592 CLASSICAL ART 



acknowledged that the Greek is the basis of the Roman style, and 

 that the plastic works which have been preserved to us in Italy are 

 mostly only copies of lost Greek originals, and that the understanding 

 of most of the works of art must be reached through Greek legends 

 and poetry. 



But Winckelmann did not carry through to fulfillment his de- 

 mand for historical appreciation. In opposition to it stood his own 

 and his time's conviction that the antique was the canon of all beauty, 

 the model and ideal in which all laws of the beautiful were exemplified, 

 and which modern art was bidden to imitate directly. This idea 

 was in complete contradiction to the historical view 7 , which saw in 

 antique art not a rigid norm, but a play of organically developing 

 style-forms. These two fundamentally opposed tendencies cross 

 each other continually in Winckelmann's works; he was himself never 

 conscious of the logical conclusions of his own new historical concep- 

 tion; he speaks as if there \vere only one antique ideal form, holding 

 as model for all time, and forgets his own great achievement, the 

 establishment of the demand that the antique shall be understood in 

 its evolution. 



This contradiction was not resolved for a long time afterward; 

 indeed, it persists into modern times, inasmuch as, for instance, 

 Overbeck's treatment of the so-called mythology of art still suffered 

 from it. 



It is the merit of that intellectual tendency really opposed to 

 Winckelmann's which was manifested first in Herder, then in the 

 circle of the so-called Romanticists, that a truly historical method 

 in the science of antiquity came to full formulation and conquest 

 in all fields. Men became able to put themselves sympathetically 

 into the alien feeling of long-vanished times. They applied no longer 

 the absolute measure of fixed concepts, but learned to use relative 

 historical judgments. The seemingly humble and hitherto disdained 

 now, too, attained to consideration. The religion, the folk-belief and 

 the whole mass of legend, as it appears in poetry, or as embalmed 

 only in local tradition, was recognized as the source, as the nourish- 

 ing soil, from which even the humblest of the works of ancient art 

 drew their intimate meaning and power. 



This really new and for the whole field of mental sciences 

 most blessed transformation, which this historical feeling, heretofore 

 unattained by any epoch, brought about, had nevertheless untoward 

 results for classical archaeology. Attention was turned from the really 

 artistic clement, the essential form of the work of art, for only the 

 content and significance and the position of the work in the whole 

 cultural development was inquired into, and the problems of the 

 aesthetic form were ignored. It is a fact that very many aesthetically 

 important examples of the antique were recognized and appreciated 



