“Just think, for instance, what incredible clumsiness it took for life to alter, diminish, or add even the slightest thing in Tuscany after the blessed moment of two and a half centuries from the birth of Cimabue (c. 1240) to the death of Piero della Francesca (1492: also the year of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death). The very idea! What was historical development thinking in continuing to concern itself with it? Here, it had produced a masterpiece. Couldn’t it leave it alone and turn to another region that had not yet fully flourished? Michelangelo—fine. But in Florence, he was already stylistically out of place. Far too baroque, that man, far too lush, too un-Tuscan. Rome, all right. That’s his home. That was his true hometown. There he could go wild. Even at the risk of depriving Florence and the world of a wonderful tomb, he should have limited himself to Rome. It would have spared us some of the worst horrors of the nineteenth century. But certainly after him: from the seicento to the settecento (which had quite delightful results elsewhere, for example in the Veneto) they should have simply prohibited any artistic attempt in Florence. Just imagine if we had gotten control of the matter in time. What a Disneyland of cultural history Europe would have become! An Italy without the Risorgimento. The Netherlands, where after Vermeer anyone who touches a brush has his right hand chopped off. In Germany, the natural development would have been halted shortly before the Thirty Years’ War (although I have to admit: Grimmelshausen was worth it). And of course, without this barbarity, all those highly gifted pastors’ sons would never have turned up, those to whom your Fatherland owes such an intellectual debt—as I do my Uncle Helmuth. True, the private tutor trade would have blossomed, flourished even, it might even have produced important pupils and not just poetry and philosophy. But I am speaking of the truly plastic arts, the formative arts, pleasant to our senses and therefore truly civilizing, arts that, unlike literature, do not stir up our brains. Intellect is a precarious thing, after all. It testifies to a high aesthetic sensibility, that the old aristocracy had domestics to do their thinking for them. Be that as it may: you would know how to present this Wonderland of Europe, varnished like the color prints in the Propyläen History of Art, neatly cleared of the refuse of cultural decline here and there, the corners swept clean of the feces of epigoni. In short, an Americanly perfected Europe: a gigantic museum, splendidly lucid in its arrangement, its inscriptions intelligible even to the semiliterate, purged of the stylistic anachronisms committed by those who are behind the times, the latecomers. Just think of the treasures of Europe’s landscapes as designed here by Lorenzetti, there by Altdorfer, there again by Breughel, there by Le Lorrain, here by Caspar David Friedrich, there by Constable and Turner, here by Courbet, Corot, and Cézanne! Imagine this pleasure adorned with Piranesi ruins and crowned with hilltop towns à la Matthäus Merian, towns by Paolo Ucello, by Dürer, by Canaletto, on whose squares we are greeted by Praxiteles and Brancusi, and whose halls relieve us with frescoes by Giotto and Picasso.