DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0350
CHAPTER XXIX
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM
It is called the Archaeological Museum: a bad omen. Visual
people can get little out of it, but psychologists can take their
exercise in jumping like chamois. The results of our ex-
periences on the Acropolis are completed in various ways.
It is curious, the contact with Mycenae, that astounding
zero. The direct, but to my mind, brutal gestures of the
heroic age, of which the sagas tell us, are nowhere to be
found. Neither gods nor kings are visible: merely pretty
trifles and bibelots. That is how, generally speaking, civiliza-
tions end their days. Of course that is partly due to the
accidents of excavation; it is impossible to rebuild the
crumbled ruins of the kings’ palaces. But every artistic
expression bears, in addition to the signs of its own category,
the marks of the general civilization to which it belongs.
Mycenae produces an ornamental art in full flower at a very
early date. They started with the surface and never bothered
with the form they were decorating. At the same period as
this refined industrial art they produced sculpture which is
unhandy to an astonishing degree. In the remains of the
wall-paintings the same ornamental qualities prevail, but the
portraits are grotesquely confused. The influence of Egypt
is utterly misunderstood; it results in a theatrical style where
compactness has turned into stiffness. There is none of the
prototype’s healthy realism. (The Egyptian room collected
by dilettanti cannot of course give you any proper notion of
this.) On the contrary the famous head of a bull in Crete
must be a triumph of dull naturalism. Thomas declared that
322
THE NATIONAL MUSEUM
It is called the Archaeological Museum: a bad omen. Visual
people can get little out of it, but psychologists can take their
exercise in jumping like chamois. The results of our ex-
periences on the Acropolis are completed in various ways.
It is curious, the contact with Mycenae, that astounding
zero. The direct, but to my mind, brutal gestures of the
heroic age, of which the sagas tell us, are nowhere to be
found. Neither gods nor kings are visible: merely pretty
trifles and bibelots. That is how, generally speaking, civiliza-
tions end their days. Of course that is partly due to the
accidents of excavation; it is impossible to rebuild the
crumbled ruins of the kings’ palaces. But every artistic
expression bears, in addition to the signs of its own category,
the marks of the general civilization to which it belongs.
Mycenae produces an ornamental art in full flower at a very
early date. They started with the surface and never bothered
with the form they were decorating. At the same period as
this refined industrial art they produced sculpture which is
unhandy to an astonishing degree. In the remains of the
wall-paintings the same ornamental qualities prevail, but the
portraits are grotesquely confused. The influence of Egypt
is utterly misunderstood; it results in a theatrical style where
compactness has turned into stiffness. There is none of the
prototype’s healthy realism. (The Egyptian room collected
by dilettanti cannot of course give you any proper notion of
this.) On the contrary the famous head of a bull in Crete
must be a triumph of dull naturalism. Thomas declared that
322