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
Moreover, in the same way that the old personal criticism was unable to
account for the resemblance between the works of different individuals
of the same school, so the theory of the environment fails to explain
certain qualities possessed in common by various schools of art and various
arts which have arisen under the pressure of different civilisations;
and it is obliged to slur over the fact that the sculpture of the time
of Pericles and Alexander, the painting of the early sixteenth century,
and the music of the age of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart are all very much
more like one another in their serene beauty than they are any of them
like the other productions, artistic or human, of their environment.
Behind this explanation there must therefore be another, not controverting
the portion of truth it contains, but completing it by the recognition
of a relation more intimate than that of the work of art with its
environment: the relation of form and material. The perceptions of the
artist, what he sees and how he sees it, can be transmitted to others
only through processes as various as themselves: hair seen as colour
is best imitated with paint, hair seen as form with twisted metal wire.
It is as impossible to embody certain perceptions in some stages of
handicraft as it would be to construct a complex machine in a rudimentary
condition of mechanics. Certain modes of vision require certain methods
of painting, and these require certain kinds of surface and pigment. Until
these exist, a man may see correctly, but he cannot reproduce what he is
seeing. In short, the work of art represents the meeting of a mode of
seeing and feeling (determined partly by individual characteristics,
partly by those of the age and country) and of a mode of treating
materials, a craft which may itself be, like the mind of the artist,
in a higher or lower stage of development.
The early Greeks had little occasion to become skilful carvers of
stone. Their buildings, which reproduced a very simple wooden structure,
were ornamented with little more than the imitation of the original
carpentering; for the Ionic order, poor as it is of ornament, came only
later; and the Corinthian, which alone offered scope for variety and
skill of carving, arose only when figure sculpture was mature. But the
Greeks, being only just in the iron period (and iron, by the way, is the
tool for stone), were great moulders of clay and casters of metal. The
things which later ages made of iron, stone, or wood, they made of clay
or bronze. The thousands of exquisite utensils, weapons, and toys in our
museums make this apparent; from the bronze greaves delicately modelled
like the legs they were to cover, to the earthenware dolls, little
Venuses, exquisitely dainty, with articulated legs and go-carts.
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