THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. VOL. 136. PUBLISHED IN JANUARY & APRIL, 1874. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1874. LIPPAY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-Winckelmann, sein Leben, seine Werke und seine Zeitgenossen. Von Carl Justi. 3 Volumes, Leipsic, 1866-72. THE book at the head of this article will well repay perusal. Though Winckelmann exercised an electrical influence in his day, and attained an European celebrity, inspiring contemporaries with a new conception of Art, and kindling their imaginations by a flashing revelation of the Antique, these volumes first give us a real life of him. Full justice has been done to the virgin subject thus taken in hand. Dr. Justi has performed his part with discriminating love and an exhaustive research which has made his composition more than a mere biography: it is an encyclopædic history of whatever can in any way bear upon or illustrate the influence of Winckelmann's individual action. We tender our warm acknowledgments for the indefatigable industry which has cleared every speck of haze from the memorable and dramatic career of an extraordinary man-a career bespeaking interest on many scores; at its outset painful, at its close deeply tragical, at various points marked by curious psychological features, and from first to last pre-eminently distinguished by indelible vigour in one particular pursuit. In the sandy plain known as the Old March, which stretches with dreary flatness from Magdeburg to Hamburg, lies the dilapidated town of Stendal, with grass-grown streets and tumbledown houses, an image of desolation, though once a stately stronghold of those indomitable German colonists, who won this tract for their race from the Slaves, and monuments of whose vigour are yet visible in massive gate-towers and lofty churchsteeples, rising like solemn ghosts of the past over the surrounding solitude and decay-monuments of striking character, but as removed from the forms of Classical architecture as is the monotonous landscape from the type of Greek scenery. In this grim phantom of rugged Mediæval existence John Joachim Winckelmann was born, December 9, 1711, and passed those earlier years during which the mind is apt to receive from Vol. 136.-No. 271. surrounding B |