Ancient art

“ Upon these creations of ancient Art we cannot look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot, in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work, through a reverentially excited fancy. ”

“ Especially the intaglios—the indented sculptures, are, for the most part, as perfect and sharp now as they were eighteen hundred years ago. What is it, then, that these gems of art bring under our modern eyes?—it is the very same ideal personages of the same mythology;—and the symbols are the same, and the air, and the grace, and the attributes of beauty and power are the same;—there is the same sensuousness—there are the same ambiguous adventures;—there is the same poetry and the same art—poetry and art, admirable, indeed, how much soever it may be open to censure as to its moral quality. ”

“ As, among all the works of antiquity, it is to Hellenic sculpture that the undisputed palm of precedence is given, it is befitting that particular attention should be devoted to it—that it should be treated as the central point, the focus, of the history of ancient art. ”

“ We have but little left us of the painting of the ancient world, examples, in fact, which we see can neither have formed part of the most consummate work of antiquity in this respect, nor have been the product of its most famous masters. ”

“ I simply allude to sculpture as an art which reached a great perfection among the Greeks and Romans, as we have a right to infer from the specimens which have been preserved. How many more must have perished, we may infer from the criticisms of the ancient authors! The finest productions of our own age are in a measure reproductions. They cannot be called creations, like the statue of the Olympian Jove. Even the Moses of Michael Angelo is a Grecian god, and the Greek Slave a copy of an ancient Venus. ”

“ We moderns, victims of the giddy pace at which we live, may be somewhat oblivious of the fact; but it is a fact that anyone who knows history cannot ignore. To create and foster an art really worthy of the name,—Greek sculpture, Italian painting, the French decorative art of the eighteenth century,—the immense sums at our disposal are useless, and the sciences of steam and electricity of no avail. ”

“ After the churches the art treasures and galleries are found in the public buildings, and there we get what is left of the art of Greece and Rome, together with much of a later time. The old pagan mythology furnished most of the ancient art, together with a few attempts at transferring abstract ideas into concrete form. ”

“ When he bought a book with the odd incongruous title, Ancient Art and Ritual, he was prepared to put up with some remarks on the artistic side of ritual, 168but he did expect to be told something about what the ordinary man calls art, that is, statues and pictures. Greek drama is no doubt a form of ancient art, but acting is not to the reader’s mind the chief of arts. Nay, more, he has heard doubts raised lately—and he shares them—as to whether acting and dancing, about which so much has been said, are properly speaking arts at all. Now about painting and sculpture there is no doubt. ”

“ All these effects of antiquity, as a means of enforcing poetry, declare it too powerful an ally to be readily abandoned by the poet.” To all this the painter will add that the costume of almost any ancient time is more beautiful than that of the present—added to which it exposes more of that most beautiful of all objects, the human figure. ”

“ In respect of art a similar inspiration, aid, instruction, are afforded by the study. This volume is liberally supplied with cuts of famous paintings and sculptures of mythical subjects. Familiarity with specimens of ancient art, even through the medium of photography and engraving, must not only cultivate the historic sense but stimulate the æsthetic. ”

“ It is not probable that such perfection was reached in this art as in sculpture and architecture. We have no means of forming incontrovertible opinions. Most of the ancient pictures have perished; and those that remain, while they show correctness of drawing and brilliant coloring, do not give us as high conceptions of ideal beauties as do the pictures of the great masters of modern times. But we have the testimony of the ancients themselves, who were as enthusiastic in their admiration of pictures as they were of statues. ”

“ The motives for art are still around about us as they were round about the ancients. And the subjects are also easily found by the earnest sculptor and the painter. Nothing is more picturesque and graceful than a man at work. The artist who goes to the children’s playground, watches them at their sport and sees the boy stoop to tie his shoe, will find the same themes that engaged the attention of the ancient Greeks, and such observation and the illustrations which follow will do much to correct that foolish impression that mental and physical beauty are always divorced. ”

“ And you will find that their works of art are painted or moulded in the same forms which they had ten thousand years ago;—this is literally true and no exaggeration,—their ancient paintings and sculptures are not a whit better or worse than the work of to-day, but are made with just the same skill. ”

“ The rule appears to be to study the antique, but instead of copying or reproducing the works of the ancients, to follow their example in choosing subjects from the every-day life of the artist’s own time. We nowhere see a copy of ancient statuary or feel a breath of borrowed inspiration. Every subject is taken from modern literature, or from life in America in the nineteenth century. ”

“ But on that account, I say, we ought not to reject the ancient Art, as if it were not, and had not been properly founded, because it did not attain accuracy in all things, but rather, since it is capable of reaching to the greatest exactitude by reasoning, to receive it and admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as having been well and properly made, and not from chance. ”

“ And yet, if any such heritage exist, there is clearly a fresh source of knowledge open to us, from which to supplement and to correct the lessons of Art and Literature.
Art, by its very nature, serves rather as illustration than as proof of any theory of ancient religion. Sculpture has preserved to us the old conceptions of the divine personalities. Vase-paintings record many acts of ritual and scenes of worship. Architectural remains allow us to restore in imagination the grandeur of holy places. ”

“ Whether art will again be able to sum up and express adequately in monumental form the new life and its aspirations, as it expressed the heart of ancient life in Greece and mediaeval Europe, must depend upon its power of appeal, and this again must depend upon the sensitiveness to form and colour on the part of the people. ”

“ To a business so beautiful and pleasant as Greek sculpture we shall gladly come, but a word must first be said to explain the reason of our long delay. The main contention of the present book is that ritual and art have, in emotion towards life, a common root, and further, that primitive art develops normally, at least in the case of the drama, straight out of ritual. ”

“ The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times rather a tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by postponing our study of this tendency until we come to investigate the origin of Greek and Italian art, we are enabled to avoid all excursion beyond the limits implied by our title, beyond that which is generally called antiquity. ”

“ The ancient painting comprehends the Greek and Roman: the modern has formed several schools, each of which has its peculiar character and merit. The first masters who revived the art were greatly surpassed by their scholars, who carried it to the greatest state of perfection, and advanced it not only by their own noble works, but also by those of their pupils. ”

“ We have already seen that primitive Christian art sprung out of an alliance of ancient forms with new ideas; in its outward physiognomy it proceeded directly, in point of style and method of execution, from the school of Pagan decorative art, but it was animated by a new life; and therefore it began at once to create a pictorial cycle for itself, taken partly from historical and partly from allegorical materials. ”

“ It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the importance of the study of Mythology: our poems, our novels, and even our daily journals teem with classical allusions; nor can a visit to our art galleries and museums be fully enjoyed without something more than a mere superficial knowledge of a subject which has in all ages inspired painters, sculptors, and poets. ”

“ My object, if I can accomplish it, is to describe the spirit by which that art was created and sustained, and this I should do triumphantly if love were synonymous with power; for never, since the fabled artist hung enamoured over the marble he had fashioned, did any man’s imagination cleave more earnestly to the spirit that presided over Grecian art, 292not the plastic merely but every form of it, from the epic in poetry and sculpture down to the signet ring and the drinking song. ”

“ Many wonderful stories are told by classic writers concerning these old myths, and innumerable relics of antique art which embody the conceptions of the times are extant in our museums, by which we may judge to what a large extent such ideas influenced the common life and formed the beliefs of ancient peoples. ”

“ Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously—we beg pardon for setting forth a result which the reader has probably already foreseen from what has been said above—previously, following therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a certain type of beauty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Pag. 150.Though the Ancients went much beyond all this; for the Remains of the ancient Painting discover great Skill in Designing, great Judgment in Ordering of the Postures, much Nobleness and Majesty in the Airs of the Heads; but little Art, at the same time, in the Mixing of their Colours, and none at all in the Perspective, or the Placing of the Figures. That their Colouring is all equally strong; nothing comes forward, nothing falls back in their Pictures; the Figures are almost. all upon a Line: So that their Paintings appear like Pieces in Basso Relievo, coloured ”

“ There is no better recreation for the mind than the study of the ancient classics. Take any one of them into your hand, be it only for half an hour, and you will feel yourself refreshed, relieved, purified, ennobled, strengthened; just as though you had quenched your thirst at some pure spring. Is this the effect of the old language and its perfect expression, or is it the greatness of the minds whose works remain unharmed and unweakened by the lapse of a thousand years? Perhaps both together. But this I know. ”

“ In purely literary excellence—in perfection of form—the pre-eminence of the ancients is not disputed. In every department which they attempted, and they attempted almost all, their composition, like their sculpture, has been to the greatest modern artists an example, to be looked up to with hopeless admiration, but of inappreciable value as a light on high, guiding their own endeavours. In prose and in poetry, in epic, lyric, or dramatic, as in historical, philosophical, and oratorical art, the pinnacle on which they stand is equally eminent. ”

“ For him the problem came to be:—Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be communicated to artistic productions, which shall contain the fulness of the experience of the modern world? We have seen that the development of the various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world. ”

“ From its earliest dawn in the pre-historic etchings of the cave-dweller, to the hieroglyphics of the Egyptian; the sculptured slabs of the Ninevite and the Persian; from the treasury of Athens, and the spoils of Troy, to the refinement and monumental beauty of the Parthenon marbles—everywhere art (at first identical with language, or picture-writing) is eloquent of the mode of life; the ideas and ideals which have held sway in the human mind, until they have become precipitated, or crystallized, for us in antique architecture and sculpture, and painting, and the sister arts of design. ”

“ With the ideas of the ancients, their works of art, too, arose from the grave. To the newly-awakened antique spirit corresponded the new form of the beautiful; and in an instant, almost, art flourished as it never has flourished since, with a bloom which is to the bloom of Hellenic art what a flower, perhaps of less perfect form, but of heavenly sweet odor, is to a flower of perfect beauty but odorless. ”