art, the
victors in the Olympic games; yes, and even Phryne, who, as the most
beautiful of women, ascended naked out of the water, in the presence of
assembled Greece."

This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann possessed
in his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid open
by accident to our alien modern atmosphere. To the criticism of that
consummate Greek modelling he brought not only his culture but his
temperament. We have seen how definite was the leading motive of his
culture; how, like some central root-fibre, it maintained the
well-rounded unity of his life through a thousand distractions.
Interests not his, nor meant for him, never disturbed him. In morals, as
in criticism, he followed the clue of an unerring instinct. Penetrating
into the antique world by his passion, his temperament, he enunciates no
formal principles, always hard and one-sided. 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 ineffectual
wholeness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance of its own.

One result of this temperament is a serenity--Heiterkeit--which
characterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of Greek art.
This serenity is, perhaps, in 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 the senses." It may be so for the spectator; he may
find that the spectacle of supreme works of art takes from the life of
the senses something of its turbid fever. But this is possible for the
spectator only because the artist, in producing those works, has
gradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form. He
may live, as Keats lived, a pure lif