While at Rome, Goethe realized with new vividness all that the mighty city had been to the world in the remote ages when on her had been imposed the task of guiding it to higher destinies. And he worked hard to think himself back into the Rome of ancient times. This, he confesses in one of his letters, was no easy task. “It is a sour and sad undertaking,” he writes, “to pick out the old Rome from the new.... One comes upon traces of a splendour and of a destruction, both of which go beyond our conceptions. What the barbarians allowed to stand, the architects of modern Rome have laid waste.” Gradually, however, a living idea of the ancient city was formed in his mind. “Roman antiquities,” he wrote about two months after his arrival, “begin to delight me. History, inscriptions, medals, of which I might otherwise have known nothing, all crowd in on me. As it happened to me in natural history, so it happens here; for in this place the entire history of the world centres, and I count as a second birthday, the day of a real new birth, that on which I entered Rome.” With regard to the significance of the remains of ancient art in Rome, Winckelmann had introduced a wholly new order of ideas, and Goethe owed much to him in the appreciation of the Apollo Belvedere and all the other masterpieces of sculpture he had now an opportunity of studying. He was astonished to find how little he had learned from plaster casts. The breath of life, it seemed to him, was to be felt only in the original marble figures. The fascination exerted by ancient statues led him to renew, but in a higher way, the studies of the human body which he had formerly carried on through anatomy. “In our medico-surgical anatomy,” he says, “all that is aimed at is a knowledge of the part, and for this a wretched muscle is enough. But in Rome the parts are worth nothing if they do not at the same time present a noble, beautiful form.” The art of the Renascence, as represented in Rome, stirred in Goethe an interest not less profound than that awakened by ancient sculpture. Long before, when as a young student he visited Dresden, the pictures which had appealed to him most strongly were those of the Dutch school. Now he felt the power of the ideal art of Italy in her great period. He was fascinated by the Loggie of Raphael, at the Vatican, but even they seemed of slight importance in comparison with the masterpieces of Michael Angelo in the Sixtine Chapel. “I could,” he says, writing of these sublime conceptions, “only gaze and stand amazed. The inward sureness and manliness of the master, his greatness, go beyond all expression.”