The disciples of Winckelmann had not been, like Goethe and Schiller, vigorous naturalists until the spirit of ancient times had looked upon them, and they were consequently still less able to resist her glance. They entered upon the new road not with that generative impulse of the creative mind, whose superabundance did not know what course it should take, what stream it should find. They adopted the forms, as they had been provided by the greater ages, without any doubt as to their absolute excellence, or the least attempt at any happy innovation. And if they "have better understood" the Greeks than their predecessors in Italy and France were able to do, then one is never less like an original nature than when one imitates them faithfully. Winckelmann's road to inimitability led not only to a more hollow and lifeless Classicism than there ever had been, to a more cheerless and unpleasant art than any which the school of Bologna had produced. It tended, above all, since the thinking people had thought out the classic idea--which the other nations had not--to the sacrifice of all pictorial technique, of the whole knowledge which the age had up till then possessed. There is a legend in the history of the Church, that at the time of the donation of Constantine a voice was heard from Heaven: "This day has poison entered into the body of the Church." To the German art of our century this poison was the writings of Winckelmann. First of all it was _Anton Rafael Mengs_, whose originally strong and great talent was distorted by the counsels of the learned. As in the works of the Caracci, those only are to-day of any interest which reveal themselves least as eclectics and most as children of the seventeenth century, so with Mengs--he is only enjoyable now where he did not try to be antique, but sympathised without too much reflection on the traditions of his age. He is particularly so in his fine pastel portraits in the Dresden Gallery, which are wholly influenced by the taste for _rococo_, and are its last expiring manifestation. They are a testimony that it was not without some justice that the Apelles of Dresden was called by his contemporaries the most remarkable German painter of the eighteenth century. Rosalba Carriera and Liotard seem weak and insipid beside him; Reynolds only at his best had that characteristic clearness, that plastic energy of modelling, and that life-like colouring. There is nothing insipid or affected, nothing of that simpering affability that his successors brought into vogue. And when we remember that they proceeded from a youth of sixteen, the strength and simplicity of intuition seem incredible. In his later portraits, too, painted in oil, the better ones are directly classic; very noble in their clear, subtile, grey tone, strikingly alive, and, withal, of an extraordinary independence which shows no leaning upon any other master whatever. Mengs belongs to those portrait painters who look