FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 569 



(2) "Be not governed in your opinion by the judgment of the 

 guild, which generally prefers what is difficult to what is beautiful." 



(3) " The observer should discriminate as the ancient artists appar- 

 ently did between what is essential and what is only accessory (in 

 the drawing)." 



He could be, we see, as practical as when he was teaching trouble- 

 some boys in Saxony; and yet the fervor of his great work shook 

 Germany, stirred Lessing and Goethe, and made the author recognized 

 as a power wherever there \vere lovers of art. 



Of course, no one could make so many utterances as he did with- 

 out making some mistakes, " Es irrt der Mensch so long er Strebt." 

 Even with the first publication of his great History of Ancient Art 

 came many corrections by the editors and others. But he stands 

 colossal above editors and annotators. 



One hundred and thirty-six years have passed since the tragic 

 death of Winckelmann, and we know immensely more of the history 

 of Greek sculpture than it was permitted him to know. A present- 

 ation of some of the principal additions to our knowledge Will also 

 illustrate some of the fundamental methods of the study of the his- 

 tory of Greek sculpture. We have gone on to larger acquaintance 

 with the field, and have gathered in the fruits ripened by reflection 

 and comparison. It might not be difficult to find twenty such lines 

 of advance. But I will confine myself to three: 



(1) Modern Excavations. 



(2) The Study and Groupings of Copies of Ancient Statues. 



(3) The Examination of the Literary Sources of our Knowledge. 



(1) Modern excavations have modified, if not wholly revolution- 

 ized, the old notions of Greek sculpture, and rapidly made our hand-- 

 books of sculpture antiquated. The excavation of Olympia, the first 

 suggestion of which came from Winckelmann, a suggestion that 

 ripened in the mind of Ernst Curtius, did not, it is true, yield so many 

 fine statues as might have been expected from the statement of Pliny 

 that seventy-three thousand statues remained at Olympia in A. D. 67, 

 after the Romans had been systematically transporting statues from 

 Greece for nearly a century and a quarter. But even apart from the 

 other important discoveries at Olympia the yield in sculpture alone 

 put the stamp of success on the enterprise. For the Hermes of Praxi 

 teles alone, the only Greek statue on which we can put our hand and 

 say " this is an original from the hand of one of the great masters," * 

 probably some rich man could be found who would gladly pay the 

 whole cost of the excavation of Olympia. Having now a sure Praxite-- 



1 Pliny (34, 87) speaks of a Hermes of Kephisotodos holding a child. On the 

 strength of this Miss Sellars, in Pliny's Chapters on the History of Greek A rt (addenda, 

 p. 236), has suggested that Pliny must be preferred to Pausanias, and that we must 

 understand the famous Hermes to be the work of Kephisotodos, father or elder 

 brother of Praxiteles. 



