So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few [209] faces cast up
sharply from the waves, Winckelmann, as his manner was,
divines the temperament of the antique world, and that in which it
had delight. It has passed away with that distant age, and we may
venture to dwell upon it. What sharpness and reality it has is the
sharpness and reality of suddenly arrested life. The Greek system
of gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual. The
worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by becoming
fleet and fair, white and red, like them. The beauty of the
palaestra, and the beauty of the artist's workshop, reacted on one
another. The youth tried to rival his gods; and his increased
beauty passed back into them.--"I take the gods to witness, I had
rather have a fair body than a king's crown"--Omnymi pantas theous
mê helesthai an tên basileôs archên anti tou kalos einai+--that
is the form in which one age of the world chose the higher life.--
A perfect world, if the gods could have seemed for ever only fleet
and fair, white and red! Let us not regret that this unperplexed
youth of humanity, satisfied with the vision of itself, passed, at
the due moment, into a mournful maturity; for already the deep joy
was in store for the spirit, of finding the ideal of that youth still
red with life in the grave.
It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-eminently in
sculpture. All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound--in
poetry a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound,
joyful sensuousness of motion, and each [210] of them may be a
medium for the ideal: it is partly accident which in any individual
case makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculptor.
But as the mind itself has had an historical development, one
form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more
adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that
development. Different attitudes of the imagination have a native
affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they
combine together, with completeness and ease. The arts may
thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a series of
developments in the human mind itself. Architecture, which
begins in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or
symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. He closes his sadness over
him, or wanders in the perplexed intricacies of things, or projects
his purpose from him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself to
the sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can but
lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered
from it by reflexion. Their expression is, indeed, not really
sensuous at all. As human form is not the subject with which it
deals, architecture is the mode in which the artistic effort centres,
when the thoughts of man concerning himself are still indistinct,
when he is still little preoccupied with those harmonies, storms,
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