DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9177#0045
II
ANCIENT CRITICS ON ART
25
loses its innate nobility, or sinks to a level which can be called
vulgar. One may fairly say that it idealizes even deformity
itself. For example, in the Palace of the Conservators at Rome
there are two noteworthy statues of the Hellenistic age,1 one
representing an old fisherman, the other an old shepherdess.
Both are ugly and wrinkled, and the folds of their skin are
portrayed with wonderful fidelity to life. At first sight they
seem mere transcripts from sordid actuality. Yet, on a closer
study, one sees how marvellously they embody the idea of a
life of hardship passed in battling with wind and storm; and
they are found, after all, to have an underlying idealism, which
one would not always find in a modern rendering of the same
subjects. Their character, if one may use a modern parallel,
is of the school of Dickens, rather than of the school of the
Police Gazette. Dickens has also been called a realist; but in
fact he gives us not individuals but types, much in the fashion
of the Greeks, but without their delicacy of taste.
Another distinction drawn by Aristotle is between the poets
and artists who represent men as better than they are, and
those who represent them as worse than they are, with the
intermediate class of those who represent men neither as better
nor as worse, but exactly as they are in fact. "Sophocles," he
remarks,2 "said that he drew men as they ought to be, Eurip-
ides as they are." Of course the broad distinction between
the idealist, the naturalist and the caricaturist holds at all
times and in all lands. But to discuss this matter at length
would take us too far into the deep waters of aesthetics, and we
must reserve it for treatment in the final chapter of this book.
In the great and flourishing time of art, while every day
brought forth new and striking developments, while great
temples were rising, and the market-places were being stored
like museums with the masterpieces of great sculptors, it does
1 In Brunn's series, PI. 393. 2 Poetics, XXV., 10.
ANCIENT CRITICS ON ART
25
loses its innate nobility, or sinks to a level which can be called
vulgar. One may fairly say that it idealizes even deformity
itself. For example, in the Palace of the Conservators at Rome
there are two noteworthy statues of the Hellenistic age,1 one
representing an old fisherman, the other an old shepherdess.
Both are ugly and wrinkled, and the folds of their skin are
portrayed with wonderful fidelity to life. At first sight they
seem mere transcripts from sordid actuality. Yet, on a closer
study, one sees how marvellously they embody the idea of a
life of hardship passed in battling with wind and storm; and
they are found, after all, to have an underlying idealism, which
one would not always find in a modern rendering of the same
subjects. Their character, if one may use a modern parallel,
is of the school of Dickens, rather than of the school of the
Police Gazette. Dickens has also been called a realist; but in
fact he gives us not individuals but types, much in the fashion
of the Greeks, but without their delicacy of taste.
Another distinction drawn by Aristotle is between the poets
and artists who represent men as better than they are, and
those who represent them as worse than they are, with the
intermediate class of those who represent men neither as better
nor as worse, but exactly as they are in fact. "Sophocles," he
remarks,2 "said that he drew men as they ought to be, Eurip-
ides as they are." Of course the broad distinction between
the idealist, the naturalist and the caricaturist holds at all
times and in all lands. But to discuss this matter at length
would take us too far into the deep waters of aesthetics, and we
must reserve it for treatment in the final chapter of this book.
In the great and flourishing time of art, while every day
brought forth new and striking developments, while great
temples were rising, and the market-places were being stored
like museums with the masterpieces of great sculptors, it does
1 In Brunn's series, PI. 393. 2 Poetics, XXV., 10.