Art, Greek; Greek drama -- History and criticism; Mythology, Greek
perhaps only because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, at
any rate, the animal breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of
Pliny's phrase regarding Myron--Corporum curiosus. And when he came
to his main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the runner,
he did not for a moment forget that they too were animals, young
animals, delighting in natural motion, in free course through the
yielding air, over uninterrupted space, according to Aristotle's
definition of pleasure: "the unhindered exercise of one's natural
force." Corporum tenus curiosus:--he was a "curious workman" as far
as the living body is concerned. Pliny goes on to qualify that
phrase by saying that he did not express the sensations of the mind--
animi sensus. But just there, in fact, precisely in such limitation,
we find what authenticates Myron's peculiar value in the evolution of
Greek art. It is of the essence of the athletic prizeman, involved
in the very ideal of the quoit-player, the cricketer, not to give
expression to mind, in any antagonism to, or invasion of, the body;
to mind as anything more than a function of the body, whose healthful
balance of functions it may so easily perturb;--to disavow that
insidious enemy of the fairness of the bodily soul as such.
Yet if the art of Myron was but little occupied with the reasonable
soul (animus), with those mental situations the expression of which,
though [287] it may have a pathos and a beauty of its own, is for the
most part adverse to the proper expression of youth, to the beauty of
youth, by causing it to be no longer youthful, he was certainly a
master of the animal or physical soul there (anima); how it is, how
it displays itself, as illustrated, for instance, in the Discobolus.
Of voluntary animal motion the very soul is undoubtedly there. We
have but translations into marble of the original in bronze. In
that, it was as if a blast of cool wind had congealed the metal, or
the living youth, fixed him imperishably in that moment of rest which
lies between two opposed motions, the backward swing of the right
arm, the movement forwards on which the left foot is in the very act
of starting. The matter of the thing, the stately bronze or marble,
thus rests indeed; but the artistic form of it, in truth, scarcely
more, even to the eye, than the rolling ball or disk, may be said to
rest, at every moment of its course,--just metaphysically, you know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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