On the other
hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan
grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed
Protestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he might
reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the
Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme
tradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with its
simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must
have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this
sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann
may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one
incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or
political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was
that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the
mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless
routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the
intellect.
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