French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and SculptureBrownell, W. C. (William Crary)
General
French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture
Brownell, W. C. (William Crary)
Art, French; Painting, French; Sculpture, French
in different arts, and because, also, it shows not only what M. Rodin is
not, but what he is. The grandiose does not run away with him. His
imagination is occupied largely in following out nature's suggestions.
His sentiment does not so drench and saturate his work as to float it
bodily out of the realm of natural into that of supernal beauty, there
to crystallize in decorative and puissant visions appearing out of the
void and only superficially related to their corresponding natural
forms. Standing before the Medicean tombs the modern susceptibility
receives perhaps the most poignant, one may almost say the most
intolerable, impression to be obtained from any plastic work by the hand
of man; but it is a totally different impression from that left by the
sculptures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because the sentiment is
wholly different, but because in the great Florentine's work it is so
overwhelming as wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natural
character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel the soul is exalted; in
the British Museum the mind is enraptured. The object itself seems to
disappear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other.
I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the Greeks--from whom in
sentiment and imagination he is, of course, as totally removed as what
is intensely modern must be from the antique--any more than I mean to
contrast him with Michael Angelo, except for the purposes of clearer
understanding of his general aesthetic attitude. Association of anything
contemporary with what is classic, and especially with what is greatest
in the classic, is always a perilous proceeding. Very little time is apt
to play havoc with such classification. I mean only to indicate that the
resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as
the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind--as one might, through
their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates--and that
to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing
sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more closely related to that of
Donatello and the Greeks. It, too, reveals rather than constructs
beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion
of sentiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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