DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0212
i78
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
And so it is always with them that dwell in Olympus ;
they are as strong and fair as the sons and daughters
of men, nay, stronger and fairer, sometimes as frail.
They love and hate, they hope and fear, they feast and
dwell in goodly houses, they are weary and would fain
sleep—they are human, in a word, and nothing human
do they account alien.
No aspect of religion is so favourable to art as this
tendency to anthropomorphism. From before the face
of a god with the body of a man and the head of a
crocodile, art flies abashed ; creation, Plato has said,
must be of beauty not of deformity, “ the deformed is
always inharmonical with the divine.” “ Beauty is the
destiny of parturition who presides at creative birth, and
therefore, when she approaches beauty, the conceiving
power is propitious, and diffuse, and benign, and inspires
and bears fruit; on the appearance of foul ugliness she
frowns, and contracts in pain, and is averted and morose
and shrinks up, and not without a pang refrains from
creation ” (Plato, Symp. 206).
I do not mean to say that the Greeks had never their
period of grosser religions. Scattered about through
their mythology are traces of bygone animal worship.
Zeus, when he would beguile the heart of a mortal, dis-
guises himself as a swan or a bull; the goddess Thetis,
when beset by a lover, can transform herself into a
snake, a dragon, a fire, a tree. These and the like
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
And so it is always with them that dwell in Olympus ;
they are as strong and fair as the sons and daughters
of men, nay, stronger and fairer, sometimes as frail.
They love and hate, they hope and fear, they feast and
dwell in goodly houses, they are weary and would fain
sleep—they are human, in a word, and nothing human
do they account alien.
No aspect of religion is so favourable to art as this
tendency to anthropomorphism. From before the face
of a god with the body of a man and the head of a
crocodile, art flies abashed ; creation, Plato has said,
must be of beauty not of deformity, “ the deformed is
always inharmonical with the divine.” “ Beauty is the
destiny of parturition who presides at creative birth, and
therefore, when she approaches beauty, the conceiving
power is propitious, and diffuse, and benign, and inspires
and bears fruit; on the appearance of foul ugliness she
frowns, and contracts in pain, and is averted and morose
and shrinks up, and not without a pang refrains from
creation ” (Plato, Symp. 206).
I do not mean to say that the Greeks had never their
period of grosser religions. Scattered about through
their mythology are traces of bygone animal worship.
Zeus, when he would beguile the heart of a mortal, dis-
guises himself as a swan or a bull; the goddess Thetis,
when beset by a lover, can transform herself into a
snake, a dragon, a fire, a tree. These and the like