Quoted by Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Rennaissance. 1873.
Description:

'Goethe's fragments of art-criticism contain a few pages of strange pregnancy on the character of Winckelmann. He speaks of the teacher who had made his career possible, but whom he had never seen, as of an abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life. He classes him with certain works of art, possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may return again and again with renewed freshness.' (86)

'Goethe has told us how, in his eagerness actually to handle the antique, he became interested in the insignificant vestiges of it which the neighbourhood of Strasburg contained. So we hear of Winckelmann's boyish antiquarian wanderings among the ugly Brandenburg sandhills. (87)

'By a happy, unperplexed dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete. It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen Kunst, his finding of Greek art.' (90)

''A lowly childhood,' says Goethe, 'insufficient instruction in youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood; the burden of school-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single favour of fortune, but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the ancient sense.'' (90-91)

'In 1763, in the full emancipation of his spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman prospect, he [Winckelmann] writes—'One gets spoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much.'' (86)

'His [Winckelmann's] appointed teachers did not perceive that a new source of culture was within their hands. 'Homo vagus et inconstans,' one of them pedantically reports of the future pilgrim to Rome, unaware on which side his irony was whetted.' (87)

'Engaged in this work, he [Winckelmann] writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of beauty—sehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des Schoenen zu gelangen.' (88)

'Engaged in this work, he [Winckelmann] writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of beauty; 'sehnlich wuenschte zur Kenntniss des Schoenen zu gelangen.' He had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours, to gain time for reading. (88)

''It is my misfortune,' he [Winckelmann] writes, 'that I was not born to great place, wherein I might have had cultivation, and the opportunity of following my instinct and forming myself'... In 1784 Winckelmann wrote to Buenau in halting French: 'He is emboldened,' he says, 'by Buenau's indulgence for needy men of letters.' He desires only to devote himself to study, having never allowed himself to be dazzled by favourable prospects of the Church. He hints at his doubtful position 'in a metaphysical age, when humane literature is trampled under foot. At present,' he goes on, 'little value is set on Greek literature, to which I have devoted myself so far as I could penetrate, when good books are so scarce and expensive.' Finally, he desires a place in some corner of Buenau's library. 'Perhaps, at some future time, I shall become more useful to the public, if, drawn from obscurity in whatever way, I can find means to maintain myself in the capital.' (89)

'Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence of Winckelmann is always discernible, as the strong, regulative under-current of a clear, antique motive. 'One learns nothing from him,' he says to Eckermann, 'but one becomes something.'' (90)

'He [Winckelmann] was introduced to Raphael Mengs, a painter then of note, and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter, in a place where he could 'overlook, far and wide, the eternal city.' At first he was perplexed with the sense of being a stranger on what was to him, spiritually, native soil. 'Unhappily,' he cries in French, often selected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling, 'I am one of those whom the Greeks call opsimatheis.—I have come into the world and into Italy too late.'' (92)

'That his [Winckelmann's] affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido's archangel. These friendships, bringing him in contact with the pride of human form, and staining his thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture. A letter on taste, addressed from Rome to a young nobleman, Friedrich von Berg, is the record of such a friendship. 'I shall excuse my delay,' he begins, 'in fulfilling my promise of an essay on the taste for beauty in works of art, in the words of Pindar. He says to Agesidamus, a youth of Locri—ideai te kalon, horai te kekramenon—whom he had kept waiting for an intended ode, that a debt paid with usury is the end of reproach. This may win your good-nature on behalf of my present essay, which has turned out far more detailed and circumstantial than I had at first intended.

'It is from yourself that the subject is taken. Our intercourse has been short, too short both for you and me; but the first time I saw you, the affinity of our spirits was revealed to me: your culture proved that my hope was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense of beauty. My parting from you was therefore one of the most painful in my life; and that this feeling continues our common friend is witness, for your separation from me leaves me no hope of seeing you again. Let this essay be a memorial of our friendship, which, on my side, is free from every selfish motive, and ever remains subject and dedicate to yourself alone.'' (94)

'One notable friendship, the fortune of which we may trace through his letters, begins with an antique, chivalrous letter in French, and ends noisily in a burst of angry fire. Far from reaching the quietism, the bland indifference of art, such attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any others of equal strength of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of physical excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These friendships, often the caprices of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light for the mute Olympian family. The impression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those about him was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather than the contemplative evolution of general principles.' (95)

'So comes the truth of Goethe's judgments on his [Winckelmann's] works; they are ein Lebendiges fuer die Lebendigen geschrieben, ein Leben selbst.' (95) [later editions translated as: 'they are a life, a living thing, designed for those who are alive'.]

''He has,' says Goethe, 'the advantage of figuring in the memory of posterity, as one eternally able and strong; for the image in which one leaves the world is that in which one moves among the shadows.'' (97)