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
As I say, I am judging purely from the artistic records. But I have no
doubt that, if I possessed the necessary scholarship, I could trace
the two Art-wills to two distinct races of men who, from the days of
the fall of Mycenæan culture, strove for mastership in Greece. I also
entertain no doubts that the fall of Greece might be attributed to the
gradual triumph of that race which possessed the inferior Art-will, and
nothing I have read, either in Grote, Bury, Oman, Curtius, Schnaase,
Miss Harrison and others, has led me seriously to hesitate before
suggesting this hypothesis.
Professor Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece leads me to suppose that
the problem might be solved in the way I suggest. But, in any case,
whether this is so or not, the style of the art of Pheidias shows
a descent from the style of the Apollo of Tenea, which only an age
with a mistaken conception of what art really is could possibly have
overlooked.
The art of the fifth and fourth centuries, I will not and cannot deny,
contains a large proportion of Ruler form, or what modern and ancient
art-historians call the "ideal."[37] No people, any portion of which
had been capable of producing the Apollo of Tenea, could have avoided
it; but that it preponderates in realism, the evidence of history,
alone, apart from that of our own senses, proves beyond a doubt.
The appreciation which it has met with at the hands of almost all
Europeans of all ages, and particularly at the hands of the Renaissance
realists, shows how general its appeal has been; and no art which has
been so very much above Nature as to apotheosize the particular values
of a particular people at its zenith, has ever made such a general
appeal.
D. Greek Painting.
In regard to the painting of Greece, I will not detain you long.
Practically all I have said in regard to Greek sculpture may be applied
with equal force to Greek painting, and I cannot do better than sum
up this side of the question with the words of that profound Japanese
artist Okakura-Kakuzo.
In speaking of the great style of the Greeks, in painting--a style
which vanished with the sixth century,--he says--
"The great style of the Greeks in painting--that style which was
theirs before a stage chiaroscuro and imitation of Nature were brought
in by the Appellesian school,--rises up before us with ineffaceable
regret ... and we cannot refrain from saying that European work, by
following the later school, has lost greatly in power of structural
composition and line expression, though it has added to the facility of
realistic representation."[38]
When it is remembered that the demands of theatrical scenery are
generally admitted to have exercised considerable influence over
Greek painting, we need feel no surprise at the necessarily vulgar
nature of its ultimate development; while in raising this point about
chiaroscuro, Okakura-Kakuzo really opens a very serious and needful
inquiry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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