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
carefully examined the brilliant productions of modern French sculpture
without being struck by this apparent paradox: that, whereas all its
canons are drawn from a study of the Renaissance, its chief
characteristic is, at bottom, a lack of expression, a carefulness for
the type. The explanation is this: in the course of time, which "at last
makes all things even," the individuality, the romanticism of the
Renaissance has itself become the type, is now itself become
"classical," and the modern attitude toward it, however sympathetic
compared with the modern attitude toward the antique, is to a noteworthy
degree factitious and artificial. And in art everything depends upon
the attitude of mind. It is this which prevents Ingres from being truly
Raphaelesque, and Pradier from being really classical. If, therefore, it
can justly be said of modern French sculpture that its sympathy for the
Renaissance sculpture obscures its vision of the ideal, it is clearly to
be charged with the same absence of individual significance with which
its thick-and-thin partisans reproach the antique. The circumstance
that, like the Renaissance sculpture, it deals far more largely in
pictorial expression than the antique does, is, if it deals in them
after the Renaissance fashion and not after a fashion of its own, quite
beside the essential fact. There is really nothing in common between an
academic French sculptor of the present day and an Italian sculptor of
the fifteenth century, except the possession of what is called the
modern spirit. But the modern spirit manifests itself in an enormous
gamut, and the differences of its manifestations are as great in their
way, and so far as our interest in them is concerned, as the difference
between their inspiration and the mediaeval or the antique inspiration.
II
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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