added too freely
In his ‘History of Ancient Art,’ of which the first edition appeared in 1764, Winckelmann gave to the study of the antique an impulse along a line which it has never wholly deserted; his theory of the ‘beautiful’ as manifested even in these Græco-Roman copies to which his imagination often added too freely the missing artistic beauty, still colours our modern phraseology when we speak of ancient art. But not even Winckelmann lived to enter the promised land. He was murdered in 1768, nearly half a century before the purchase of the marbles of the Parthenon, by which the British Museum in 1816, revealed to modern Europe the flower of Greek sculpture.