Ancient Greek art

“ In its narrower, modern sense, art is the {396} outward sign of the spirit of a nation as it is expressed in painting and in stone and marble. Except for the vase-paintings, Greek painting has almost entirely disappeared, but the achievements of the Greeks in architecture and sculpture are amongst the greatest that the world has ever seen. ”

“ The Greeks are a people of such swift constructive imagination that they almost always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their cloud-capp’d towers that they distract our minds from the task of digging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of Greek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain of Greek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so swiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek material only to hand, we might never have marked the transition. ”

“ In other words, Greek art expressed the rare quality of Greek life; its naturalism, its compactness, its clearness. And it did so instinctively both to the artist and the spectator. We are not to think that because, in order to understand ancient art, it may be necessary for us first to obtain a conception of life and then to match it in art, this is essential to its appreciation. On the contrary, the object of art is not beautiful {187} until it flashes the idea upon us, communicating an ideal unity that is not intellectually articulate at all. ”

“ Thus when we examine any work of Greek sculpture, before the eclectic schools came into being, we find it easy to determine its period, often within narrow limits, and we are usually able to assign it with confidence to a particular school, imperfect as is our knowledge of the history of Greek art. But we can scarcely ever say that it is the work of an individual artist, unless it stands on a basis bearing the author’s name, or unless ancient critics and historians have left us detailed descriptions of a work which survives. ”

“ Even in the case of substantive sculpture, figures or groups made to stand by themselves in market-place or portico, the Greek love of harmony, or as they would have put it, of rhythm and symmetry prevails: ancient critics in those accounts of Greek sculpture, of which fragments have come down to us in the writings of Pliny and Quintilian, lay great stress on these features. They show us that whereas in early art a merely external and mechanical balance had prevailed, in the course of the fifth century this love of order and measure was taken into the very being of art. ”

“ The masterpieces of the Greek artists have been the astonishment and despair of all succeeding ages; and the triumphs of modern art have been but poor imitations of the models of the first masters. But it is, nevertheless, true that the embodiment in marble of certain obscene myths was destructive of ancient morals. The paintings in the temples and houses of the cities of Greece and Italy were a constant menace to the mental purity of those who gazed upon them. ”

“ It is hard to reconcile the unworthy motive attributed to Greek painting by the ancient writers with the high aim of Greek sculpture. It is easier to think (and it is more probable) that the writers knew very little about art, and that they missed the spirit of Greek painting in admiring its insignificant details. That painting technically was at a high point of perfection as regards the figure, even the imitative Roman works indicate, and it can hardly be doubted that in spirit it was at one time equally strong. ”

“ Some of the ancient temples of Greece were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous modern museum. That Asiatic poikilia,+ that spirit of minute and curious loveliness, follows the bolder imaginative efforts of Greek art all through its history, and one can hardly be too careful in keeping up the sense of this daintiness of execution through the entire course of its development. It is not only that the minute object of art, the tiny vase-painting, intaglio, coin, or cameo, often reduces into the palm of the hand lines grander than those of [223] many a life-sized or colossal figure ”

“ Happily, however, we are not confined within the Greek paradise. Wider fields are open to us; our subject is not only Greek, but ancient art and ritual. We can turn at 15once to the Egyptians, a people slower-witted than the Greeks, and watch their sluggish but more instructive operations. To one who is studying the development of the human mind the average or even stupid child is often more illuminating than the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often too near to us, too advanced, too modern, to be for comparative purposes instructive. ”

“ In feature and build the modern Greek still possesses the characteristic traits of his ancestors. Scientific researches and anatomical observations made upon the skulls of ancient Greeks are said to prove that if art had glorified to a slight extent the splendid models of statues, it could not have strayed very far from the originals. Such pure and perfect types are constantly met with at the present day in the modern Greeks, who, as a rule, possess fine open foreheads, straight noses, and fine eyes full of fire and intelligence, furnished with black lashes and well-defined eyebrows ”

“ It is also said that after hearing of this reply Demetrius refrained from burning the town, in order to preserve the pictures of Protogenes.
The ancient writers mention many other Greek painters, but none as important as those of whom we have spoken. Greek painting never reached a higher point than it had gained at the beginning of the Hellenistic age. Every kind of painting except landscape-painting had been practised by Greek artists ”

“ The conception, the anatomy, and beauty of form found in these statues denote a highly cultivated artistic taste and power, to which the peculiar faces, the invariable smile on the mouth, and a certain stiff angularity of treatment, form a marked contrast. We observe in them that turning-point in the history of Greek sculpture, when the conventionalities of an earlier system were receding before that love of nature and extraordinary perception of the Beautiful, which subsequently rendered the Greeks so pre-eminent in art. ”

“ This lively susceptibility on the score of suffering, this warm, ingenuous nature, showing itself uncovered and in all truth in the monuments of Greek art, and filling us with such deep and lively emotions—this is a model presented for the imitation of all artists; it is a law which Greek genius has laid down for the fine arts. It is always and eternally nature which has the first rights over man; she ought never to be fettered, because man, before being anything else, is a sensuous creature. ”

“ And this predominance of the didactic element over the sense of proportion, the love of beauty, the appreciation of nature prevails more and more as Europe slowly moves towards the dark ages. The lamps of Greek art burn more and more dimly. They are never wholly extinguished; for in all ages there are born artists to whom they are the light of life; and in mediaeval carvings one finds here and there a touch of humanism, most often in grotesque or satyric figures. ”

“ Its genius, a mixture of spontaneity and reflection, presented an equal fusion of contraries. The feeling of this auspicious harmony pierces through all the productions of the Greek mind. It was the moment of youth in the life of humanity—a fleeting age, a moment unique and irrevocable, like that of beauty in the individual.
Art attains then the culminating point of sensuous beauty under the form of plastic individuality. The worship of the Beautiful is the entire life of the Greek race. Thus religion and art are identified. All forms of Greek civilization are subordinate to art. ”

“ This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical language of contrasts of form to be used according to the exigencies of design. The service of Greek Art was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome, it became academic. ”

“ Greek literature was The arts. no longer synonymous with epic poetry. Some of its most distinctive forms had not yet been evolved; indeed, it is only quite at the end of the period that prose-writing begins; but both lyric and elegiac poetry had been brought to perfection. In art, statuary was still comparatively stiff and crude; but in other branches, in architecture, in vase-painting and in coin-types, the aesthetic genius of the race had asserted its pre-eminence. Philosophy, the supreme gift of Greece to the modern world, had become a living power. ”

“ No bit of Greek art is to be viewed as a thing in itself. It is always a fragment, and gets its value from the whole. Every bit of carved stone picked up in Athens is a piece of architecture; so is every speech in a play, every phrase in a dialogue. You must go back and bring in the whole Theatre or the whole Academy, and put back the fragment in its place by means of ladders, before you can guess at its meaning. The inordinate significance that seems to gleam from every broken toy of Greece, results from this very quality—that the object is a part of something else. ”

“ INTRODUCTION Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel, as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation is mere aping. ”

“ And their art reflects ever the brighter side of things. Surely they were wise and right. We seek out works of art not to foster pessimism but to inspire optimism, not to show us the world of nature on its repulsive side, but to reveal to us how much underlying beauty is to be found in it. ‘’Tis life not death for which we pant, More life and fuller that we want.’
At the same time, Greek art in some forms was extremely serious and keenly alive to the darker side of existence. The Greeks invented tragedy, the poetical reflection of the severity of fate. ”

“ They have called forth the glory of art; and wonderful were the periods that stamped on earth their statues, as if all men's intellect had been tasked to the work, that they should leave a mark and memorial of beauty than which no age hereafter should show a greater. We acknowledge the perfection in the remains that are left to us. Greek art stills sways the mind of every country—all the world mistrusts every attempt in a contrary direction. The excellence of Greek sculpture is reflected back again upon Greek fable, the heathen mythology from which it was taken ”

“ ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE IT is of course an illogical division to separate art from literature. Among the Greeks, at all events, literature in all its forms, was not only an art but the most perfect art. No statue of Lysippus is more perfect than a drama of Sophocles. But for convenience’ sake, and in this age where literature is seldom an art, we may speak of Greek art as that division of their work where they dealt not with words, but with other materials, and where they combined the uses of life with the love of the beautiful, as no other nation ever did. ”

“ One work was given them, and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks’ work was done not for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man—the dignity of man which they perceived for the most part with their intense æsthetic sense, through the beautiful in man. Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself. ”

“ What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses,—of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phœbus, and Jove ”

“ For although painting, as the art which reproduces objects upon flat surfaces, is now practised in the broadest sense of that definition, yet the wise Greek set much narrower bounds to it. He confined it strictly to the imitation of beauty. The Greek artist represented nothing that was not beautiful. Even the vulgarly beautiful, the beauty of inferior types, he copied only incidentally for practice or recreation. The perfection of the subject must charm in his work. ”

“ We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection. It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with all things needful to its full development, born at a happier moment in the history of the world, and more nobly endowed with physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity. ”