XXVI.

THE history of Art by Herr Winckelmann has appeared I will not venture a step further without having read this work. To reason upon general ideas about Art may mislead one into whims, which, sooner or later, may be found refuted by works of Art. The ancients, as well as we, were aware of the ties which knit Painting and Poetry together, and they would not have drawn them tighter than was suitable for each. The achievements of their artists shall instruct me as to what artists speaking generally should do: and when such a man as Winckelmann lifts up the torch of history, speculation may follow him with confidence".

We are accustomed to turn over the leaves of a work of importance before we set to work to read it through steadily. My curiosity was to ascertain before anything else the author's opinion about Laocoon: not indeed so much with respect to the merit of the work, upon that he had elsewhere already expressed his opinion, as with respect to the date of it. To which party will he adhere? To that which thinks that Virgil had the group before his eyes? or to that which holds that the artist worked on the model of the poet?

The author is entirely silent on the question of reciprocal imitation, and this is quite in accordance with.

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my taste. Where is the absolute necessity for it? It is not at all impossible that the points of resemblance, which I have been bringing under consideration between the poetical picture and the work of art are only accidental and not intended: and that so little has the one been the model of the other that they do not even appear to have once made use of the same model. If indeed Winckelmann had been dazzled by an appearance of imitation, he would have pronounced in favour of the work of the artist having been the model to the poet. For he is of opinion that Laocoon belongs to the period when the art of the Greeks had reached its highest pinnacle: the period of Alexander the Great c.

'A benevolent destiny,' he says, 'which watches over the arts even at the period of their destruction, has preserved to us for the admiration of all ages a work of art of this epoch, as a proof of the truth with which history records the glory of so many masterpieces now lost to us. Laocoon with his two sons, the joint composition of Agesander, Apollodorus, and Athenodorus of Rhodes, belongs, according to all probability, to this epoch, although it may not be possible to specify, as some have done, the Olympiad in which this artist. flourished:'-and then he adds in a note-' Pliny does not say one word as to the time in which Agesander and his fellow-workmen lived; Maffei, however, in his explanatory remarks on the ancient statues, has chosen to be convinced that this artist flourished in the eighty-eighth Olympiad, and his authority others, like Richardson, have followed. I think Maffei has mistaken an Athenodorus, one of the scholars of Polycletus; and

as Polycletus flourished in the eighty-seventh Olympiad, has placed his supposed scholar in a later Olympiad : Maffei has no other grounds for his opinion.'

He can certainly have no other grounds. But why does Herr Winckelmann content himself with merely exposing the error of Maffei? Does it refute itself? Not entirely. For although it is not supported by any other grounds, still it has in itself a slight probability, unless we can prove that Athenodorus, the scholar of Polycletus, and Athenodorus, the assistant of Agesander and Polydorus, could not possibly be one and the same person. Fortunately this can be proved, and, moreover, that they did not belong to the same country. The first Athenodorus was, according to the express testimony of Pausanias, of Clitor in Arcadia. The other, according to the testimony of Pliny, was born at Rhodes. Herr Winckelmann could not have intended to abstain from refuting incontestably the mistake of Maffei, and for that reason not have brought forward this circumstance. Rather must the reasons which he deduces from the art of the work, and which he founds upon an indisputable knowledge, have appeared to him so important that he did not trouble himself with considering whether the opinion of Maffei has or has not any appearance of probability. He doubtless recognises in the Laocoon so many of those argutiae which are characteristic of Lysippus f, and with which this master first enriched the art, as to render it impossible that this could have been a work anterior to his time.

But when it is demonstrated that the Laocoon cannot be older than Lysippus, is it thereby demonstrated that

the Laocoon must belong to about the time of this sculptor? that it cannot possibly be of a much later date? I pass over the periods in which, up to the beginning of the Roman monarchy, Art in Greece at one time lifted up, at another hung down, her head: but why might not the Laocoon have been the happy fruit of competition amongst the artists which the extravagant splendour of the first Caesars kindled into life? Why could not Agesander and his fellow-workmen have been the contemporaries of a Strongylion, an Arcesilaus, a Pasiteles, a Posidonius, a Diogenes? Would not the works of even these masters be equally prized with the best which Art ever produced? And if undoubted works of Art by them were in our possession, but the age of the authors was unknown, and could only be inferred from their art, what a divine inspiration must have been necessary to prevent the critic from believing that they belonged to that period which Herr Winckelmann considers to have been alone worthy to produce the Laocoon!

It is true Pliny does not expressly mark the time in which the artists of the Laocoon lived. But if I was obliged to draw a conclusion from the whole tenor of the passage whether he intended to place them among the old or the new artists; I confess that it appears to me that the latter opinion has the greater probability. Let any man judge.

After Pliny had spoken in some detail of the most ancient and greatest masters of sculpture, of Phidias, of Praxiteles, of Scopas, and afterwards had named, without any chronological order, the rest, especially

those of whose works there were some traces existing in Rome: he continues as follows: 'Nec multo plurium fama est1, quorundam claritati in operibus eximiis obstante numero artificum, quoniam nec unus occupat gloriam, nec plures pariter nuncupari possunt, sicut in Laocoonte qui est in Titi Imperatoris domo, opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum. Ex uno lapide eum et liberos draconumque mirabiles nexus de consilii sententiâ fecere summi artifices Agesander et Polydorus et Athenodorus Rhodii. Similiter Palatinas domus Caesarum replevere probatissimis signis Craterus cum Pythodoro, Polydectes cum Hermolao, Pythodorus alius cum Artemone, et singularis Aphrodisius Trallianus. Agrippae Pantheum decoravit Diogenes Atheniensis, et Caryatides in columnis templi ejus probantur inter pauca operum: sicut in fastigio posita signa, sed propter altitudinem loci minus celebrata §.'

Of all the artists mentioned in this passage Diogenes of Athens is the one the period of whose existence is the most certainly known. He adorned the Pantheon of Agrippa. He therefore lived in the time of Augustus. But let us weigh the words of Pliny more carefully, and we shall, I think, find that they fix also as incontestably the age of Craterus and Pythodorus, of Polydectes and Hermolaus, of the second Pythodorus and Artemon, as well as of Aphrodisius Trallianus. He says of them: 'Palatinas Domus Caesarum replevere probatissimis signis.' I ask, can this mean only that the palaces of the Caesars were filled with their excellent works?

This is incorrectly cited by Lessing, it should be 'Deinde multorum obscurior, etc.' R. P.