Observe this little torso of a woman; it is a little Venus. It is
broken; it has no longer a head, arms, legs, yet I never weary of
contemplating it; each day, each hour for me adds to this masterpiece
because I only understand it better. What could it say to our
indifferent glance? For me it has the ineffable voluptuousness of
softly maturing flesh. The effect lies in no part and in every part.
It is perfection. This little childish body, has it not all the charm
of woman? It does not catch the light, the light catches it, glancing
over it lightly; without any effect of roughness, any dark shadow. Here
shadow can no longer be called shadow but only the decline of light.
She does not become dark, she grows pale in imperceptible depressions,
in delicious undulations. She is indivisible; she is whole or
incomplete, but her unity is not disturbed. And this passage that joins
the abdomen to the thighs, this little declivity of graces, this valley
of love! Everything is full of the calm, the lightness, the serenity
of pure beauty in the perfect confidence of nature. The ideal that you
imagine you find in a gesture, in a momentary attitude, is here; it is
here because of the infinite love of the flesh, of the human fruit. What
you call the ideal is nothing but the perfume of beautiful modeling.
What more could you ask?
When I look at this marble in the evening by candle-light, how the
wonder deepens! If those who have been telling us for a hundred years
that Greek art is cold studied it with care, could they for one hour
maintain this absurdity? This sculpture, on the contrary, is of an
extraordinary living complexity, which the flame reveals; the whole
surface is nothing but depressions and reliefs, but united, melted
together in the great, harmonious force of the _ensemble_. I turn the
little torso about under the caressing rays of the light. There is not
a fault, not a weakness, not a dead spot; it is the very continuity
of life, its intoxicating voluptuousness hidden in the bosom of the
molecule.
Why should such artists have sought to create an abstract Beauty by
the idealization of forms? These men of genius loved Nature too well to
presume to correct her. They knew well that despite their genius, they
still remained beneath her. Nothing can surpass the marvel of creation.
The conception of an idealistic art comes from the Academy. Before the
purity of the antique forms people used to believe that the beauty lay
solely in the exterior profiles. It is really beautiful because of
the interior modeling. And still we make this distinction between the
profiles and the modeling, thanks to our mania for dividing things; but
we know that the one is inseparable from the other; the surfaces are
nothing but the extremities of volumes, the boundaries of the mass.
All the sculpture of the period of Louis-Philippe was imitated from the
antique, but only by means of the exterior profiles. If it had been
practised by true modelers, by geometrical minds, it would have been
as beautiful as its original. What pleased people in that epoch, what
pleases people in ours, is not at all the antique; it is the fashion
in which we see it. It was the Renaissance that really understood the
Greek. It created works exactly the same in feeling, though somewhat
different in arrangement and general color. For color does not exist
in painting alone. Its rôle is equally great in sculpture. To-day this
color is bad; it fails to obtain the chiaroscuro which derives from
_ronde-bosse_. Good sculpture owes to chiaroscuro clarity, unity, charm,
even, I might say, the voluptuousness of breathing flesh. Shadow, at
once luminous and mysterious, models the fulness of the body in the
exuberance of health; it makes one understand abundance, solidity. In
the art of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century shadow is always
supple and warm as in Greek art; it has the tender coloring of the
vegetation of our country, the sweetness of which our great artists have
captured. The chiaroscuro of the antique consists of the density and
depth of light falling over the entire modeling. Chiaroscuro penetrates
to every plane and renders the reality of them; it is reality itself.
This is because the antique and nature are part and parcel of the same
mystery, the infinitely harmonious mystery of force in suspense. The
great artists compose as nature itself operates.
Undoubtedly the Greeks possessed certain methods which they handed down
from master to pupil, as has been the case in all artistic epochs. They
had celebrated ateliers, schools, where they taught their principles.
By the fifth century they had established a canon of the human body;
but they never made use of it without consulting the model. As for us,
we have imagined that we could use it like a magic formula. It is not
the formula that makes the art; it is the experience of the artist
that creates the formula. If we abandon nature for a rule, if we do
not constantly vivify the one by means of the other, we soon speak a
language that means nothing.
One cannot repeat this enough: the ancients are realists; they work in
_ronde-bosse_. This explanation seems commonplace and even vulgar; it is
the whole truth. It can be understood by the humblest artisan, provided
only that he knows his trade. But it is as difficult to get it into the
heads of people to-day as it is to restore faith in a man who has lost
it.