Greek art

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Use Greek art as a first, not a final, teacher. Learn to draw carefully from Greek work; above all, to place forms correctly, and to use light and shade tenderly. Never allow yourselves black shadows. It is easy to make things look round and projecting; but the things to exercise yourselves in are the placing of the masses, and the modelling of the lights. It is an admirable exercise to take a pale wash of color for all the shadows, never reinforcing it everywhere, but drawing the statue as if it were in far distance, making all the darks one flat pale tint. ”

“ Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. ”

“ To confine art to architecture, sculpture and painting, is to rob it of half its meaning. The forms of art are as many and varied as are the interests of every-day life, and this belief is one of the great gifts of Greece to the world. It was not given to every Greek to be a great artist. Not every one could be an Aeschylus and write the Agamemnon, a Sophocles and write the Antigone, a Pheidias and create the Parthenon, or a Praxiteles and model the Hermes, but every one could work in the spirit of which these great works are the supreme examples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greek, because its essence and its quality, as is the quality of music and of architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely mathematical laws.
But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless serenity, with the beauty of this face it is different: the grey eyes lighten into blue or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds fancy; the lips become flower-like in laughter or, tremulous as a bird’s wing, mould themselves at last into the strong and bitter moulds of pain or scorn. And then motion comes, and the statue wakes into life. But the life is not the ordinary life of common days ”

“ 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. ”

“ My object is simply to hint at what may be done, not to attempt it myself; and to show, that if the Greek nation afforded encouragement to its artists, it was because those artists met their countrymen more than half way, and laboured to deserve encouragement.
There existed in Greece a philosophy of art, that is, a perfect theory of what its object is, and of all the means by which that object may be accomplished. Now the object of art is delight, a delight which aggrandises and ennobles the mind, and such delight is only to be obtained through the contemplation of the beautiful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ WHAT a comfortable mental furniture the generalisations of a century ago must have afforded! What a right little, tight little, round little world it was when Greece was the only source of culture, when Greek art, even in Roman copies, was the only indisputable art, except for some Renaissance repetitions! Philosophy, the love of truth, liberty, architecture, poetry, drama, and for all we knew music—all these were the fruits of a special kind of life, each assisted the development of the other, each was really dependent on all the rest. ”

“ The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all other art, is to deal, indeed, with the deepest elements of man's nature and destiny, to command and express these, but to deal with them in a manner, and with a kind of expression, as clear and graceful and simple, if it may be, as that of the Japanese flower-painter. And what the student of Greek sculpture has to cultivate generally in himself is the capacity for appreciating the expression of thought in outward form, the constant habit of associating sense with soul, of tracing what we call expression to its sources. ”

“ When all is said and done, Greek art will always serve as an admirable corrective—within its limits of course, for painting is obviously excluded—and that is at least some comfort in these impressionist days, when new creeds lie about like leaves in Vallombrosa. ¶ I overheard one day a visitor to this exhibition angrily resenting the suggestion that Greek art at its best could be compared for a moment with the master works of the middle ages. ”

“ I find in Greek art eight notable features: (1) Humanism, (2) Simplicity, (3) Balance and Measure, (4) Naturalism, (5) Idealism, (6) Patience, (7) Joy, (8) Fellowship.
As my space is closely limited I cannot attempt to develop the subject of Greek art in all its provinces and in all its bearings. I must limit myself to the art of sculpture, the most characteristic branch, and the only branch which has left us sufficient materials for the formation of a satisfactory notion. And I must limit myself further to such of the sculpture as represents the human form. ”

“ There is, indeed, every proof that Greek art was the joint product of the Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations. Their amalgamation gave birth to the archaic style, struggling to express the strength and the beauty of [Pg 35] man—half heroic, half divine. Gradually, all the surrounding decorations of life assumed as a governing principle and motive, the worth of noble beauty.
The Greeks were the first artists. They broke away from the ancient trammels of customary forms, and replaced law with liberty of thought, and tradition with poetry. ”

“ Following after this, Greek art attained, in its reproductions of human form, not merely to the profound expression of the highest indwelling spirit of human intelligence, but to the expression also of the great human passions, of the powerful movements as well as of the calm and peaceful order of the soul, as finding in the affections of the body a language, the elements of which the artist might analyse, and then combine, order, and recompose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The works of the highest Greek sculpture are indeed intellectualised, if we may say so, to the utmost degree; the human figures which they present to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them, that profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is traceable in Greek art, continuously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest products, the oil-vessel or the urn, reaches its perfection. ”

“ As the conceptions of the past no longer satisfied the criterion which their own minds had embraced, the Greek artists sought in nature herself for models of that beauty, which, when placed in art forms, should be a joy forever. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greek art henceforth was the serene outcome of a serene civilisation of athletes, poets, and philosophers, living with untroubled consciences in a good climate, with slaves and helots to char for them while they ran races, discussed elevated topics, and took part in Panathenaic processions, riding half naked on prancing horses, or carrying olive branches and sacrificial vases in honour of a divine patron, in whom they believed only as much as they liked. ”

“ And here must conclude our survey of the character of Greek art. The main point which we have endeavoured to make clear has been so often insisted upon, that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it further. The key to the art of the Greeks, as well as to their ethics, is the identification of the beautiful and the good; and it therefore is as natural in treating of their art to insist on its ethical value as it was to insist on the aesthetic significance of their moral ideal. ”

“ Critics for whose opinion I feel respect have observed that, in what I wrote about the genius of Greek art, I neglected to notice the sterner and more serious qualities of the Greek spirit, that I exaggerated the importance of sculpture as the characteristic Hellenic art, and that I did not make my meaning clear about the value of the study of Greek modes of thought and feeling for men living in our scientific age. ”

“ In this living picture, we find still lingering on, at the foot of the beautiful Greek marbles, that phase of religious temper which a cynical mind might think a truer link of its unity and permanence than any higher aesthetic instincts—a phase of it, which the art of sculpture, humanising and refining man's conceptions of the unseen, tended constantly to do away. For the higher side of the Greek religion, thus humanised and refined by art, and elevated by it to the sense of beauty, is here also. ”