which sought to go further, has exaggerated this manner, and by looking for nothing but large parts, their garments have become stiff and tinny.

The general exquisite characteristic of the Greek masterpieces is finally a noble simplicity and a quiet greatness, both in the position and in the expression. Just as the depth of the sea remains calm at all times, the surface may rage no matter how, the expression in the figures of the Greeks shows a great and settled soul with all passions. This soul is portrayed in the face of the Laocoon, and not in the face alone, in the most violent suffering. The pain, which is found in all muscles and tendons of the body and which one believes almost alone, without looking at the face and other parts, on the painfully drawn abdomen, this pain, I say, still does not express itself Anger in the face and in the whole position. He does not cry out like Virgil sings about his Laocoon. Opening the mouth does not allow it; it is rather a fearful and oppressed sigh, as Sadolet describes it. The pain of the body and the size of the soul are distributed through the entire structure of the figure with the same strength and, as it were, balanced. Laokoon suffers, but he suffers like Sophocles Philoctetes: his misery goes to our soul, but we wish, like this great man, to be able to endure the misery.

The expression of such a great soul goes far beyond the formation of beautiful nature: the artist had to feel within himself the strength of the spirit which he imprinted on his marble. Greece had artist and worldview in one person and more than one Metrodor. Wisdom shook hands with art and blew its figures more than common souls.

Under a robe, which the artist should have given to the Laocoon as a priest, his pain would have been only half as sensual to us. Bernini even wanted to discover the beginning of the effect of the snake's venom in one limb of the Laocoon on its solidification.

All actions and positions of the Greek figures, which were not labeled with this character of wisdom but were too fiery and wild, [18] fell into a mistake that the ancient artists called "Parenthyrsis".

The calmer the body is, the more adept it is to portray the true character of the soul. In all positions that deviate too much from the state of calm, the soul is not in the state that is most important to it, but in a violent and forced state. The soul becomes more recognizable and significant in violent passions, but it is great and noble in the state of unity, in the state of rest. In the Laocoon the pain, alone, would have been parenthyrsis; the artist therefore gave him, in order to unite the significant and the noble of the soul in one, an action which was the closest to the state of calm in such pain. But in this calm the soul has to be characterized by features that are unique to it and no other soul in order to make it calm, but at the same time effective, silent, but not indifferent or sleepy.

The real opposite and the extreme end opposing this is the commonest taste of today's particularly aspiring artists. Their applause deserves nothing but unusual positions and actions, accompanied by a cheeky fire, which they carry out with spirit, with Franchezza, as they speak. The favorite of their terms is the counter-post, which for them is the epitome of all the self-made properties of a perfect work of art. They demand a soul in their figures that leaves their circles like a comet; they wish to see an Ajax and a Capaneus in each figure.

The fine arts have their youth as well as the people, and the beginning of these arts seems to have been like the beginning with artists, where only the high, the astonishing. Such was the shape of the tragic muse of Aeschylus, and his agamemnon, in part due to hyperboles, has become much darker than anything [19] Heraclitus wrote. Perhaps the first Greek painters did not draw any differently than their first good tragic poet.

The violent, the volatile precedes all human actions; the final, the thorough follows. But the latter takes time to admire; it is only peculiar to great masters; violent passions are also an advantage for their students.

The wise in art know how difficult this apparent imitation is


... ut sibi quivis

Speret idem, sudet multum, frustraque laboret

Ausus idem.


La Fage, the great illustrator, was unable to match the taste of the old. Everything is in motion in his works, and in viewing them one is divided and dispersed, like in a society where everyone wants to talk at the same time.

The noble simplicity and silent size of the Greek statues is at the same time the true hallmark of the Greek writings from the best of times, the writings from Socrates' school, and these characteristics are what make the excellent size of Raphael, to whom he is imitated by the Old has arrived.

A soul as beautiful as his, in such a beautiful body, was required to first feel and discover the true character of the old in more recent times, and what was his greatest happiness, even at an age in which mean and half-formed Souls beyond true greatness remain without sensation.

With an eye that has learned to feel these beauties, with this true taste of antiquity you have to approach your work. Then the calm and tranquility of the main characters in Raphael's Attila, which seem lifeless to many, will be very important and sublime to us. The Roman [20] bishop, who averted the plans of the King of the Huns to attack Rome, does not appear with the gestures and movements of an orator, but as a venerable man who, just by his presence, quenches an uproar like the one we have Virgil describes


Tum pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem

Conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus adstand,


with a face full of divine confidence before the eyes of the rage. The two apostles do not hover in the clouds like strangled angels, but, if permitted, compare the holy with the unholy, like Homer Jupiter, who shakes Olympus by waving his eyelids.

Algardi, in his famous presentation of this very story, in half-raised work on an altar of St. Peter's Church in Rome, did not give or knew how to give the effective silence of his great predecessor to the figures of his two apostles. There they appear like envoys of the Lord of hosts, here like mortal warriors with human weapons.

How little connoisseur has found the beautiful St. Michael of Guido Reni in the Capuchin Church in Rome, which was able to see the size of the expression that the artist gave to his archangel! The Conca is given the price to his Michael because he shows anger and vengeance on his face, instead of hovering over him with a serene and unmoved expression after he overthrows the enemy of God and men.

The English poet paints just as calmly and silently the angel who hovers over Britain, with whom he compares the hero of his campaign, the winner at Blenheim.

The Royal Gallery of Signs in Dresden now contains among its treasures a worthy work by [21] Raffael's hand, from his prime, as Vasari and others testify. A Madonna and Child, the h. Sixtus and the h. Barbara, kneeling on both sides, with two angels in the foreground.

It was this picture of the main altarpiece of the St. Sixti monastery in Piacenza. Lovers and connoisseurs of art went there to see this Raphael, just as one traveled to Thespiä alone, to look at the beautiful Cupid there from the hand of Praxiteles.

See the Madonna, with a face full of innocence and at the same time a more than feminine size, in a blissfully calm position, in the silence that the ancients let in the images of their deities. How big and noble is your whole contour!

The child on her arms is a child, raised above common children by a face from which a ray of the Godhead seems to shine through the innocence of childhood.

The saint beneath her kneels to her side in an adoring silence of her soul, but far below the majesty of the main character, which humiliation the great master has replaced by the gentle charm in her face.

The saint to this figure is the most venerable old man, with features that seem to testify to his consecrated youth.

The awe of h. Barbara against the Madonna, who is made more sensual and touching by her beautiful hands pressed against her chest, helps the saint to express the movement of his one hand. It is precisely this action that paints us the delight of the holy, which the artist [...] wanted to give to a great variety, more wisely the male strength than the female chastisement.

However, time has robbed much of the apparent sheen of this painting, and the strength of the colors has partly weathered, but only the soul, which the creator has blown into the work of his hands, still enlivens it. [22]

All those who come to this and other works by Raphael, hoping to find the little beauties that give the work of the Dutch painters such a high price, the painstaking diligence of a Netscher or a Dou, the ivory flesh of a van der Werff or even the licked manner of some of Raphael's compatriots of our time, these, I say, will look for the great Raphael in the Raphael in vain.

After studying the beautiful nature, the contours, the drapery and the noble simplicity and silent greatness in the works of Greek masters, research into their way of working would be a necessary focus of the artists in order to be happier in imitating them.

It is known that they mostly made their first models in wax; but the newer masters chose smooth masses instead of clay or the like. They found the same, especially to express the meat, more skillfully than the wax, which seemed too sticky and tough for them.

In the meantime, one does not want to argue that the way of training in wet clay was unknown to the Greeks or not common with them. One even knows the name of the one who made the first attempt here. Sikyon's Dibutades is the first master of a figure in clay, and Arcesilaus, friend of the great Lucullus, has become more famous for his models in clay than for his works. He made a figure in clay for the Lucullus, representing the bliss that he had acquired with 60,000 sesterces, and the knight Octavius ​​gave this artist a talent for a mere model in plaster to a large cup, which he wanted to work in gold to let.

Clay would be the most skillful way of forming figures if it kept its moisture. But since he escapes this when he is dry and burned, the firmer parts of it will consequently come closer together, and the figure will lose its mass and take up a more confined space. If the figure suffered this reduction to the same degree in all its points and parts, the same relationship would remain, albeit a reduced one. The small parts of it, however, become faster dry than the larger, and the body of the figure, as the strongest part, the latest; and they will lack more of their mass than this at the same time.

The wax does not have this inconvenience; none of this disappears, and the smoothness of the flesh, which it does not want to take on with great ease in puffing, can be given to it in another way.

You make your model of clay; you mold it in plaster and then pour it in wax.

The actual way of the Greeks to work in marble according to their models does not seem to be the one that is common among most of today's artists. The certainty and confidence of the master can be found everywhere in the marble of the ancients, and it will not be easy to show in their works of low range that too much has been cut away somewhere. This safe and correct hand of the Greeks must have been guided by more specific and reliable rules than are customary in our country.

The usual way for our sculptors to draw horizontal and vertical lines across their models after they have been carefully studied and shaped to the best of their shape, thus intersecting each other. Then they proceed to rejuvenate and enlarge a painting through a grid, and as many intersecting lines are carried on the stone.

So each small square of the model shows its area dimensions on each large square of the stone. Just because the physical content cannot be determined thereby, and consequently neither the right degree of elevation and deepening of the model can be described here exactly [24], the artist will be able to give his future figure a certain ratio of the model, but since he only has to surrender himself to the knowledge of his eye, he will always remain doubtful whether he worked too deeply or too shallowly according to his design, whether he took too much or too little mass.

He can also determine neither the outer outline, nor the one that indicates the inner parts of the model, or those that go towards the middle, as if with a hint, by such lines, through which he is completely unmistakable and without the slightest trace Deviation could design the same outline on his stone.

In addition, in extensive work, which the sculptor alone cannot dispute, he has to use the hand of his assistants, who are not always adept at achieving his intentions. If something happens to be spanked because it is impossible to set the depths in this way, the error is irreplaceable.

In general, it should be noted here that the sculptor who drills his depths the first time he works on his stone, as far as they should reach, and does not search for them gradually, so that the last hand gives them the hollow they have set that this, I say, will never be able to cleanse his work from mistakes.

There is also this main shortcoming here, that the lines carried on the stone are cut away every moment and just as often, not without concern of the deviation, must be drawn and supplemented anew.

The uncertainty of this kind forced the artists to find a safer way, and the one that the French academy in Rome invented and used to copy the old statues was accepted by many, even when working on models.

You fix a statue over a statue that you want to copy, according to the ratio of the square, from which [25] you drop lead threads in equal degrees. These threads indicate the outermost points of the figure more clearly than in the first way by lines on the surface where each point is the outermost. They also give the artist a more sensual measure of some of the strongest peaks and valleys by the degree of their removal from parts that cover them, and he can walk a little more heartily with the help of them.

But since the curvature of a curved line cannot be determined precisely by a single straight line, the outlines of the figure are also very doubtfully indicated for the artist by this path, and in slight deviations from its main surface it will be without a guide and every moment see without help.

It is very understandable that the true relationship of the figures is difficult to find in this manner. You look for them through horizontal lines that cut through the lead threads. The rays of light from the quadrilaterals, which make these lines protruding from the figure, will catch the eye at a greater angle, consequently appear larger, the higher or lower they are to our point of view.

Until now, the lead threads have retained their value for copying the antiquities, which one cannot handle favorably, and it has not yet been possible to make this work easier and safer; but when working on a model this path is not determined enough for the reasons indicated.

Michelangelo has followed a path unknown to him, and one must be surprised because the sculptors honor him as their great master that perhaps none of them has succeeded him.

This Phidias of recent times, and the largest after the Greeks, has, as you might guess, got on the true trail of his great teachers, at least no other means has been made known to the world, all possible sensual parts and beauties of the model to carry the figure over and express it.

Vasari described the invention of it somewhat imperfectly. The term after his report is as follows:

Michelangelo took a container of water in which he placed his model of wax or hard matter. He gradually raised it to the surface of the water. So the raised parts were discovered first, and the recessed parts were covered until finally the whole model was bare and out of the water. This is the way, says Vasari, that Michelangelo worked his marble; he first indicated the raised parts and gradually the lower parts.

It seems that Vasari either did not have the clearest idea of ​​his friend's manner, or the negligence in his story caused it to be imagined somewhat differently from what he reported.

The shape of the water container is not clearly defined here. The gradual raising of his model out of the water from below would be very arduous and requires much more than the historian of the artists would have let us know.
 
One can be convinced that Michelangelo will have studied this path invented by him as much as possible and made himself comfortable. In all likelihood, the procedure is as follows:

The artist took a vessel according to the shape of the mass to his figure, which we want to put a long square. He marked the surface of the sides of this square box with certain sections, which he carried over to his stone on an enlarged scale, and he also noted the inner sides of the box from above to the bottom with certain degrees. He put his model of heavy matter in the box or fastened it to the floor if it was made of wax. He covered the box, for example, with a grid according to the sections made, according to which he drew lines on his stone and probably immediately afterwards his figure. He poured water onto the model until it reached the outermost points of the raised parts, and after noticing the part that needed to be raised on his drawn figure, drained some water around the raised part of the model and then began to work on this part according to the degree of the degrees it discovered. If another part of his model had become visible at the same time, he was processed as far as it was bare, and so he proceeded with all raised parts.

More water was drained until the wells were exposed. The degrees of the box always showed him the height of the fallen water and the surface of the water the outermost baseline of the depths. His true dimensions were just as many degrees on his stone.

The water described not only the ups and downs, but also the contours of his model, and the space from the inside of the box to the outline of the line of water, the size of which gave the degrees of the other two sides, was in every point the measure of how much he could take of his stone.

His work had now received the first, but correct form. The surface of the water had described a line for him, of which the outermost points of the elevations are parts. This line had also moved horizontally with the fall of the water in his vessel, and the artist had followed this movement with his iron until the water showed him the lowest slope of the raised parts, which flowed together with the surfaces. So, with every tapered grade in the box of his model, he had gone an equal greater degree on his figure, and in this way the line of water had him beyond the extreme contour in his [28]

Work carried out so that the model was now exposed from the water.

His figure required the beautiful shape. He poured new water onto his model to a height that was convenient for him, and then he counted the degrees of the box to the line that described the water, thereby seeing the height of the part raised. On the same raised part of his figure he laid his straight line completely horizontally, and from the bottom line of it he took the measurements down to the deepening. If he found an equal number of tapered and larger degrees, this was a kind of geometric calculation of the content, and he received proof that he had done the right thing.

When repeating his work, he sought to apply the pressure and movement of the muscles and tendons, the momentum of the other small parts and the finest art in his model to his figure. The water, which also lay on the most imperceptible parts, sharply traced the momentum of the same and described the contour of it with the most correct line.

This way does not prevent the model from being given all possible positions. When placed in the profile, the artist will fully discover what he has overlooked. It will also show him the outer contour of his raised and inner parts and the whole average.

All this and the hope of a good success of the work presupposes a model that was made with the hands of art according to the true taste of antiquity.

This is the path on which Michelangelo has reached immortality. His reputation and rewards allowed him leisure to work with such care.

An artist of our times, to whom nature and hard work gave gifts to climb higher, and who finds truth and correctness in this manner, is obliged to work more for bread than for honor. So he remains in the usual track [29], in which he believes to show greater skill, and continues to use his sense of proportion, which he has acquired through lengthy practice, as his rule.

This sense of proportion, which must primarily guide him, has finally become quite decisive through practical ways, some of which are very doubtful. How fine and reliable would he have done it if he had made it from an early age according to infallible rules?

If aspiring artists were to be instructed to work in clay or in other matter at the first citation, according to this sure manner of Michelangelo, which he had found after long research, they could hope to get as close as he could to the Greeks.

Everything that can be said about the price of Greek works in sculpture should in all likelihood also apply to Greek painting. But time and the anger of the people robbed us of the means to make an irrefutable statement about it.

Greek painters are allowed drawing and expression, and that's all; Perspective, composition and coloring are denied to them. This judgment is based partly on half-raised works, partly on the discovered paintings of the ancient (the Greeks cannot be said) in and near Rome, in the underground vaults of the Palaces des Mäcenas, Titus, Trajans and Antoninen, not much of which over thirty have so far been preserved, and some are only in mosaic work.

Turnbull has added a collection of the best-known pieces, drawn by Camillo Paderni and engraved by Mynde, to his works from old painting, which give the magnificent and misused paper of his book the only value. Among them are two, of which the originals are in the cabinet of the famous doctor Richard Meads in London.

That Poussin studies after the so-called Aldobrandin wedding, that there are still drawings made by [30] Annibale Carracci according to the given Marcus Coriolanus, and that there is great equality among the heads in [the] Guido Reni's works and under the heads on the known mosaic kidnapping of Europe has been found by others.

If such frescoes could give a well-founded judgment of the painting of the ancients, one would want to dispute the drawing and the expression among the artists among them from the remains of this kind.

The paintings of life-size figures staggered from the walls of the Herculan theater and the wall give us, as one assures, a bad concept of it. The Theseus, as an overcomer of the Minotaur, as the young Athenians kiss his hands and clasp his knees, the flora along with Hercules and a faun, according to the eye witness of an artist, the prescribed court ruling by the Appius Claudius are partly mediocre and partly drawn incorrectly. In most heads, as one assures, there is no expression alone, but in the Appius Claudius there are also no good characters.

But this proves that paintings by the hand of very mediocre masters, since the science of beautiful conditions, the outlines of the bodies and the expression in Greek sculptors must have been peculiar to their good painters.

These parts of art conceded to the old painters leave much more merit for the new painters.

In terms of perspective, theirs is undisputed, and despite all the learned defense of the old, in terms of this science, it remains on the side of the newer. The laws of composition and arrangement were only partially and imperfectly known to the elderly, as can the exalted works of times when the Greek arts flourished in Rome. [31]

In the coloring, the messages in the writings of the old and the remnants of the old painting also seem to decide for the benefit of the newer artists.

Different types of ideas of painting have also reached a higher degree of perfection in recent times. In cattle pieces and landscapes our painters have surpassed the old painters. They do not seem to have been familiar with the more beautiful species of animals under other lines of the sky, when one looks at individual cases, from the horse of Marcus Aurelius, from the two horses on Monte Cavallo, and indeed from the specified Lysippian horses above the portal of the St. Marcus Church in Venice, from the Farnese bull and the other animals of this group.

In passing, it should be noted that the ancients did not observe the diametrical movement of the legs of their horses, as can be seen on the horses in Venice and on old coins. Some recent ones have followed and even defended them out of ignorance.

Our landscapes, especially the Dutch painters, owe their beauty primarily to oil painting; her colors have gained more strength, joy and exaltation, and nature, even under a thick and humid sky, has done a lot to expand art in this way.

The displayed and some other advantages of the new painters over the old ones deserve to be put in a greater light by more thorough evidence than has been done so far.

There is still a big step to be taken to expand art. The artist who begins to deviate from the common path or has actually deviated tries to take this step; but his foot stops at the youngest place in art, and here he sees himself helpless. [32]

The history of the saints, the fables and transformations have been the eternal and almost only reproach of the new painters for several centuries. They have been turned and artificated in thousands of ways, so that weariness and disgust must finally attack the wise in art and the connoisseur.

An artist who has a soul who has learned to think leaves it idle and idle with a Daphne and an Apollo, with a kidnapping of Proserpina, a Europa and the like. He tries to show himself as a poet and to paint figures through pictures, that is allegorical.

Painting also extends to things that are not sensual; these are their ultimate goal, and the Greeks have endeavored to do the same as the ancient writings attest. Parrhasius, a painter who, like Aristides, portrayed the soul, was even said to be able to express the character of an entire people. He painted the Athenians as benevolent and cruel, reckless and stubborn, well-behaved and cowardly at the same time. If the idea seems possible, it is only through the path of allegory, through images that mean general concepts.

The artist is here like in a desert. The languages ​​of the wild Indians, who have a great lack of such terms and which do not contain a word that could denote recognizability, space, duration, etc., are no emptier of such signs than painting is in our times. The painter who thinks further than his palette desires to have a learned stock of where to go and to take meaningful and sensualized signs of things that are not sensual. A complete work of this kind is not yet available; attempts to date have not been substantial enough and do not reach these great intentions. The artist will know how far Ripa's iconology, [33] van Hooghe's old peoples' ideas, will do for him.

This is the reason that the greatest painters only made known accusations. Annibale Carracci, instead of being able to present the most famous deeds and events of the Farnese house in the Farnese Gallery, as an allegorical poet, through general symbols and sensual images, has shown his full strength here only in well-known fables.

The Royal Gallery of Signs in Dresden undoubtedly contains a treasure trove of works by the greatest masters, which may outperform all galleries in the world, and Se. Your Majesty, as the wisest connoisseur of the fine arts, sought only the most perfect of its kind after a strict choice; but how few historical works can be found in this royal treasure! Even less of allegorical and poetic paintings.

The great Rubens is the most excellent among great painters, who dared to take the unprecedented path of this painting in great works as a sublime poet. The Luxembourgish gallery, as his greatest work, has become known by the most skilful engravers in the world.

According to him, a more sublime work of this kind was not easily undertaken and carried out in modern times, just as the Cupola of the Imperial Library in Vienna was painted by Daniel Gran and engraved in copper by Sedelmayr. The deification of Hercules in Versailles, as an allusion to the Cardinal Hercules of Fleuri, painted by Le Moine, with which France is the greatest composition in the world, is a very mean and short-sighted allegory against the learned and meaningful painting of the German artist ; it is like a poem of praise, in which the strongest thoughts refer to the name on the calendar. Here was the place to do something big, and you have to be surprised that it didn't happen. One also sees [34] at the same time if the deification of a minister should have adorned the most elegant ceiling of the royal palace, which the painter lacked.

The artist needs a work that contains the sensual figures and images from all of mythology, from the best poets of old and modern times, from the secret wisdom of the world of many peoples, from ancient monuments, on stones, coins and devices general terms have been formed poetically. This rich material would have to be brought into certain comfortable classes and, through a special application and interpretation in possible individual cases, could be arranged for the teaching of the artists.

This would open up a large field at the same time, to imitate the old and to give our works a sublime taste of antiquity.

The good taste in our embellishments today, which has deteriorated even more since the time when Vitruvius complained bitterly about its corruption, partly due to the grotesques brought into being by Morto, a painter, born by Feltro, partly through nothing significant paintings of our rooms, could at the same time be cleaned by a more thorough study of the allegory and preserved truth and reason.

Our curlicues and the most beloved mussel work, without which no decoration can now be formalized, sometimes has no more nature than Vitruvs candlesticks, which carried small castles and palaces. The allegory could provide a scholarship to make even the smallest adornments according to the place where they stand.

Reddere personae scit convenientia cuique.


The paintings on the ceilings and over the doors are mostly only there to fill their place and to cover the single places, which cannot be filled with gilding. Not only do they have no relation to the status and circumstances of the owner, but they are often disadvantageous to the owner.

The loathing of the empty space fills the walls, and paintings, empty of thoughts, are supposed to replace the empty.

This is the reason that the artist, who is left to his own free will, often chooses allegations for lack of allegorical images, which must be more satire than honor to the one to whom he dedicates his art; and perhaps, in order to be safe from this, the painter is carefully asked to take pictures that are not meant to mean anything.

It is often difficult to find such things, and finally


... velut aegri somnia, vanae

Finger door species.


So one takes away from painting that which is its greatest happiness, namely the idea of ​​invisible, past and future things.

However, those paintings that could become important in one place or another lose what they would do through an indifferent or uncomfortable place that is given to them.

The builder of a new building,


Dives agris, dives positis in foenore nummis,


may have small pictures placed over the high doors of his rooms and halls, which are against the eye and against the grounds of the perspective. We are talking about pieces that are part of the fixed and immovable ornamental rates, not those that are arranged in a collection according to symmetry.

The choice in decorations of architecture is sometimes not more thorough: fittings and trophies will always be just as uncomfortable on a hunting lodge as Ganymedes and the Adler, Jupiter and Leda under the raised work of the doors of ore at the entrance to the St. Peterskirche in Rome.

All the arts have a dual purpose: to enjoy and teach at the same time, and many of the greatest landscape painters have therefore believed that they would only have done half their art if they had left their landscapes without any figures.

The brush that the artist uses is said to be dipped in the mind, as someone said of Aristotle 's writing pen: it should leave more to think than what it shows the eye, and the artist will get this when he puts his thoughts in Learned not to hide allegories but to dress them. If he has an accusation which he himself chose or which he was given, which is to be made or made poetically, then his art will inspire him and will awaken in him the fire which Prometheus stole from the gods. The connoisseur will have to think and the mere lover will learn.