Greek art E-Book

Elie Faure

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 82

Beschreibung

Greek art, at the very moment that it was breaking up in depth, was scattering over the whole material surface of Hellenic antiquity. After the movement of concentration that had brought to Athens all the forces of Hellenism, a movement of dispersal began, which was to carry from Athens to southern Italy, to Sicily, to Cyrenaica, Egypt, the Islands, and Asia Minor the passion and, unfortunately, the mania, for beautiful things—in default of creative genius. Dilettantism and the diffusion of taste multiply and at the same time weaken talent. It is the Hellenistic period, perhaps the richest in artists and in works of art that history has to show, but possibly, also, one of the poorest in power of emotion. The ideal of the Greek is wisdom. He also has a strong feeling for what is just, but what is beautiful and what is true is to the same degree the object of his passion. He finds in each of these ideas the echoes of the other two, and completes, tempers, and broadens each one through the others. Phidias is in Pythagoras, and Socrates is in Phidias. The “Greek miracle” was necessary. The whole ancient world had prepared, had willed its coming. During the fruitful silence when the Dorians were “accumulating within themselves the strength of their soil, Egypt and Assyria kept their lead. But they were discouraged and stricken by the cold of age. They were to become the initiators of the Hellenic Renaissance, as they had been the guides for the childhood of the peoples of the Archipelago. Greek Art, the perfume of the Greek soul, is preserved until our time, through Pompeii.

Leseprobe

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ISBN: 978-1-64461-874-5

Elie Faure and Klaus H. Carl

Contents

Introduction

The Sources of Greek Art

The Dorians

Dorian Art and Architecture

The Hera of Samos

The Ionians

The Apollonian Myth

The Hellenistic Period

Phidias (c. 480 – 430 BC)

The Parthenon

The Dusk of Mankind

Praxiteles (c. 400 – before 326 B. C.)

The Gods Have Deserted the Souls of the Artists

Index

Introduction

From fishing, coast trade, the small business of one isle with another, from rapine and piracy, a whole little moving world of sailors, merchants, and corsairs lived their healthy life, neither a rich nor a poor one — a mean one — if we think of the vast commercial enterprises and the great explorations which the Phoenicians undertook. Their feet in the water and their faces to the wind, the men of the Aegean would carry to the traffickers from Tyre and Sidon who had just entered the port, under blue, green, and red sails, their fish and their olives in vases painted with marine plants, octopuses, seaweed, and other forms taken from the teeming, viscous life of the deep. It needed centuries, doubtless, for the tribes of a single island or a single coast to recognize a chief, to consent to follow him afar on cunning and bloody expeditions to the cities of the continent, whence they brought back jewels, golden vessels, rich stuffs, and women. And it was only then that the Achaeans and the Danai of the old poems heaped up those heavy stones on the fortified promontories, the Cyclopean walls, the Pelasgic walls under the shadow of which the Atreides, crowned with gold like the barbarian kings who sallied forth from the forests of the north two thousand years later, sat at table before the meats and wines, with their friends and their soldiers.

Such origins could only make them subtle and hard. Aeschylus (c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC) felt this when he came there, after eight centuries, to listen in the solitude to the echo of the death cries of the frightful family. These pirates selected sites for their lair near the sea — tragically consistent with their life of murder and the heavy orgies which followed upon their deeds of crime. A circle of hills — bare, devoured by fire and enlivened by no torrent, no tree, no bird cry. We find the life of these men depicted on the sides of the rudely chiseled vase of Vaphio (ancient site in Laconia, Greece), and on the strips of wall remaining beneath the ruins of Tirynth and of Knossos. There are bits of frescoes there as free as the flight of the sea birds; the art is of a terrible candor, but is already disintegrating. One sees women with bare breasts, rouge on their lips, black around the eyes, their flounced dresses betraying the bad taste of the barbarian; they are painted and sophisticated dolls bought in the Orient or taken by force on the expeditions of violence.

Here are bulls pursued in the olive groves, bulls galloping, rearing, charging upon men or tangled in great nets. Sometimes there are reapers who laugh and sing with tremendous gaiety among the sheaves of wheat which they carry, but usually we find the questionable woman, the wild beast, and the marine monster; a voluptuous and brutal life like that of every primitive man rose to a post of command by force or by chance. As guardians of the gates of their acropolis they set up stone lionesses with bronze heads, heavily erect. When they died these men were laid away in a shroud of gold leaf.

It was a civilization already rotten, a Byzantium in miniature, where dramas of the bedroom determined revolutions and massacres. It ended like the others. The Dorian descends from the north like an avalanche, rolls over Argolis and even to Crete, devastating the cities and razing the acropolises. Legendary Greece enters a thick darkness from which she would not have reappeared if the barbarians had not left, intact under the conflagration, such material testimony of her passage through history as the kings with the masks of gold. The Phoenicians desert the coast of the Peloponnesus, of Attica, and of Crete, and the native populations, dispersed like a city of bees on which a host of wasps has descended, swarm in every direction, on the shores of Asia, in Sicily, and in southern Italy. Silence reigns around continental Greece. It was to be two or three hundred years before the Phoenicians and the Achaeans, driven away by the invasion, could get back the route to its gulfs.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace, c. 200 – 190 B.C. Parian marble Louvre, Paris.

The Mask of Agamemnon, funeral mask, c. 1550–1500 B.C., Gold. National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

The Contemplative Athena Relief, 460 B.C. Marble, h: 54 cm. Acropolis Museum, Athens

Bust of Pericles, Roman copy of a Greek original, c. 425 B.C. British Museum, London.

The Sources of Greek Art

The Dorians had no word to say during the Hellenic Middle Ages; nothing from Asia entered their land. The ancient continent was advancing step by step, by way of the islands, prudently regaining a little of the lost territory. Melos, in need of pottery, had to wait till the Ceramists of primitive Athens had manufactured at the Dipylon (workshop of an ancient Greek vase painter, active around 760–750 BC), those vases with the geometrical designs which were the first sign of the reawakening witnessing a slow dramatic ascent in the shadows of the soul, under this magnificent sky, at the center of this brilliant world. In order that the spark might kindle, it was necessary that the Dorian, the Phoenician, and the ancient Aegean who has become an Ionian, repair their broken relationships. Thereupon the flame mounted quicker to light up the virgin soil with the most dazzling focus of intelligence in history.

For this focus, the Homeric poems — echoes picked up from the annihilated world by the vanquished — and the radiant Greek myths which are elaborated confusedly along the deserted shores are the heralding dawn lights seen against this black background. The cradle of the Hellenic soul mounts with them on the chariot of the sun.

In the evening, the Dorian herdsman bringing home his goats from the mountain and the Ionian sailor bringing home his bark from the sea would repeat to themselves glorious fables which carried over into images men’s old intuitive notions of the phenomena of nature, or translated the struggle of their ancestors against the adverse forces of the ill-organized world. The enthusiastic naturism of the human soul in its freshness gave to its young science a robe of light, of clouds, of leaves, and of waters. The whole religion, the philosophy, the austere and charming soul of the builders of the Parthenon are in this anonymous and tangled poem which rises with the murmur of a dawn as Greece reawakens to life.

The “Greek miracle” was necessary. The whole ancient world had prepared, had willed its coming. During the fruitful silence when the Dorians were “accumulating within themselves the strength of their soil, Egypt and Assyria kept their lead. But they were discouraged and stricken by the cold of age. They were to become the initiators of the Hellenic Renaissance, as they had been the guides for the childhood of the peoples of the Archipelago.

The Greeks had the privilege of inhabiting a land so inundated, steeped and saturated with light, so clearly defined by its own structure, that the eyes of man had only to open, to draw from it its law. When man enters a bay closed in by an amphitheater of mountains between an illuminated sky and water that rolls rays of light, as if a spring of flame welled up under its waves, he is at the center of a slightly dark sapphire set in a circle of gold. The masses and the lines organize themselves so simply, cutting such clear profiles on the limpidity of space that their essential relations spontaneously impress themselves on the mind. There is not a country in the world which addresses itself to the intelligence with more insistence, force, and precision than this one. All the typical aspects of the universe offer themselves, with the earth — everywhere penetrated by the sea, with the horizon of the sea, the bony islands, the straits, golden and mauve between two liquid masses glittering even in the heart of the night, the rocks repeating from morning to evening all the changes of space and the sun, with the dark forests on the mountains, with the pale forests in the valleys, with the hills everywhere surrounding the dry plains, and — bordered by pink laurel — the streams, whose whole course one can embrace at a glance.