DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0342
3θ4
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
The fancy of the sculptor is boisterous and exuberant,
his dexterity boundless. But after all we feel sadly
enough that it is only restless fancy; we stand in the
presence of no high imagination. In his reckless
sensationalism the sculptor does not even care that his
forms be always beautiful. The giants of early vase-
paintings are hoplites, huge heavy-armed soldiers. A
little later they take the form of huge warriors fighting
naked, of somewhat savage appearance, but still ideal in
strength and always perfectly human. Now fancy
wanders freely in the forbidden fields of the phantastic,
peopling the art world once more with hybrid monsters.
In Assyrian days the demon-monsters had at least this
excuse, that decoratively their very monstrosity was a
gain, so excellently lifeless was the pattern they furnished.
But the Pergamene monsters are wholly false, too hybrid
to be expressively beautiful, too alive to be decoratively
successful. We seem to see the end of this lawless
departure from nature near at hand ; fancy, to whom
some occasional wayward wandering was perhaps per-
missible, will soon become a confirmed vagrant; she will
please the better the more preposterous her creations,
and all the while the increasing realism of art will make
these phantastic creations the more repulsive. We are
not far from the monstrous compound of the leafy tree
and the human Daphne, from the man who is half a
bunch of grapes. Perhaps if we did not know the end
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
The fancy of the sculptor is boisterous and exuberant,
his dexterity boundless. But after all we feel sadly
enough that it is only restless fancy; we stand in the
presence of no high imagination. In his reckless
sensationalism the sculptor does not even care that his
forms be always beautiful. The giants of early vase-
paintings are hoplites, huge heavy-armed soldiers. A
little later they take the form of huge warriors fighting
naked, of somewhat savage appearance, but still ideal in
strength and always perfectly human. Now fancy
wanders freely in the forbidden fields of the phantastic,
peopling the art world once more with hybrid monsters.
In Assyrian days the demon-monsters had at least this
excuse, that decoratively their very monstrosity was a
gain, so excellently lifeless was the pattern they furnished.
But the Pergamene monsters are wholly false, too hybrid
to be expressively beautiful, too alive to be decoratively
successful. We seem to see the end of this lawless
departure from nature near at hand ; fancy, to whom
some occasional wayward wandering was perhaps per-
missible, will soon become a confirmed vagrant; she will
please the better the more preposterous her creations,
and all the while the increasing realism of art will make
these phantastic creations the more repulsive. We are
not far from the monstrous compound of the leafy tree
and the human Daphne, from the man who is half a
bunch of grapes. Perhaps if we did not know the end