Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to EuphorionLee, Vernon
History
Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to Euphorion
Lee, Vernon
Art, Italian; Art, Renaissance -- Italy
bystanders, earthworks, fascines, smoke, &c., firing off the cannon,
is the woman as she is remembered by the creature who exclaims, "Que
valor!" We feel that the half-dead soldier being stripped, the condemned
turning his head aside as far as the rope will permit, the man fallen
crushed beneath his horse or vomiting out his blood, is the wretch who
exclaims, "Por eso soy nacido!" They are, these etchings of Goya's, the
representation of the sufferings, real and imaginative, of the real
sufferers. In the most absolute sense they are the art which does not
merely show, but tells; the suggestive and dramatic art of the individual,
unaided and unhampered by tradition, indifferent to form and technicality,
the art which even like the art of the immediate predecessors of Giotto,
those Giuntas and Berlinghieris, who left us the hideous and terrible
Crucifixions, says to the world, "You shall understand and feel."
TUSCAN SCULPTURE
I
We are all of us familiar with the two adjacent rooms at South Kensington
which contain, respectively, the casts from antique sculpture and those
from the sculpture of the Renaissance; and we are familiar also with the
sense of irritation or of relief which accompanies our passing from
one of them to the other. This feeling is typical of our frame of mind
towards various branches of the same art, and, indeed, towards all
things which might be alike, but happen to be unlike. Times, countries,
nations, temperaments, ideas, and tendencies, all benefit and suffer
alternately by our habit of considering that if two things of one sort
are not identical, one must be in the right and the other in the wrong.
The act of comparison evokes at once our innate tendency to find fault;
and having found fault, we rarely perceive that, on better comparing,
there may be no fault at all to find.
As the result of such comparison, we shall find that Renaissance
sculpture is unrestful, huddled, lacking selection of form and harmony
of proportions; it reproduces ugliness and perpetuates effort; it is
sometimes grotesque, and frequently vulgar. Or again, that antique
sculpture is conventional, insipid, monotonous, without perception for
the charm of detail or the interest of individuality; afraid of movement
and expression, and at the same time indifferent to outline and grouping;
giving us florid nudities which never were alive, and which are doing
and thinking nothing whatever. Thus, according to which room or which
mood we enter first, we are sure to experience either irritation at
wrong-headedness or relief at right-doing; whether we pass from the
sculpture of ancient Greece to the sculpture of mediæval Italy, or _vice
versâ_.
But a more patient comparison of these two branches of sculpture, and of
the circumstances which made each what it was, will enable us to enjoy
the very different merits of both, and will teach us also something of
the vital processes of the particular spiritual organism which we call
an art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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