The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actualitySpengler, Oswald
Philosophy
The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actuality
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
With this is connected an important principle of _composition_. In a
picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another
or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of
perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the
dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does not
necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primitive men and
children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought the sense-
impressions of their world more or less into fundamental order. But this
order differs in the different Cultures according to the prime symbols
of these Cultures. The sort of perspective composition that is so self-
evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor
intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to
represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating
the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art
placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of
space-and-time relations in the plane of representation. Polygnotus’s
frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi are a celebrated
instance of this. There is no background to connect the individual
scenes—for such a background would have been a challenge to the
principle that things alone are actual and space non-existent. The
pediment of the Ægina temple, the procession of gods on the François
Vase and the Frieze of the Giants of Pergamum are all composed as
meander-syntheses of separate and interchangeable motives, without
organic character. It is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus
Frieze of the altar of Pergamum is the earliest example that has been
preserved) that the un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes
into existence. In this respect, as in others, the feeling of the
Renaissance was truly Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to
such a pitch of perfection that its work remains the pattern for all
following ages. But the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the
last analysis, it was a silent music of colour-illumined extension that
created within itself _light-resistances_, which the understanding eye
could grasp as things and as existence, and could set marching with an
invisible swing and rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial
ordering, with its unremarked substitution of air-and light-perspective
for line-perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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