Ernest Henry Short

“ To this very day the long winters and cool summers, the sombre skies and deep forests, have operated to produce a body of thought and emotion in the North of Europe that differs entirely from that nourished under the clear skies and in the warm winds of Italy and Greece. The mysticism of the Northman, his yearning to be at one with the Ultimate Reality, is foreign to the typical Southern intellect—as foreign as the dim forests, in which the mystical gloom of the Northern imagination arose, are to the fruitful plains in which the sunnier creed of the Southerner had its birth. ”

“ We have seen the conclusion of the struggle of the sculptors to make marble and bronze bear once more the impress of every imagination of the human heart. Nothing now remains save to estimate the fruits of the victory—a task which entails the appreciation of one man, Michael Angelo.
There is no exaggeration in focussing our attention on one artist. The apotheosis of Italian sculpture connects itself as inevitably with Michael Angelo as the topmost peak of Elizabethan drama—Shakespeare—connects itself with the dramatic hills and hillocks which led up to it. ”

“ CHAPTER II THE PARTHENON AND THE TEMPLE STATUARY OF GREECE
(470 b.c. TO 420 b.c.)
On the vast canvas of recorded history one half-century has always stood out. The clearer the vision of the observer and the larger his view, the more every line in the composition has appeared to converge upon and lead up to that central point. Ever and again the imagination of man, fascinated by some new beauty, has been tempted away. It has always returned with a new wonder. The advance of knowledge has changed the world’s estimate of this and that part of the glowing record of human action and endeavour. ”

“ Coming there at the age of twenty-two, Canova encountered the full tide of the ideas enunciated by Winckelmann and his school. Like most successful sculptors, the Venetian was a man of boundless energy. His patrons and rivals in Rome soon became impressed with the belief that Canova was capable of founding a school of sculpture worthy of comparison with those of classic times. Indeed, to-day, it is quite easy to realize the intense enthusiasm aroused by the works of Canova. Such a statue as the beautiful “Cupid and Psyche,” produced in the year 1787, has not yet lost its power to charm. ”

“ There are many critics who appear to doubt the existence of English sculpture. They seem to regard Paris as the only source of modern work and the English school as a mere branch of the French. The real truth is that, apart from technique, the English sculptor has little to learn from his Continental neighbour. We are not writing of clay-thumbers or marble-chippers, who work for the promise of a measure of material prosperity. We have in mind earnest craftsmen who turn to sculpture naturally—joying in an art which enables them to give form to the thoughts and feelings astir around them. ”

“ Athens has practically acknowledged defeat in the struggle for the hegemony of Greece. Instead of the all-pervading pride in citizenship, the Athenian is conscious of an increasing interest in himself as an individual. The old absorption in the ideal citizenship vanishes. For this very reason the sculptor strikes a note more akin to our nature. The cold, almost repellent, beauty of the fifth-century sculpture is replaced by a new and more sensuous grace.
What were the historical circumstances which brought about this entire change in the Greek artists’ outlook upon life? ”

“ To-day, we are too apt to regard clarity of thought as the chief attribute of genius. Really genius depends upon the power to call up delicate tones of feeling, of infinite subtlety of texture when compared with the ideas which we often regard as its sole endowment.
Praxiteles has been described as “He who actually blended with his marbles the emotions of the soul.” The phrase is a fitting one with which to close our review of his art. His abiding greatness depends less upon sheer beauty of line than upon the delicacy of the feelings which he made marble convey. ”

“ Unfortunately, no lover of sculpture, writing in English can turn from the art of France to that of his own country without a pang. For hundreds of years, the sculptor met with no encouragement in Great Britain. The land which had nourished the genius of a Shakespeare, a Milton and a Wren, of a Gainsborough and a Reynolds, could only advance a list of shadowy names against the tangible achievements of its great rival on the other side of the Channel. In the early days of the Renaissance, there was some promise that sculpture might obtain a foothold in England as it was doing in France. ”

“ It would be fatal to treat the bronzes of Polyclitus, the marbles of Phidias, Donatello, and Michael Angelo, as too many historians do the documents from which they presume to create the past. Even if political history can be profitably reduced to a dull catalogue of charters and enactments—which we deny—the history of an art cannot. That must take human passion and emotion into account, and must be written by those who are not afraid to feel or ashamed of their feelings. From any other standpoint, art becomes divorced from life. ”

“ The case of the sculptor, however, differs considerably from that of the painter. It is, of course, obvious that form is, in a sense, a mere convention, whether in painting or sculpture. No one can argue that the eye has any immediate knowledge of form, any more than it can be said that lines really exist in nature. But form is a convention which every sculptor, from Phidias to Donatello, and from Michael Angelo to Houdon, has accepted. True, no sculptor is concerned with form and form only. ”

“ When Flaxman sought to portray the intense passions, his borrowed style betrayed him. If intensity of emotion was of little moment in sculpture, Flaxman would rank among the immortals. As a fact, we know that it constitutes its very life. [Pg 262] Consequently, one can only regret that it was not given to the first great English sculptor to emulate the achievements of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and evolve a style capable of expressing the manifold energies of his age in marble, as truly as they did on canvas. As it was, the genius of Flaxman only served to perpetuate a false ideal. ”

“ Men turned from the griefs of a Niobe and found consolation in the sheer sensuous beauty of Praxiteles’ “Aphrodite.” They preferred the manly charms of Hermes to the awful sublimity embodied in the brow of Phidias’ Zeus. And so in our period, when the horrors which had overtaken the Greek cities were threatening their heirs in Italy, the same thing took place. We find that the typical work is not the brooding figure of “Lorenzo of Urbino” or the “Night,” which Michael Angelo sculptured beneath the figure of Giuliano, but the melodious dreams that floated from the brush of a Correggio. ”

“ What we have come to regard as the great charm of the group—the insistence upon the joy of motion—must have seemed sheer impertinence to an age which regarded a graceful calm as the one end of sculpture. No doubt, Carpeaux’s critics really believed that, in “The Dance,” Genius, in truth, danced a bacchanal; in their view, he crowned
“The brimming goblet, seized the thyrsus, bound His brows with ivy, rushed into the field Of wild imagination and there reeled, The victim of his own lascivious fires, And, dizzy with delight, profaned the sacred wires.” ”

“ What he desired was not civic or national success, but the foundation of a new age of art and culture in which every type of individuality would have its place. The Italian longed for individual fame, for individual power. This could not but entail the loss of that grand unity of aim which was the great glory of Athenian art. Instead, it led to the growth of a wonderful diversity of character and an extraordinary variety of interests. Whereas the Greek had been content to portray a few supreme types, the artist of the Italian Renaissance wished to show humanity in every aspect. ”

“ As we look upon the “Niobe,” we feel at once that so dramatic a theme would have made no appeal to the generation before Scopas. But we must also feel that the fourth century has struck a new note—a note, moreover, to which marble can respond. But what is most wonderful is the magnificent reserve, the perfect moderation, with which the artist has expressed emotions that had been considered beyond the range of the art. The sculptor has not sacrificed that harmony and repose which he regards as essential to the idea of the beautiful. ”

“ He rightly refuses to confine himself to forms which the Athenians and the Florentines happened to find most suitable for the expression of their experience. This is the simple justification for much that is regarded as iconoclastic in his artistic creed. When he cries: “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of the clean, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures,” Rodin merely asserts a closer kinship with the Gothic than the Greek ideal. Whether Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles are right and Rodin wrong, matters little. ”

“ But it is even more necessary to realize the essential difference—that the Gothic cathedral owed even more to the inspiration of a great church and an all-powerful priesthood. At the very outset we come upon the fact that whereas the growth of Greek sculpture largely depended upon such a purely human feeling as the passion for physical beauty, sculpture in the Middle Ages was required to incarnate an entirely extra-mundane emotion—the craving for an all-ruling and ever-living deity. ”

“ Speaking roughly, the pseudo-Hellenic style of Canova and his followers persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century. So long as it lasted, the sculptor chose to fit his thoughts and emotions into an entirely alien form. It was a form of his own choosing, it is true, but it could scarcely be said to be of his own making.
Now, we have seen again and again, that the production of vital sculpture, whether by the nation or the individual, depends upon absolute sincerity. It must spring from the deep-felt emotions of the artist. The class of work—portraiture or what not—matters little. ”

“ Surely any imaginative sculptor of the modern school would insist, above all, upon the obvious contrast between the male and the female form, seeing that the story of Hylas itself depends upon this very point. Gibson, however, practically models the male and the female limbs, the male and the female flesh, alike. Hylas has not the legs of a youth, nor have the nymphs, who have been smitten by his beauty, the legs of women. ”

“ The Athenians could applaud a Phryne who at a festival at Eleusis, let down her hair and descended into the sea in the sight of all the Greeks, after the manner of a sea-born Aphrodite. Instead of Zeus and Hera, men looked to Dionysus, the leader of the revels; to Apollo, the chief of the Muses; to Aphrodite, the Queen of Desire, who held in her cestus all the magic of passion.
The greatness of an artist does not rest upon opposition offered to current civic and social ideals. ”

“ A work of art so great, which exemplified the struggles and aspirations of a race so completely, could not but owe the largest debt to the political leader of the State. All the forces of Athens were united to beautify the Acropolis, and these were marshalled, naturally enough, not by an artist but by a politician. The real creator of the temple of Athena was Pericles. He realised that the greatness of his countrymen depended, not upon the breadth of their dominions, but upon the healthy development of every citizen, physically, mentally, and emotionally. ”

“ Michael Angelo did not forget that his formal arrangements—to describe the figures of “Dawn” and “Night” in the baldest possible terms—would be seen by the aid of the sun and through the Florentine atmosphere. But it is a long cry from this intelligent use of light and shade to the ultra-modern justification for the distorted grotesques of such a sculptor as Rosso. Here are Rosso’s words:
“Art must be nothing else than the expression of some sudden sensation given us by light. There is no such thing as painting or sculpture. There is only light.” ”

“ The sculptor, like the dramatist, needs the atmosphere of a city and the vivifying effects of a city’s ever-changing influences to kindle the vital spark. Both are inspired, not by the appreciation of the few, but by the homage of the many. So long as the Greek husbandmen met by tens to honour Dionysus, the god’s feast was the occasion of a rude medley of rustic song and dance. ”

“ But it would be untrue to suggest that as a sculptor he rose superior to his age. Weighed in the scale of European art, ancient and modern, the life-work of Flaxman contains the same lesson as that of Canova and Thorvaldsen. It stands as a perpetual memorial of the eternal law, that no living art can be built upon a borrowed style—even though that style be Greek. ”

“ Florence certainly played the part in Italian culture that Athens did in the growth of Hellenism. Of all the cities of Italy, she was most completely in touch with the diverse influences which humanized the arts. But the movement was not a matter of Florentine culture. Just as had been the case in Greece, a hundred centres produced personalities—men and women of every stamp. The theocracy of Rome, the democracy of Florence, the monarchy of Naples, the aristocracy of Venice, and the tyranny of Milan, all did their part. ”