DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0241
LUXOR
are pretty borders with vine-clusters on the roughly carved
ceiling, where the irregular ups and downs in the limestone
give it the appearance of a roof made of leaves.
On the way back we looked in for a moment at the
Ramesseum. One can’t stand this expansive opulence for
long. Rameses towers over the whole place. He and his
successors have dug themselves in so thoroughly here that
only furtive remains of earlier generations have survived.
Rameses has brutalized Thebes. Even before him there
were big buildings here, great formal symphonies which
did not halt at the conventional limits prescribed for archi-
tecture. Thutmosis m, the builder of Luxor, stands in
relation to the pyramid builders as Beethoven to Bach. You
already feel the retreat has begun. You meet with excesses,
and the rhythm runs up to a shriek. But the visionary only
lets himself be carried away after a gradual raising of the
temperature, and in his last excesses the whole process of
development swings with him. His isolation is due not to
a conscious caprice but to the dramatic development of an
experience. He does not wish to break with tradition and
leaves no stone unturned in order to get back into it.
Rameses, on the other hand, is the romantic degenerate v/ho
finds his normal method of procedure in excesses and leaves
the classic mean with nothing but a rigorously restricted
pretence at mastery. He is aiming at something quite
different from harmony. He wants to thrill himself and the
rest with his egotistic lusts and pays no heed to the flood.
It hits architecture harder than music; and the building
mania of Rameses is dominated by a bandmaster who turns
a concert of strings into a brass band. The rock facade of
Abu Simbel is the climax; there they have tried to convert
an entire mountain into an orchestra. But this illusion, too,
whose origin remained wrapped in obscurity at Abu Simbel,
is anticipated time and again by the mistakes and the strokes
of genius of many illustrious precursors. The sphinx by the
2x9
are pretty borders with vine-clusters on the roughly carved
ceiling, where the irregular ups and downs in the limestone
give it the appearance of a roof made of leaves.
On the way back we looked in for a moment at the
Ramesseum. One can’t stand this expansive opulence for
long. Rameses towers over the whole place. He and his
successors have dug themselves in so thoroughly here that
only furtive remains of earlier generations have survived.
Rameses has brutalized Thebes. Even before him there
were big buildings here, great formal symphonies which
did not halt at the conventional limits prescribed for archi-
tecture. Thutmosis m, the builder of Luxor, stands in
relation to the pyramid builders as Beethoven to Bach. You
already feel the retreat has begun. You meet with excesses,
and the rhythm runs up to a shriek. But the visionary only
lets himself be carried away after a gradual raising of the
temperature, and in his last excesses the whole process of
development swings with him. His isolation is due not to
a conscious caprice but to the dramatic development of an
experience. He does not wish to break with tradition and
leaves no stone unturned in order to get back into it.
Rameses, on the other hand, is the romantic degenerate v/ho
finds his normal method of procedure in excesses and leaves
the classic mean with nothing but a rigorously restricted
pretence at mastery. He is aiming at something quite
different from harmony. He wants to thrill himself and the
rest with his egotistic lusts and pays no heed to the flood.
It hits architecture harder than music; and the building
mania of Rameses is dominated by a bandmaster who turns
a concert of strings into a brass band. The rock facade of
Abu Simbel is the climax; there they have tried to convert
an entire mountain into an orchestra. But this illusion, too,
whose origin remained wrapped in obscurity at Abu Simbel,
is anticipated time and again by the mistakes and the strokes
of genius of many illustrious precursors. The sphinx by the
2x9