Nietzsche and ArtLudovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Philosophy
Nietzsche and Art
Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Aesthetics, German -- 19th century; Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900 -- Aesthetics
On the whole, therefore, the fact that one can talk of different
types as characteristic of particular schools or ideals is amply
accounted for, and when the general spirit of rivalry that animated
the whole nation for centuries is duly taken into consideration it
is not difficult to explain a certain preponderance of manifold
characteristics over simplicity, which is observable in the greater
part of Greek sculpture--a preponderance which sometimes led very
rapidly to the crudest realism, and which at other times approached
realism only after a considerable lapse of time. Such phenomena are the
inevitable result of that lack of the powerful master or ruler spirit
who unifies and co-ordinates heterogeneity, and who thereby makes
simplification and powerful art possible, as the outcome of relative
permanency.[32]
For, when technique is largely mastered, realism, as I have shown in
the case of Mediæval and Renaissance Art, may in a great measure be the
outcome of a desire to make one's own particular ideal unmistakably
plain, and although this kind of truth to nature always reveals a
clashing of values or types, it is of a kind which may be regarded as
infinitely superior to the realism which has nothing to say at all, and
which merely copies out of poverty of invention.
When talking to strangers about an ideal they do not share with you,
it is necessary to bring all your powers to bear upon an adequate and
perfectly vivid representation of what you have in your mind.
I, on this platform, assuming that Nietzsche as an art valuer was
strange to you, had to present him to you with all the realism and
detail I could dispose of. If I had been talking to people who knew
the Nietzschean views of art perfectly well, I might have indulged in
certain artistic simplifications and poetical transfigurations which I
considered unsuited to the present circumstances.
This same feeling, I believe, partly explains the tendency to realism
in Greek art. And it is precisely to this tendency to realism that I
think it is now high time to call attention, after all the fulsome
praise which has for ages been lavished upon the products of the
Hellenic spirit.
When you turn to the granite statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhet in
the Louvre, or to the lions of Gebel Barkal in the Egyptian Gallery
of the British Museum, you are conscious of a sensation of great
strangeness, of humiliating unfamiliarity, of almost incalculable
distance. You may look at these things for a moment and wonder what
they mean; you may even pass on with a feeling of indifference
amounting to scorn;[33] but whatever your sensations are, you will be
quite unable to deny that what you have seen does not belong to your
world, that it is utterly and completely separated from you, and that
you felt in need of a guide and of an initiator in its presence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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