Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/216

194 no formal principles, always hard and one-sided; it remained for Hegel to formulate what in Winckelmann is everywhere individualised and concrete. Minute and anxious as his culture was, he never became one-sidedly self-analytical. Occupied ever with himself, perfecting himself and cultivating his genius, he was not content, as so often happens with such natures, that the atmosphere between him and other minds should be thick and clouded; he was ever jealously refining his meaning into a form, express, clear, objective. This temperament he nurtured and invigorated by friendships which kept him ever in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here, there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own.

One result of this temperament is a serenity, a Heiterkeit, which characterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in a great measure, a negative quality; it is the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan manner; and what is implied in that? It has been sometimes said that art is a means of escape from 'the tyranny of