DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9188#0039
The Lamps of Greek Art
27
individual, a poem of nature rather than a portrait. It is
parallel to the pastorals of Theocritus. It strongly contrasts
with such loathsome figures as some modern sculptors in their
exaggerated love of fact, even if repulsive, have inflicted upon
us, such as the Vieille Heaulmiere of Rodin (Fig. n), a figure
of an aged and decayed prostitute. I know, of course, that
some critics would defend the last-mentioned work on ethical
grounds, as showing how hideous the decay of sensual beauty
may become ; but I venture to doubt whether sculpture is an
appropriate vehicle for a moral lesson of that kind, because it
can only represent and cannot explain.
V
So we come to the fifth lamp of Greek art, Ideality. It is
in the idealism of their rendering of the body of man that the
Greeks have surpassed all other peoples and left an imperishable
record. The history of Greek art is the history of a search for
beauty, for poetry, for whatever can charm and delight.
In the earliest sculptural works of Greece, as Lange the Dane
was the first to point out, we find not a direct imitation of the
facts of the visible world, but impressions taken from that world,
stored in the memory, and put together in accordance with
subjective purpose rather than objective law. It is indeed thus
that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their
sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining
separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent
whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which
happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which
they sketch it would be invisible. They think of a face as
turned towards them, of legs as walking past them. Every
face must have two eyes, every body two arms, whether they
would be visible under the natural conditions or not. In early
Greek reliefs it is common to find the body down to the waist
C 2
27
individual, a poem of nature rather than a portrait. It is
parallel to the pastorals of Theocritus. It strongly contrasts
with such loathsome figures as some modern sculptors in their
exaggerated love of fact, even if repulsive, have inflicted upon
us, such as the Vieille Heaulmiere of Rodin (Fig. n), a figure
of an aged and decayed prostitute. I know, of course, that
some critics would defend the last-mentioned work on ethical
grounds, as showing how hideous the decay of sensual beauty
may become ; but I venture to doubt whether sculpture is an
appropriate vehicle for a moral lesson of that kind, because it
can only represent and cannot explain.
V
So we come to the fifth lamp of Greek art, Ideality. It is
in the idealism of their rendering of the body of man that the
Greeks have surpassed all other peoples and left an imperishable
record. The history of Greek art is the history of a search for
beauty, for poetry, for whatever can charm and delight.
In the earliest sculptural works of Greece, as Lange the Dane
was the first to point out, we find not a direct imitation of the
facts of the visible world, but impressions taken from that world,
stored in the memory, and put together in accordance with
subjective purpose rather than objective law. It is indeed thus
that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their
sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining
separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent
whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which
happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which
they sketch it would be invisible. They think of a face as
turned towards them, of legs as walking past them. Every
face must have two eyes, every body two arms, whether they
would be visible under the natural conditions or not. In early
Greek reliefs it is common to find the body down to the waist
C 2