Franz von Reber

“ As the beaten metal not only extended over all the carved walls of wooden sheathing, but even covered the horizontal ceiling, the eye saw nothing but gold—a decoration which the many-flamed candlesticks must have rendered particularly brilliant, but which was eminently barbaric, as the metal was probably not enlivened by colored enamels. It is in questionable taste, even in the most prominent members of an architectural composition, to outbid the artistic expression of a work by employing for it a material of too striking intrinsic value ”

“ The scanty clothing introduced into ancient Hellenic sculptures shows throughout a close observation of nature; and the drapery is pleasing even in unsuccessful imitations, because it betrays the loving care of the artist. In the oldest productions of Greece we perceive a slumbering genius and capacity for development which were wholly lacking in the trained handiwork of Egyptian art,—as the faulty free-hand drawing of an intelligent boy, who tries to show what he has seen, awakens greater interest and hope than do the labored copies and tracings of an illiterate mechanic. ”

“ Who would prize the picture less because thunder and lightning were represented instead of Zeus, a deity who would have been attempted by no painter of antiquity, or, indeed, of later times? Though his motive may have been purely intellectual, the painter remained the same, whether he portrayed a Cassandra or a Diabole—whether he more or less displayed his astounding mastery. Apelles will be more rightly judged if he be treated as a painter rather than an artist; as such we recognize in him a technical and many-sided perfection. ”

“ The Homeric epics know nothing of a columnar temple, nothing of artistic images of the gods, nothing even of dwellings corresponding to the importance of their princely heroes. Even at a much later time a Spartan, accustomed to erect his own house with saw and axe alone, might be astonished at the squarely hewn beams of a ceiling, which he previously had seen formed only of round trunks, like those imitated upon the Lycian block-house tombs. ”

“ But, as in the history of all civilization, the currents of Greek intellectual and artistic progress moved distinctly from east to west. The European (Doric) culture was in itself less calculated to influence Asia than the Asiatic (Ionic) to affect the younger continent. It was, as decided by nature, upon European soil, upon Attica—the most advanced promontory of European Greece—that the two branches of the Greek race united, and bore in Athens that double fruit at which we marvel. ”

“ Not in the elevation of the ideal above the human, but rather in the emphasizing of this latter quality, did the Heracles of Lysippos stand in distinct opposition alike to the merely human model of Polycleitos, to the superhuman and godlike beings of Pheidias, and especially to the divinely charming beauty of the Aphrodite and the Eros, as seen in the best creations of Scopas and Praxiteles. ”

“ That upon a marble fountain-drum from Corinth represents the meeting of Heracles and Hebe; it still preserves the silhouette-like outline, the small parallel folds and general ornamental style of the drapery, and the stepping of both feet flatly upon the soles; while the unschooled endeavor and evident embarrassment of the artist does not give an unpleasing expression of awkwardness to the figures, which have a certain dignity and grace, especially remarkable in the garments and in the action of the extremities. ”

“ In this adoption of foreign properties, in this mingling of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hellenic manners of expression, they utterly sacrificed originality and simplicity of style, and made of their sculpture a repulsive hybrid of inharmonious elements. It may well be conceived that with this lifeless imitation the creative impulse languished, and art became more and more limited, until it shrank at last into mere ornamental handiwork. ”

“ In the so-called Dying Gladiator, the rough hair growing low upon the neck, the strongly marked indentation between the brow and the projecting Northern nose, the beard shorn to the upper lip, the heavy cheek-bones, the fleshy and somewhat clumsily formed body, the hard and calloused skin upon the hands and feet, the twisted neckband, and the curved battle-horn have long since shown the meaning of this statue. ”

“ As Brunn truly remarks, we can look upon whole rows of Egyptian sculptures without a question ever arising in our minds as to the authorship of this or that work, without observing that one is superior to the others, or that any were much above manufactures. The work became what the artist felt himself personally to be—a mere link in a monotonous chain. The result of this is that the statues generally represent an entirely abstract human being—not an absolute ideal, for that can hardly be said to exist in any art, but a type of the Egyptian race, well understood and unalterably repeated. ”

“ It being here entirely lacking, we cannot properly speak of an art of painting in Egypt, or, indeed, in antiquity at all, before the time of Polygnotos. Egyptian paintings are entirely of the nature of ornament; the representation of human beings is conventionalized in the same manner as are floral ornaments,—while imitated to a certain degree from nature, it is simplified according to the requirements of decorative laws. The actions shown are all without truth and life. The beauty of decoration demands a certain harmony in the choice of colors, which is there unfettered ”

“ The ordinary Egyptian stone-cutter knew of only two positions, well established by custom; he renounced fundamentally the countless different appearances of life, and, with this, all representation of action and of individuality. Primitive Greek sculpture, on the contrary, arose from a sound naturalism, which directed the eye of the artist to real and peculiar appearances from the outset, often neglecting the proportions of the whole in the desire characteristically to express important details. ”

“ The deserved sovereignty of Athens over Greece, its naval power, imposing even to the Orientals of Western Asia and Egypt, and, finally, the necessity and opportunity of rebuilding the Attic capital after its destruction by the Persians, before the decisive battle of Salamis, caused a monumental rebirth of the noble city, which not only became the classic model in those ages throughout the extent of Greece and its colonies upon distant shores, but the highest ideal of architecture to the present day and for the entire future of the human race. ”

“ But the essential and characteristic merit lay in the bodily incarnation of a grand and truly godlike ideal, employing the human form only as a word through which the elevated thought found expression. The artist had set before himself the most exalted aim—namely, to present to the eyes of the world the highest conception of divinity as seen in Athene, the goddess of the mind, and in Zeus, the king of gods. Hence the large number of Athenes executed by Pheidias, and the Aphrodite Urania, the great “heavenly” goddess, the feminine principle of the universe ”

“ The schools of Ægina, Athens, Sikyon, Argos, Rhegion, and the other cities where art had chiefly centred, flourished during the Persian wars—that greatest period of Greece, from 490 to 450 B.C., when Myron, the scholar of Ageladas, was still young. The unequalled grandeur of this age, which resulted in the splendid culmination of all Hellenic life, must have furthered art, all the more as the devastation of the war, and the subsequent enrichment of the victors, offered full opportunity and means for monumental activity. ”

“ Pergamon had been restored and enlarged by Eumenes. The wonderful works of that time show architecture to have lost all earnestness and truthfulness through the extravagant demands created by the luxurious courts of the Ptolemies, Seleucidæ, and Attalidæ; their sham theatrical pomp was surpassed only by the Oriental costliness and splendor of the materials. The monuments were expressive of the weakness and superficiality into which the Eastern Hellenic world had fallen, and for which the forms of Greek art were employed only as a transparent varnish. ”

“ Though we cannot speak of monumental independence in Persian sculpture and painting—of which, indeed, no ancient Orientals had any conception—the art of the land had at least the superiority that its three branches, in their application, stood in true relations to each other, inasmuch as architecture employed and brought forward the sister arts as secondary, decorative aid; painting and sculpture did not predominate in the excessive degree characteristic of the older nations of the East. ”

“ It has also had the more important result of securing to the fine arts their due place in the history of mankind as the chief record of various stages of civilization, and as the most trustworthy expression of the faith, the sentiments, and the emotions of past ages, and often even of their institutions and modes of life. The recognition of the significance of the fine arts in these respects is, indeed, as yet but partial, and the historical study of art does not hold the place in the scheme of liberal education which it is certain before long to attain. ”

“ Though the high state of advance which we first find in Egyptian art, three thousand years before the Christian era, must necessarily have been preceded by less perfected degrees, it is wholly impossible to perceive such stages of development in any of the monuments known. After Egypt had attained a certain height of civilization, its history, during the thousands of years known to us, shows none of those phases of advance or decline, of development in short, to be observed in Europe during every century, if not during every decade. ”

“ Pre-eminently a sculptor of portraits, he affected striking characteristics at the expense of beauty, and made it his specialty to represent the likenesses of decrepit men and women. A priestess sixty-four years old, and an aged Corinthian field-officer, Pelichos—“a bald-head with a pot-belly, tangled and flying beard, and veins projecting roundly under the withered skin,” according to the description of Lucian—must have been so far from ideal and refreshing beauty that it would seem rather to have been the aim of the artist to illustrate age as its destroyer. ”

“ For centuries cultivated nations have drawn from this inexhaustible fountain, in unconditional admiration,—learning from Greek statues, and acknowledging their matchless perfection. Although it may justly be concluded that a direct reconstruction of the architectural remains, as a whole, were it possible, is not to be recommended, still no one can hesitate to regard the best examples of Hellenic sculpture as a model worthy of direct emulation, the controlling influence of which upon the present age is only to be desired. ”

“ EGYPT. IT is a curious chance that the most ancient monuments of human civilization should stand upon a land which is one of the youngest geological formations of our earth. The scene of that artistic activity made known to us by the oldest architectural remains of Africa and of the world was not Upper Egypt, where steep primeval cliffs narrow the valley of the Nile, but the alluvion of the river’s delta. ”

“ It is only in this position that both arms are visible—an important consideration to the artist, whose object was solely to represent some action or attributes. It was also felt as a difficulty that in a relief of the side view the visible shoulder should project farther than any other part of the body, the breadth of the breast and arms being more than double that of the head. The primitive designer, to avoid these objections, resorted to a forced and clumsy torsion of the body, which may be noticed in the childhood of almost every art—in the Assyrian as well as in the most ancient Greek. ”

“ The Egyptian completed buildings and statues begun by his remote ancestors without the slightest striving for individual peculiarity. He commenced new works in the same spirit, leaving them for similar execution by his great-grandchildren. Numberless generations thus dragged on without bequeathing a trace of any peculiar character and ability. It is only by the cartouches of the kings in the hieroglyphic inscriptions that it is possible to separate the dynasties, and to group into periods of a thousand years or more, works of art which seem from their style to belong to one and the same age. ”

“ It was this same spirit of life that caused Myron’s cow to be so celebrated in antiquity that no less than thirty-six epigrams have been handed down concerning it. Petronius, in praising this master, says that, in representing animals, Myron seemed to enclose the very breath of life in the bronze; and when Pliny says that he multiplied nature, he can have no other meaning than that the artist attained so life-like an effect that his works appeared rather to have grown than to have been an artistic creation. ”

“ While for the other statues the artist had before his eyes the living combatants of the palaistra, his model for this was the sacred image standing within the temple. The evident contrast between the stiff bearing and archaic garments of the Athene and the rest of the group is thus more naturally explained than by the view that, in the artist’s conception, the goddess did not need any real action, that a slight lifting of the shield, as a divine “thus far and no farther,” was sufficient to show her supernatural power and to protect the fallen. ”

“ The blocks of the chamber floor are swallow-tailed into each other with great exactness; to which circumstance, and to the exact jointing of all the massive masonry, this exceptionally fine state of the building’s preservation is to be ascribed. The whole structure gives the impression of a terraced Chaldæan temple. It is not improbable that the Tomb of Cyrus received this sacred form because the character of a hero of Western Asia was attributed to the king soon after his death. A colonnade appears to have enclosed the sombre pile; several drums of its columns still project above the ground. ”

“ The Persians could the more easily forego the revetment of their walls with carved slabs, after the Assyrian fashion, as their architecture itself, far more than that of Mesopotamia, fulfilled its own aim,—accomplished with its own means what was elsewhere effected by sculpture and painting.
With Persian statues in the full round we have no acquaintance. Several examples remain of colossal monsters in the half round, like those met with in Assyrian sculpture. In conception and in detail, in proportion and in situation, they scarcely differ from those of Assyria: they are only somewhat stiffer ”

“ When the underdress is short, as is the case in hunting and warlike costumes, the leg below the knee is correctly but rather stiffly modelled; the muscles protrude like hard bands, without giving to the limb the vigorous force peculiar to Egyptian works. Yet the whole composition, as well as every detail of Assyrian sculpture, displays more direct study of nature than was to be found in Egypt, where the figures were created upon an abstract model,—a canon founded more upon convention than upon observation of life. ”

“ Besides figures of the gods, the sculpture of Egypt is rich in the images of kings, queens, and prominent subjects; and in such portraits the observation of the living model, of the peculiarities of character which lead to the differences of exterior appearance, would seem to be a natural consequence. But as the individual disappeared in the mass of the Egyptian people, so the appreciation of individuality was almost wholly lacking in the Egyptian artist. ”