nstruction
in youth, broken, distracted studies in early manhood, the burden of
school-keeping! He was thirty years old before he enjoyed a single favour
of fortune: but as soon as he had attained to an adequate condition of
freedom, he appears before us consummate and entire, complete in the
ancient sense."

But his hair is turning grey, and he has not yet reached the south. The
Saxon court had become Roman Catholic, and the way to favour at Dresden
was through Romish ecclesiastics. Probably the thought of a profession of
the Romish religion was not new to Winckelmann. At one time he had
thought of begging his way to Rome, from cloister to cloister, under the
pretence of a disposition to change his faith. In 1751, the papal nuncio,
Archinto, was one of the visitors at Noethenitz. He suggested Rome as the
fitting stage for Winckelmann's attainments, and held out the hope of a
place in the papal library. Cardinal Passionei, charmed with
Winckelmann's beautiful Greek writing, was ready to play the part of
Maecenas, on condition that the necessary change should be made.
Winckelmann accepted the bribe, and visited the nuncio at Dresden.
Unquiet still at the word "profession," not without a struggle, he joined
the Romish Church, July the 11th, 1754.

Goethe boldly pleads that Winckelmann was a pagan, that the landmarks of
Christendom meant nothing to him. It is clear that he intended to deceive
no one by his disguise; fears of the inquisition are sometimes visible
during his life in Rome; he entered Rome notoriously with the works of
Voltaire in his possession; the thought of what Count Buenau might be
thinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the other
hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan
grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed
Protestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he might
reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the
Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme
tradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with its
simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must
have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this
sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann
may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one
incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the relig