since 1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago. The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the improvements which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's History of Art and Ottfried Müller's Manual of Artistic Archæology so successful in their day.[1]
Winckelmann's History of Art among the Ancients, originally published in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences, that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write
- ↑ Germany had long felt the want which Schnaase attempted to satisfy. As early as 1841 Franz Kugler published his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, which embraces the whole history of art from the earliest times down to our own day. The book was successful; the fourth edition, revised and corrected by Wilhelm Lübke (2 vols. 8vo. 1861, Stuttgart), lies before us, but to give an idea of its inadequacy as a history of ancient art, it is enough to say that the whole of the antique period, both in Greece and Asia, occupies no more than 206 pages of the first volume. The few illustrations are not very good in quality, and their source is never indicated; the draughtsman has taken little care to reproduce with fidelity the style of the originals or to call attention to their peculiarities; finally, the arrangements adopted betray the defects of a severely scientific method. The author commences with Celtic monuments (dolmens and menhirs), and then passes to the structures of Oceania and America; before commencing upon Egypt he takes us to Mexico and Yucatan. Lübke, whilst still occupied with the work of Kugler, wished to supply for the use of students and artists a book of a more elementary character; he therefore published in 1860 an 8vo volume which he called Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte; the antique here occupies 208 pages out of 720. His plan seems to us to be open to the same objection as that of Kugler; he follows a geographical instead of an historical arrangement; he begins with the extreme east; he puts the Assyrians and the Persians before Egypt, and India before Assyria. His illustrations are sometimes better than those of Kugler, but many of the cuts are common to both works.
Under the title Geschichte der Plastik, Overbeck and Lübke have each written a comprehensive history of sculpture. [The word "comprehensive" must here be understood in a strictly limited sense.—Ed.] The word Plastik in the language of German critics has this special and restricted meaning—it comprises sculpture only. The work of Overbeck, far superior to that of Lübke, deserves the success which has attended it; the third edition, which contains the results of the searches at Olympia and at Pergamus, is now in course of publication.
