Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/215

Rh selves to what they were and willed to be. The age of Pericles was rich in such characters: Pericles himself, Phidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon and Socrates, each in his own order, without the perfection of one being diminished by that of the others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould—works of art which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the gods. Of this modelling also, are those bodily works of art, the victors in the Olympic Games; yes, and even Phryne, who, as the most beautiful of women, ascended naked out of the water in the presence of assembled Greece.'

This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann possessed in his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that consummate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture but his temperament. We have seen how definite was the leading motive of his culture; how, like some central root-fibre, it maintained the well-rounded unity of his life through a thousand distractions. Interests not his, nor meant for him, political, moral, religious, never disturbed him. In morals, as in criticism, he followed the clue of an unerring instinct. Penetrating into the antique world by his passion, his temperament, he enunciates