L essing, a teacher of the Germans, banished the por-
trait from the domain of art. He found portraiture
incompatible with his aesthetic principles. Winckel-
mann, another teacher of the Germans, started like Less-
ing with the idea of 'Beauty' and he, too, was unable to
fit the multiplicity of individual appearances into his sys-
tem. He was less logical and acute than Lessing, but his
artistic experience was greater and he was at pains to
bring 'Nature' and 'Art'--or what he understood by art
--into harmony, whereas Lessing, who was totally lack-
ing in visual experience, (he had not even seen a cast of
his Laocoon), had no artistic recollections of any kind to
disturb him in his uncompromising deductions. The dia-
lectician and the enthusiast drew their judgments from a
fragmentary--in Lessing's case literary--knowledge of
classical art, which, compared with the art of their own
day, seemed superior and exemplary. They were anything
but historians. You may say: What have the prejudiced
aesthetics of a rationalistic, classicistic age to do with us?
But--ever since the fifteenth century the idea of that
sempiternally valid and exemplary art of our forefathers
has guided aesthetic theory and, indirectly, aesthetic
practice not only in Italy but later in the whole civilized
world. The rule of theory always rises in proportion as
creative power falls. It rose to the utmost limit in the
work of the Saxon, Raphael Mengs. We have to wonder
why a non-Italian living on Italian soil should have gone

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