G. G. Zerffi

“ In time man became conscious of his nature, and emancipated his spirit in life and in art. He began to strive upwards, to detach himself from mere forms, however beautiful, if there was no meaning, no soul, no sense in them; he sought in everything the redeeming IDEA, without which no modern work of art is possible. Thus, ancient art had to yield to different principles. We shall have in future to distinguish between artistic products of reality, feeling, and intellect, till we shall find ourselves obliged to seek for a combination of these elements in order to understand modern art. ”

“ The Romans conquered, and the conquered provinces were to furnish soldiers or labourers, and were tied by means of despotism to the wheels of the proud state-carriage. The Greeks humanised; the Romans demoralised and organised. The Greeks played at soldiers in a spirit of glorious patriotism. The Romans were soldiers for the sake of conquest, plunder, and vain glory. Spirited youthfulness was the Greek element. Stern and calculating manliness the essence of the Roman. The Greek was free in life, in art, in the worship of his gods, in poetry and philosophy. ”

“ They were much more inclined to adorn the courts of their temples and their public places with the statues of orators, wrestlers, poets, artists, and philosophers, than with those of men who, in defending their country against invading hordes of barbarians, did their duty and nothing more. What a scope for our artists if we were to adorn our town-halls, courts of justice, our museums, universities, academies, public places, and churches with the statues of those who had devoted their energies to religion, oratory, science, art, politics, and the general welfare of their country! ”

“ We still live on the mere interest of that immense capital which was left by the Greeks as an imperishable legacy to humanity. Whatever the Greeks touched at that period they transformed into pearls of beauty, gold of truth, and jewels of goodness. They mounted the winged steed of imagination, and were taken up to the bright heaven of pure idealisation, where they saw boundless beauty in forms, and acquired an immortal striving after truth and the eternal laws of goodness, based on the very organisation of our complicated double nature. ”

“ Two forces guide our material and intellectual life. We possess two means of acquiring knowledge and of practising art: reason and experience. Impressions from without are the everlasting source of all our conceptions. Hunger and thirst drive us to seek nourishment, to become fishers, hunters, herdsmen, or agriculturists. Cold and heat force us to seek a shelter, to construct wigwams, huts, dwellings on piles, cottages, houses, palaces, and temples.
10 Though order and harmony prevail in the outer world, every atom of the universe is endowed with an unconscious will or life of its own. ”

“ As little as our globe is the centre of the universe, or man the centre of creation, so little did art or science spring at once perfectly armed, provided with spear and shield, from Jupiter’s head like blue-eyed Athene. In a certain sense art and science are both of divine origin, but only so far as the originating and creative power is concerned, which, once set in motion, had to grow and to develop according to definite and immutable laws. ”

“ Whilst faith and experience are possible without an artistic elevation of the mind, art must combine the elements of religion and science, and form through beauty a visible link between these elements.
The sublime, as we have said, rules in the universe. Clouds chase one another and are subject to everlasting changes. Trees cover the surface of our globe, forming woods at random. Mountains are towered up, as if hurled together by chance. ”

“ Christianity now illuminated the world with its clear light; but, dazzled by the divine brilliancy, everything in art, science and social life appeared at first dark, black, and hopeless. By degrees the minds of men began to grasp the newly proclaimed eternal law, through which alone the disturbed inner and outer, spiritual and material, moral and intellectual, static and dynamic forces of humanity were to attain a perfect balance. ”

“ An antediluvian world opens its gates to us. There is everywhere something astounding and gorgeous, but we are unable to discern the necessity for the existence of the parts, to form a coherent total. The galleries with their colonnades puzzle us. The outer square-form, overtowered by a mighty cupola, and by half-cupolas, is as incongruous as the ornamentation of the interior. The shafts of the columns are amongst the finest specimens of Roman architecture. Walls and pillars are adorned with variegated marble panels in mosaic patterns. ”

“ The Greeks and Jews never could grasp the mystery of a god changing his almighty subjectivity into an objective human form, in order to attain, through suffering and death, what he could have fulfilled in a thousand other ways. Osiris was not only the supreme ruler in heaven, but he was also the supremely just and inexorable judge in hell. The division of the universe into an abode of bliss for the departed just, and of eternal darkness and fire for the unjust, was an Indian, Persian, and Egyptian dogma. ”

“ Art was with them a slave, well fed, well clad, well housed, well paid, to make power more powerful, to dazzle the people, to proclaim the universal dominion of Rome over the world. The Roman character was dry and geometrical, and therefore in its artistic taste architectural and monumental. Anything that could serve, by means of technical perfection, to promote art, was encouraged, adopted, and supported by the Romans. ”

“ The Amazons in this instance represent fair Greece rushing into civil strife. Passion is predominant in action and expression. Amazons are dragged by the hair and by the legs from their horses; a Kentaur is seen biting a warrior in the shoulder. Bold naturalism and vulgar realism go hand-in-hand in these sculptures. How sensitive art is—how faithfully it reflects the social condition of a nation! and the feelings by which the artists were pervaded may be studied in this frieze. The nude is treated with exquisite truthfulness, but there is heaviness in the sudden, too violent movements. ”

“ Whenever man’s nature is overawed, whenever he is made to feel his impotence by the phenomena of nature, he faces the sublime. In art, only a few divinely-gifted and chosen geniuses have ever reached the sublime.
When, however, the cosmical forces had expended their exuberant powers—when a diversified climate had produced those plants and animals that surround us—when man appeared on this revolving planet, and by degrees reached self-consciousness as his highest development—then only beauty acquired existence and dominion on earth. ”

“ That art is not altogether Greek with us need astonish172 no one. We are trained for practical purposes, but the Greeks were trained to appreciate beauty, symmetry, and harmony, not in verses only, but also in the human frame and in every product of art. Architecture with them was thoroughly plastic; it was never subservient to some metaphysical subtlety; it was finished in itself; a total of which every part formed, as in the human body, a completing element—without which the whole conception of a temple would be as incomplete as a man without arms, legs, or toes. ”

“ Art was an enchantress of the senses, and sculpture invented by the father of all ‘lies,’ to deceive us with mock-creatures, to seduce men, and to cheat them of their share in everlasting salvation. In this gloomy spirit the newly converted Teuton Christians built churches, and, sunken in the most atrocious superstition, occupied themselves with the casting out of devils. Nature was, in fact, one grand dwelling-place for demons. Plague, poverty, and sickness, were attributed to the agency of the enemy of mankind. ”

“ In studying the history of man we find that art ushers us into life, gladdens the child, inspires the youth, and interests the man. All our public actions, all our religious ceremonies, our Court pageantry, our battles and funerals, all our useful or useless surroundings, pass more or less through an artistic process. In analysing the historical development of humanity at large, or that of a nation, or even that of single individuals, we find that our sensations, intellect, and reason have always been at work to create something in their respective spheres. ”

“ We are bold enough to assert that the whole of the criminal and sanguinary history of Rome, with her products in literature and art, might be wiped out, and yet philosophically, poetically, and artistically, not the slightest gap in the progressive development of humanity would be found. Socially and legally, we should be sorry to miss a state, which had a mission of its own, which, if well understood, may teach us the causes why the gentler feelings of morality were oppressed, imagination defiled, and every higher artistic aspiration deadened in Rome. ”

“ Art is as necessary to man as either ethics or science. For man is endowed with an emotional element, which must be satisfied and cultivated, in order to raise him to the dignity of a human being using his esthetical and intellectual faculties. It is vain to attempt to draw lines of demarcation, between our component material and spiritual elements. We recognise, or become conscious, through our senses; we sift the impressions made on our senses by the power of our intellect: and we regulate and arrange these impressions with the aid of our reason. ”

“ Conforming to the general tendency of modern science, we have tried to express the cause of the artistic development of the three groups of humanity by figures; we have measured the seat and instrument of our intellectual faculty, and have thus tried to leave the sphere of mere conjecture, or unfounded opinion, in order to place the phenomena of art-history on a firm basis. Though art, undoubtedly, belongs ‘to the magic circle of the imagination, and the inner powers of the mind,’ those powers are dependent on our very bodily construction, the amount of brain and the facial angle. ”

“ From their love for individuality and diversity of customs, manners and modes of thinking, sprang the national unity of the Greeks in the fairy realms of Poetry and Art. When they began to feel themselves a people, they assumed the name of Hellenes; and their first historical deed was the admirable completion of a language which, for simplicity, power, and beauty, has remained up to our own days a model for all other languages, for it alike possesses eurythmy and power of expression. The overwhelming metaphysical subtleties of the Sanskrit are simplified ”

“ If art is the outgrowth of the intellectual and moral condition of a people, what kind of art could the Romans have produced? None. And this was the case. Roman art is altogether a misnomer; it is in fact Etruskan, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian art, dressed in an eclectic Roman garb by foreign artists. Art with the Romans was never the glorious emanation of the poet’s sacred ideal of the gods, or the irresistible civilising power of beauty ”

“ We must, however, try to prepare for a period of original vitality, which can only be done by avoiding one-sidedness and heedless originality. We shall try to suggest and to excite in our readers new thoughts. As music speaks in sounds, poetry in words, so art in forms; but music, poetry, and art are subject to certain rules, without which harmony would become dissonance, poetry an inflated prose, and art a tasteless entity, of which quaintness will be the only distinguishing attribute. What we call our sense of beauty is based on those laws which make the existence of the universe possible. ”

“ Art must be looked upon as the phenomenal result of certain religious, social, intellectual, and natural conditions. To trace these conditions, their origin, influence, and gradual development, by means of a critical and historical investigation into the causes which produced them, will be our task. For art is like a mirror: whatever looks into it is reflected by it. If a poor, untrained imagination stares into it, no one must be astonished that poor and distorted images result. ”

“ The art-historian knows that academies neither produced a Pheidias nor a Praxiteles, neither a Raphael nor an Albert Dürer; neither a Rubens nor a Holbein; neither a Gainsborough nor a Hogarth; neither a Canova nor a Flaxman. For art-academies, as mere outgrowths of fashion, unless rooted in the earnest, artistic spirit of a nation, only foster mannerism, pander to the general bad taste of the wealthy classes, and one-sidedly cultivate portrait-painting, whilst they shut out landscape or historical figure-painting. Academies have rarely encouraged grand ideas ”

“ Without men capable of understanding what is beautiful, art would have no meaning.
The aim of science is to vanquish error; the province of industry to subdue matter, and the vocation of art to produce beauty. The artist must not neglect science, for he has to be truthful, as error is ugly; he must make himself well acquainted with matter, for he has to use, to transform, and to modify it ”

“ Time is then said to have hastened to the birth of Krishna, ‘that bright offspring of the gods, who sets forward on his way to signal honours. The world with its globular, ponderous frame, nodding signs of congratulation, when the sweet babe will distinguish his mother by her smiles!’ Krishna, whom the Samaritans believed to have been Joshua, the long hoped-for Messiah, at last appeared on earth, where he passed a life of a most extraordinary and incomprehensible nature. ”

“ So long as everyone with us thinks himself justified in having his own bad taste gratified, because he can pay for it, decorative artists will serve that bad taste in all our household details. Art-history comprises not merely measurements of temples, heights of spires in feet, or of statues in cubits and inches.
We have of late years made gigantic strides in the advancement of street-architecture, though we do not yet know how to create perspective views of artistic beauty ”

“ The Egyptians, sighing under their Roman taskmasters, had taken refuge in dark mysticism, the meaning of which had been long lost to them; the Jews were divided into quarrelling sects, sunken in religious indifference, or occupied with mere outward formalities, hating everyone and hated by everyone. The Romans knelt tremblingly before an imperial divinity, slaves and poor being considered mere burdens on society; the rich were merciless, debauched, and revelled in amusements; infanticides, suicides, murder and decay, despair and annihilation, were every-day occurrences. ”

“ We are not only capable of philologically tracing the development of the different languages of the Aryan group step by step to one common parent-language—the Sanskrit, but the art-historian may trace every mysterious conception of the powers of nature, every form of personification or incarnation, and every religious tenet or mystery, symbol or myth, to these same Indians, who with the words Pitâ, Matâ, Brahtâ, Duihtâ, have taught us the holiest relations of our family life. For words, like pictures, are only representatives of outward impressions. ”

“ The study of anatomy was not yet degraded to coarse realism. It was not yet the aim of Greek sculptors to distort the human body so as to exhibit expanded muscles, over-strained sinews, and swelling veins, as expressions of pain, grief, distress, or contortions of the death-agony. Anatomy served Pheidias as a mould, into which he poured his beautiful conceptions—the spiritualised forms of gods and men. ”

“ How taste may be degraded by prejudice and custom, can be seen in the fact, that when this innovation in Egyptian art was settled by a general law of the Pharaoh, with the connivance of the high ceremonial courts, the masses, on seeing their gods with legs apart, as if ready to walk, rushed from all sides with strong ropes, and tied the divinities to their pedestals, horrified at the possibility of their leaving the country altogether. ”

“ Without a correct and thorough knowledge of Greek literature, no man can aspire to an exalted position in poetry and science; and without a correct and thorough study of Greek art, no man can become an artist. We do not recommend a slavish imitation of the Greeks, but a thorough understanding of their slow development, through the phases of unconscious reproduction and systematically conscious creation, to the philosophical appreciation of beauty, which enabled them to reflect in their works of art the eternal types of Nature in an idealised form. ”