The close of the eighteenth century was a period of antiquarian revival. The ruins of Pæstum had been brought to light, Greek vases and Roman monuments had become known to the public by the works of Hamilton and Piranesi. In 1762 Stuart and Revett published their splendid work on the _Antiquities of Athens_. To a German, however, was to fall the honour of becoming the hero of the archæological period. The _History of Ancient Art_, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, appeared in 1764, and this writer devoted his literary energies to the hymning of the glories of the re-discovered treasures of antiquity. In the realm of pictorial art he may also be looked upon as the chosen of fate. Already, nine years before the appearance of his _History of_ _Art_, he had given, at the age of thirty-eight, his first writing to the world, _Thoughts upon the Imitation of Greek Works_, in which the reformation motive is epitomised in this sentence: "The sole means for us to become--ay, if possible, inimitably great--is the imitation of the ancients." From Winckelmann the stone kept on rolling. "In Greek sculpture the painter can attain to the most sublime conception of beauty, and learn what he must lend to nature in order to give dignity and propriety to his imitation," writes Solomon Gessner in 1759. In 1762 Hagedorn of Dresden deplored, in his _Treatise on Painting_, that "Terburg and Metsu never showed us fair Andromache amongst her industrious women, instead of Dutch sempstresses." In 1766 Lessing wrote his _Laocoön_, and, like Winckelmann, saw in the sculpture of the Greeks the ideal to be imitated. From this point forward he despised landscape and _genre_ painting, and especially everything which illustrates intimate emotions and actions, and would confine the composition of pictures to an arrangement of two or three "ideal figures which please by physical beauty." Soon afterwards, with almost astonishing partiality, Goethe intervened in a notable manner on behalf of Classicism with the most flagrant contradiction of the ideas of his youth. "Nature alone," he had said in _Werther_, "makes the great artist"; and in his essay upon _German Method and Art_ he aimed this sentence at Winckelmann and his followers: "You yourselves, admirable beings, to whom it was given to enjoy the highest beauty, you are hurtful to genius; it will be raised up and borne along on no strange wings, were they even the wings of the dawn." In the same essay occurs the beautiful passage: "If art is produced out of an inward, single, independent conception, untroubled by, unconscious indeed, of, all that is extraneous, then whether she be born of rough wildness or of cultivated sensibility, she is complete and living." Soon afterwards he wrote again these great words: "Rembrandt appears to me in his biblical subjects as a true saint who saw God present everywhere, at every step, in the chamber and in the fields, and did not need the surrounding pomp of temples and sacrifices to feel