At Rome,
spending a whole year drawing from the antique, in preparation for
Iphigenie, he finds the stimulus of Winckelmann's memory ever active.
Winckelmann's Roman life was simple, primeval, Greek. His delicate
constitution permitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned by
many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour, but only to
see his merits acknowledged, and existence assured to him. He was simple
without being niggardly; he desired to be neither poor nor rich.
Winckelmann's first years in Rome present all the elements of an
intellectual situation of the highest interest. The beating of the
intellect against its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the
still barbarous literature of Germany, are afar off; before him are
adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokens
of the advent of the new German literature, with its broad horizons, its
boundless intellectual promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of the
Inferno, is filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light, which makes
him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully
touching and penetrative way.
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