with the pagan work of the Sabæans.
Footnote 255:
See Vol. II, pp. 143 et seq.
Footnote 256:
See Vol. II, pp. 316 et seq.
Footnote 257:
Kohl & Watzinger, _Antike Synagogen in Galilãa_ (1916). The Baal-
shrines in Palmyra, Baalbek and many other localities are basilicas:
some of them are older than Christianity and many of them were later
taken over into Christian use.
Footnote 258:
Frauberger, _Die Akropolis von Baalbek_, plate 22. (See Ency. Brit.,
XI Edition, art. “Baalbek,” for plan, etc.—_Tr._)
Footnote 259:
Diez, _Die Kunst der islamischen Völker_, pp. 8 et seq. In old Sabæan
temples the altar-court (mahdar) is in front of the oracle chapel
(makanat).
Footnote 260:
Wulff, _Altchristliche und byzantinische Kunst_, p. 227.
Footnote 261:
Pliny records that this region was rich in temples. It is probable
that the type of the transept-basilica—i.e., with the entrance in one
of the long sides—which is found in Hauran and is distinctly marked in
the tranverse direction of the altar space of St. Paul Without at
Rome, is derived from a South Arabian archetype. (For the Hauran type
of church see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., Vol. II, p. 390; and for St. Paul
Without, Vol. III, p. 474.—_Tr._
Footnote 262:
Neither technically nor in point of space-feeling has this piece of
purely _interior_ architecture any connexion whatever with Etruscan
round-buildings. (Altmann, _Die ital. Rundbauten_, 1906.) With the
cupolas of Hadrian’s Villa at Tibur (Tivoli), on the contrary, its
affinity is evident.
Footnote 263:
Probably synagogues of domical type reached these regions, and also
Morocco, long before Islam, through the missionary enterprise of
Mesopotamian Judaism (see Vol. II, p. 253), which was closely allied
in matters of taste to Persia. The Judaism of the Pseudomorphosis, on
the contrary, built basilicas; its Roman catacombs show that
artistically it was entirely on a par with Western Christianity. Of
the two, it is the Judæo-Persian style coming from Spain that has
become the pattern for the synagogues of the West—a point that has
hitherto entirely escaped the notice of art-research.
Footnote 264:
Generally called the “Basilica of Constantine.”—_Tr._
Footnote 265:
The Grail legend contains, besides old Celtic, well-marked Arabian
elements; but where Wolfram von Eschenbach goes beyond his model
Chrestien de Troyes, his Parzival is entirely Faustian. (See articles
_Grail_ and _Perceval_, Ency. Brit., XI Ed.)—_Tr._
Footnote 266:
The relation of column and arch spiritually corresponds to that of
wall and cupola, and the interposition of the drum between the
rectangle and the dome occurs “simultaneously” with that of the impost
between the column and the arch.
Footnote 267:
A. Riegl, _Stilfragen_ (1893), pp. 248 et seq., 272 et seq.
Footnote 268:
The Ghassanid Kingdom flourished in the extreme North-west of Arabia
during the sixth century of our reckoning. Its people were essentially
Arab, and probably came from the south; and an outlying cousinry
inhabited Medina in the time of the Prophet.—_Tr._
Footnote 269:
Dehio, _Gesch. der deutschen Kunst_, I, pp. 16 et seq.
Footnote 270:
Wulff, _Altchristl.-byzant. Kunst_, pp. 153 et seq.
Footnote 271:
See Vol. II, p. 315, Geffcken, _Der Ausgang des griech-röm.
Heidentums_ (1920), p. 113.
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CHAPTER VII | | MUSIC AND PLASTIC
I
THE ARTS OF FORM
CHAPTER VII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
I
THE ARTS OF FORM
I
The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of
higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-
scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas)
that of the arts of form,[272] of which the number is legion. _And with
these arts we count music_ in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had
these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead
of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts,
we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the
import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that
is at work in the _wordless_[273] arts can never be understood until we
come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as
only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the
ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from
another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of
_physiological_ conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or
communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not
really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space-
straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The
Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often
and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different
from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We _read_
“Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change
one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of
these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the
outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un-
Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand
Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity
of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust”
itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is
physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella”
of the Palestrina style as well as _a fortiori_ in the Passions of
Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of
Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience _behind_ the sensuous
impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter
that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us,
and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and
golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of
storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces
which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself.
It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was
deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music,
sight and hearing _equally_ are bridges into the soul and nothing more.
To the Greek this visionary kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly
alien. He _felt_ the marble with his eye, and the thick tones of an
aulos moved him almost _corporally_. For him, eye and ear are the
receivers of the _whole_ of the impression that he wished to receive.
But for us this had ceased to be true even at the stage of Gothic.
In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just
as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so
than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance
separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that
separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in
relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the
same as that of a contemporary chamber-cantata; that of Rembrandt as
that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi
as that of the Mozart opera—the _inner_ form-language is so nearly
identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is
negligible.
The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to a
timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres only
proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been attacked. Arts
are living units, and the living is incapable of being dissected. The
first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the
infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by perfectly
superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these
provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-principles. Thus
he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and
“Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting,
“the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-
language is no more than the _mask_ of the real work. Style is not what
the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of Darwin and materialism—
supposed it to be, the product of material, technique, and purpose. It
is the very opposite of this, something inaccessible to art-reason, a
revelation of the metaphysical order, a mysterious “must,” a Destiny.
With the material boundaries of the different arts it has no concern
whatever.
To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-impression,
then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very enunciation. For how
is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture” of so general a
character as to admit of general laws being evolved from it? What _is_
“Sculpture?”
Take painting again. There is no such thing as “_the_” art of Painting,
and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with
one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling
that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a
dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief,
created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on
coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for
the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even
the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged
genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra
Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral-
window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?
If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they
are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.[274] An
art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs
through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the
case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily
deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws,
there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is _nothing_ in Greek and
Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a
Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of
Michelangelo. _Inwardly_, the Quattrocento is related to the
contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek
Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan
representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely what is
implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme—he shows
what he can express with it. Every individual art—Chinese landscape or
Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is _once existent_, and departs
with its soul and its symbolism never to return.
II
With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the
technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also _the choice
of art-genus itself_ is seen to be an expression-means. What the
creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night
Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the creation
of a _species_ of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history
of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each such
art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its
theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and
contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts
is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into
another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular
Culture—all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is
that other question of why individual painters and musicians
unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary,
show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on
them.
The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been recognized
by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is precisely from
this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts are accessible
to the understanding. Hitherto it has been supposed—without the
slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition
involves—that the several “arts” specified in the conventional
classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all
_possible_ at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of
them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of
creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating
patrons to guide “art” on its “way.” Here we have what I call a
transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become to
that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic
and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and
_unique occurrence_ of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse to
tangible and obvious “causes” for the building of their art-history,
which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial
concordance.
I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the
shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of “mankind” through
the stages of “ancient,” “mediæval” and “modern,” a notion that has made
us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The
history of art is a conspicuous case in point. Having assumed as self-
evident the existence of a number of constant and well-defined provinces
of art, one proceeded to order the history of these several provinces
according to the—equally self-evident—scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern,
to the exclusion, of course, of Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art
of Axum and Saba, of the Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted
altogether were at best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one
that such results argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was
there, demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a
futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were
described as “natural pauses,” it was called “decline” when some great
art in reality died, and “renaissance” where an eye really free from
prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another
landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are still taught
that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And the conclusion
was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts that are found
weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a veritable battle-
field) and set them going again by conscious reformation-program or
forced “revival.”
And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively
sudden end, of a great art—the end of the Attic drama in Euripides, of
Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt,
Wagner and Bruckner—that the organic character of these arts is most
evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in
convincing ourselves that no _one_ art of any greatness has ever been
“reborn.”
Of the Pyramid style _nothing_ passed over into the Doric. _Nothing_
connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East, for
the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural member,
though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first
importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of the
old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of “Faust.” To
believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any Classical art,
in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of the imagination.
And that a great art may die not merely with the Culture but within it,
we may see from the fate of music in the Classical world.[275]
Possibilities of great music there must have been in the Doric
springtime—how otherwise can we account for the importance of old-
fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as there were later (for
Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective there when elsewhere the
statuary art was merely infantile)?—and yet the Late-Classical world
refrained. In just the same fashion everything that the Magian Culture
had attempted in the way of frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic
finally succumbed before the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic
that had sprung up in the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims,
Bamberg, Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of
Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the
instrumental music of the Baroque.
III
The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works of the
ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the Euclidean
geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the analytical
geometry of the position of points in space referred to spatial axes.
All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the
inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there.
There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style
which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and
makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary
images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica
and the domical building may be a _field for ornamentation_, but
_architecture_ it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he
approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a
secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful
only—that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and
to the simplest Mithræa and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a
new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the
basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural
parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North
the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling-house,
begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the
arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and
non-existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a _visage_ and not
merely a façade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only
one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not
even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an
articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the
cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the
innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The _motive of the
façade_, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of
the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the
whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their characteristic
wealth of windows.[276]
The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all
following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them.
Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is
one untiring effort to accomplish one single ideal, viz., the conquest
of the free-standing human body as the vessel of the pure real present.
The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral of voices was
to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the orchestral writing of
the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to understand the emotional
force of this secular tendency of the Apollinian, because we have not
felt how the _purely material, soulless body_ (for the Temple of the
Body, too, has no "interior"!) is the object which archaic relief,
Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic fresco were all striving to
obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed how to achieve it in full. We
have, with a wonderful blindness, assumed this kind of sculpture as both
authoritative and universally possible, as in fact, “the art of
sculpture.” We have written its history as one concerned with all
peoples and periods, and even to-day our sculptors, under the influence
of unproved Renaissance doctrines, speak of the naked human body as the
noblest and most genuine object of “the” art of sculpture. Yet in
reality this statue-art, the art of the naked body standing free upon
its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the
Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which
quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space.
The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front—it is a
variant of plane-relief. And the _seemingly_ Classically-conceived
statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us
to count them, to find how few of them there are[277]) are nothing but a
semi-Gothic reminiscence.
The evolution of this rigorously _non-spatial_ art occupies the three
centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of the
Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the figures
from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness[278] to the coming of the
Hellenistic and its illusion-painting which closed-off the grand style.
This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is regarded as
the last and highest Classical, as _springing from a plane art, first
obeying and then overcoming the fresco_. No doubt the technical origin
can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment of the pristine
column, or the plates that served to cover the temple wall,[279] and no
doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian works (seated
figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists can ever have seen
one.[280] But as a _form-ideal_ the statue goes back through relief to
the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also originated. Relief, like
fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this sculpture right down to
Myron may be considered as relief detached from the plane. In the end,
the figure is treated as a self-contained body apart from the mass of
the building, but it remains essentially a silhouette in front of a
wall.[281] Direction in depth is excluded, and the work is spread out
frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of Myron can be copied
upon vases or coins without much trouble or appreciable
foreshortenings.[282] Consequently, of the two major “late” arts after
650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock of types is
always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often exactly
paralleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur group of
the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a painting. On the
Ægina temple, the advance from the West to the East pediment is an
advance from the fresco-character to the body-character. The change is
completed about 460 with Polycletus, and thenceforward plastic groups
become the model for strict painting. But it is from Lysippus that the
wholly cubic and “all-ways” treatment becomes thoroughly veristic and
yields “fact.” Till then, even in the case of Praxiteles, we have still
a lateral or planar development of the subject, with a clear outline
that is only fully effective in respect of one or two standpoints. But
an undeviating testimony to the picture-origin of independent sculpture
is the practice of polychroming the marble—a practice unknown to the
Renaissance and to Classicism, which would have felt it as
barbaric[283]—and we may say the same of the gold-and-ivory statuary and
the enamel overlaying of bronze, a metal which already possesses a
shining golden tone of its own.
IV
The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries
1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which
marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably
to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial
transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling
art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the
characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of
strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means
wherewith to _paint_. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel
the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes
pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.] to Corelli [d. 1713]
every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the
background of a _basso continuo_), paints heroic landscapes (in the
pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in
Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With the German masters, all
this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself
_absolute_: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates both
painting and architecture in the 18th Century. And, ever more and more
decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of
this form-world.
What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it was
after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more definitely,
what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two
entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one associates
painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a
technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is
akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition
and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the
fact is vital to our understanding of the _organism_ of these arts.
Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of
“eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was
an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism
just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage
was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as
cathedrals were. Their folds were an _ornamentation_ of extreme
sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their “stiffness” from
a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.
Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere
and always, even _before_ any genuine Culture, even among the beasts.
But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a _plastic for
the ear_. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural
and not a harmonic meaning:[284] but this is the very difference between
body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that
it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic;
and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument
that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichord. But, above
all, the melody—like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian’s time—was
treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables,
their bodies and their _extent_, decided the rhythm. The few fragments
that remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is
something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should cause us
also
to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by
the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the
charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.
Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to
educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave.[285]
Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction
is _march-music_. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of
our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed,
the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity—the
directional energy of our church-naves and our storeyed façades, the
depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and
narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our
private and public life. We ourselves have _accent_ in our blood and
therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that
of an alien life, we find the discordance intolerable.
Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have only
observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by
Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so
far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as
antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.[286] But it is
self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic
cults, especially Syrian sun-worship, the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but
also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the
synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nestorian Christians) must have
possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this
a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and
Sassanid chivalry[287]); and that both found their culmination in the
Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.
Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few church-
forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly transformed them
root and branch (10th Century, Hucbald, Guido d’Arezzo). Melodic accent
and beat produced the “march,” and polyphony (like the rime of
contemporary poetry) the image of endless space. To understand this, we
have to distinguish between the imitative[288] and the ornamental sides
of music, and although owing to the fleeting nature of all tone-
creations[289] our knowledge is limited to the musical history of our
own West, yet this is quite sufficient to reveal that duality of
development which is one of the master-keys of all art-history. The one
is soul, landscape, feeling, the other strict form, style, school. West
Europe has an _ornamental music of the grand style_ (corresponding to
the full plastic of the Classical) which is associated with the
architectural history of the cathedral, which is closely akin to
Scholasticism and Mysticism, and which finds its laws in the motherland
of high Gothic between Seine and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed
simultaneously with the flying-buttress system, and its source was the
“Romanesque” style of the Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple
parallel and contrary motion.[290] It is an architecture of human voices
and, like the statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only
conceivable in the setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a
high art of space, of that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of
Lisieux, gave mathematical meaning by the introduction of co-
ordinates.[291] _This_ is the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as
Joachim of Floris saw it at the end of the 12th Century[292]—the birth
of a new soul mirrored in the form-language of a new art.
Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular
_imitative_ music, that of troubadours, Minnesänger and minstrels. As
“ars nova” this travelled from the courts of Provence to the palaces of
Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and Petrarch. It
consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart with their major
and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it included also a
type of _galante_ operetta (Adam de la Hale’s “Robin and Marion”). After
1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing—the rondeau
and the ballade. All this is “art” for a public.[293] Scenes are painted
from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the
melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear
progress.
Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct.
The cathedral _is_ music and the castle _makes_ music. The one begins
with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between
waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the
knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and
therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint
belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The
result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal” rules and, on the
other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 18th
Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself,
artistically, in the _class_-opposition of Renaissance and
Reformation.[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the
spirit of counterpoint; the evolution of strict musical form from the
Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay (c.
1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture.
From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Netherlanders ruled alone in
ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici found no one in Florence who
understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in
this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d.
1495) and his school and Josquin des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal
polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment.
The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With
Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time
architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of
Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place.
About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the _a
cappella_ style of Palestrina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its
powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite,
and it made way for the chorus of instruments, wind and string. And
thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its
flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is
architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental.
The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts
have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal
Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600
Italy produces the _basso continuo_ which requires virtuosi and not
pious participants.
Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the
infinity, or rather to _resolve it into an infinite space of tone_.
Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre.
But the new-born “orchestra” no longer observes limitations imposed by
the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other
voices—at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the
geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of
Descartes.[295] In Zarlino’s “Harmony” (1558) appears a genuine
perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between
ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and embellishment join to
produce the Motive, and this in development leads to the rebirth of
counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of which Frescobaldi was
the first master and Bach the culmination. To the vocal masses and
motets the Baroque opposes its grand, orchestrally-conceived forms of
the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata (Viadana) and the opera
(Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be set against upper voices, or
upper voices be concerted against one another upon a background of
_basso continuo_, always sound-worlds of characteristic expression-
quality work reciprocally upon one another in the infinity of tonal
space, supporting, intensifying, raising, illuminating, threatening,
overshadowing—a music all of interplay, scarcely intelligible save
through ideas of contemporary Analysis.
From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in the
17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and concerto
grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic
working-out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And
thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music—now
completely bodiless—was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the
ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered
the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when,
about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional
Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were discovering the last and
ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement[296] as
vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still
this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new
sonata-movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working out is in the
one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of
pictures we get a cyclic succession,[297] and the real source of this
tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest
and most intimate kind of music—the music of the strings. Certain it is
that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul
has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and
certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas
that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of
full illumination. Here, _in chamber-music, Western art as a whole
reaches its highest point_. Here our prime symbol of endless space is
expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of
intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-melodies
wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of
Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the
presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to
be set.
With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the Faustian arts.
It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only the minor art—
an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-Renaissance art—
of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is contemporary with
the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness. Whereas the statuary of
Gothic is through-and-through architectural ornamentation, human
espalier-work, that of the Rococo remarkably exemplifies the pseudo-
plastic that results from entire subjection to the form-language of
music, and shows to what a degree the technique governing the presented
foreground can be in contradiction with the real expression-language
that is hidden behind it. Compare Coysevox’s[298] (1686) crouching Venus
in the Louvre with its Classical prototype in the Vatican—in the one
plastic is understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms
like “staccato,” “accelerando,” “andante” and “allegro” best describe
the kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the
fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has
more or less lost its fine compactness. Hence our feeling that the
granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-Classical
tendency to work with reference to effects of light and shade. This is
quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting from Titian
onwards. That which in the 18th Century is called “colour” in an
etching, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music. Music
dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art of Gobelins
and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the habit of speaking
of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the very words imply a
recognition of a final _homogeneity_ between the two arts, superficially
dissimilar as they are? And are not these same words perfectly
meaningless as applied to _any and every_ Classical art? But music did
not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture of Bernini’s Baroque
into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of
transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather “tones”) play to
dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual
into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences
and runs to complete the identification of the form-language of these
halls and galleries with that of the music imagined for them. Dresden
and Vienna are the homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of
_visible_ chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and
shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn
with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high style.
And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.
V
The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of its
many aspects,[299] is a _revolt against the spirit of the Faustian
forest-music_ of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to
vassalize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the
logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured
Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character of
a simple _counter-movement_; necessarily therefore it remained dependent
upon the forms of the original movement, and represented simply the
effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it was without true depth,
either ideal or phenomenal. As to the first, we have only to think of
the bursting passion with which the Gothic world-feeling discharged
itself upon the whole Western landscape, and we shall see at once what
sort of a movement it was that the handful of select spirits—scholars,
artists and humanists—initiated about 1420.[300] In the first the issue
was one of life and death for a new-born soul, in the second it was a
point of—taste. The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its
most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea
of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the
knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from
language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil-
painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the
stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had
mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered
the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It
could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it
could not touch—even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is
essentially a continuation of the Gothic.[301] It produced no wholly
great personality between Dante and Michelangelo, each of whom had one
foot outside its limits. And as for the other—phenomenal or manifested
depth—the Renaissance never touched the people, even in Florence itself.
The man for whom they had ears was Savonarola—a phenomenon of quite
another spiritual order and one which begins to be comprehensible when
we discern the fact that, all the time, the deep under-currents are
steadily flowing on towards the Gothic-musical Baroque. The Renaissance
as an anti-Gothic movement and a reaction against the spirit of
polyphonic music has its Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement.
This was a reaction against Doric and against the sculptural-Apollinian
world-feeling. It did _not_ “originate” in the Thracian Dionysus-cult,
but merely took this up as a weapon against and counter-symbol to the
Olympian religion, precisely as in Florence the cult of the antique was
called in for the justification and confirmation of a feeling already
there. The period of the great protest was the 7th Century in Greece and
(_therefore_) the 15th in West Europe. In both cases we have in reality
an outbreak of deep-seated discordances in the Culture, which
physiognomically dominates a whole epoch of its history and especially
of its artistic world—in other words, a stand that the soul attempts to
make against the Destiny that at last it comprehends. The inwardly
recalcitrant forces—_Faust’s second Soul that would separate itself from
the other_—are striving to deflect the sense of the Culture, to
repudiate, to get rid of or to evade its inexorable necessity; it stands
anxious in presence of the call to accomplish its historical fate in
Ionic and Baroque. This anxiety fastened itself in Greece to the
Dionysus-cult with its musical, dematerializing, body-squandering
orgasm, and in the Renaissance to the tradition of the Antique and its
cult of the bodily-plastic tradition. In each case, the alien
expression-means was brought in consciously and deliberately, in order
that the force of a directly-opposite form-language should provide the
suppressed feelings with a weight and a pathos of their own, and so
enable them to stand against the stream—in Greece the stream which
flowed from Homer and the Geometrical to Phidias, in the West that which
flowed from the Gothic cathedrals, through Rembrandt, to Beethoven.
It follows from the very character of a counter-movement that it is far
easier for it to define what it is opposing than what it is aiming at.
This is the difficulty of all Renaissance research. In the Gothic (and
the Doric) it is just the opposite—men are contending _for_ something,
not against it—but Renaissance art is nothing more nor less than anti-
Gothic art. Renaissance music, too, is a contradiction in itself; the
music of the Medicean court was the Southern French “ars nova,” that of
the Florentine Duomo was the Low-German counterpoint, both alike
essentially _Gothic_ and the property of the _whole_ West.
The view that is customarily taken of the Renaissance is a very clear
instance of how readily the proclaimed intentions of a movement may be
mistaken for its deeper meaning. Since Burckhardt,[302] criticism has
controverted every _individual_ proposition that the leading spirits of
the age put forward as to their own tendencies—and yet, this done, it
has continued to use the word Renaissance substantially in the former
sense. Certainly, one is conscious at once in passing to the south of
the Alps of a marked dissimilarity in architecture in particular and in
the look of the arts in general. But the very obviousness of the
conclusion that the impression prompts should have led us to distrust it
and to ask ourselves, instead, whether the supposed distinction of
Gothic and “antique” was not in reality merely a difference between
_Northern and Southern_ aspects of one and the same form-world. Plenty
of things in Spain give the impression of being “Classical” merely
because they are Southern, and if a layman were confronted with the
great cloister of S. Maria Novella or the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi
in Florence and asked to say if these were “Gothic” he would certainly
guess wrong. Otherwise, the sharp change of spirit ought to have set in
not beyond the Alps but only beyond the Apennines, for Tuscany is
artistically an island in Italian Italy. Upper Italy belongs entirely to
a Byzantine-tinted Gothic; Siena in particular is a genuine monument of
the _counter-Renaissance_, and Rome is already the home of Baroque. But,
in fact, it is the change of _landscape_ that coincides with the change
of feeling.
In the actual birth of the Gothic style Italy had indeed no inward
share. At the epoch of 1000 the country was still absolutely under the
domination of Byzantine taste in the East and Moorish taste in the
South. When Gothic first took root here it was the mature Gothic, and it
implanted itself with an intensity and force for which we look in vain
in any of the great Renaissance creations—think of the “Stabat Mater,”
the “Dies Iræ,” Catharine of Siena, Giotto and Simone Martini! At the
same time, it was lighted from the South and its strangeness was, as it
were, softened in acclimatization. That which it suppressed or expelled
was not, as has been supposed, some lingering strains of the Classical
but purely the Byzantine-_cum_-Saracen form-language that appealed to
the senses in familiar everyday life—in the buildings of Ravenna and
Venice but even more in the ornament of the fabrics, vessels and arms
imported from the East.
If the Renaissance had been a “renewal” (whatever that may mean) of the
Classical _world-feeling_, then, surely, would it not have had to
replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered _space_ by that
of closed structural _body_? But there was never any question of this.
On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an
architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it
differed _only_ in that in lieu of the Northern “Sturm und Drang” it
breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and
unquestioning South. It produced _no_ new building-idea, and the extent
of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to _façades and
courtyards_.
Now, this focussing of expressible effort upon the street-front of a
house or the side of a cloister—many-windowed and ever significant of
the spirit within—is characteristic of the Gothic (and deeply akin to
its art of portraiture); and the cloistered courtyard itself is, from
the Sun-temple of Baalbek to the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, as
genuinely Arabian. And in the midst of this art the Poseidon temple of
Pæstum, all body, stands lonely and unrelated: no one saw it, no one
attempted to copy it. Equally un-Attic is the Florentine sculpture, for
Attic is _free_ plastic, “in the round” in the full sense of the words,
whereas every Florentine statue feels behind it the ghost of the niche
into which the Gothic sculptor had built its real ancestors. In the
relation of figure to background and in the build of the body, the
masters of the “Kings’ heads” at Chartres and the masters of the
“George” choir at Bamberg exhibit the same interpenetration of “Antique”
and Gothic expression-means that we have, neither intensified nor
contradicted, in the manner of Giovanni Pisano and Ghiberti and even
Verrocchio.
If we take away from the models of the Renaissance all elements that
originated later than the Roman Imperial Age—that is to say, those
belonging to the Magian form-world—nothing is left. Even from Late-Roman
architecture itself all elements derived from the great days of Hellas
had one by one vanished. Most conclusive of all, though, is that motive
which actually _dominates_ the Renaissance, which because of its
Southern-ness we regard as the noblest of the Renaissance characters,
viz., _the association of round-arch and column_. This association, no
doubt, is very un-Gothic, but in the Classical style it simply does not
exist, and in fact it represents the leitmotif of the Magian
architecture that originated in Syria.
But it was just then that the South received from the North those
decisive impulses which helped it first of all to emancipate itself
entirely from Byzantium and then to step from Gothic into Baroque. In
the region comprised between Amsterdam, Köln and Paris[303]—the counter-
pole to Tuscany in the style-history of our culture—counterpoint and
oil-painting had been created in association with the Gothic
architecture. Thence Dufay in 1428 and Willaert in 1516 came to the
Papal Chapel, and in 1527 the latter founded that Venetian school which
was decisive of Baroque music. The successor of Willaert was de Rore of
Antwerp. A Florentine commissioned Hugo van der Goes to execute the
Portinari altar for Santa Maria Nuova, and Memlinc to paint a Last
Judgment. And over and above this, numerous pictures (especially Low-
Countries portraits) were acquired and exercised an enormous influence.
In 1450 Rogier van der Weyden himself came to Florence, where his art
was both admired and imitated. In 1470 Justus van Gent introduced oil-
painting to Umbria, and Antonello da Messina brought what he had learned
in the Netherlands to Venice. How much “Dutch” and how little
“Classical” there is in the pictures of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and
Botticelli and especially in the engravings of Pollaiulo! Or in Leonardo
himself. Even to-day critics hardly care to admit the full extent of the
influence exercised by the Gothic North upon the architecture, music,
painting and plastic of the Renaissance.[304] It was just then, too,
that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464),
brought into mathematics the “infinitesimal” principle, that
_contrapuntal method_ of number which he reached by deduction from the
idea of God as Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa that Leibniz
received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential
calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque,
Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of
the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still
effective even in Galileo.
The high period of the Renaissance is a moment of _apparent_ expulsion
of music from Faustian art. And in fact, for a few decades, in the only
area where Classical and Western landscapes touched, Florence did
uphold—with one grand effort that was essentially metaphysical and
essentially defensive—an image of the Classical so convincing that,
although its deeper characters were without exception mere anti-Gothic,
it lasted beyond Goethe and, if not for our criticism, yet for our
feelings, is valid to this day. The Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici and
the Rome of Leo the Tenth—that is what for us the Classical _is_, an
eternal goal of most secret longing, the only deliverance from our heavy
hearts and limit upon our horizon. And it is this because, and only
because, it is anti-Gothic. So clean-cut is the opposition of Apollinian
and Faustian spirituality.
But let there be no mistake as to the extent of this illusion. In
Florence men practiced fresco and relief in contradiction of Gothic
glass-painting and Byzantine gold-ground mosaic. This was the one moment
in the history of the West when sculpture ranked as the paramount art.
The dominant elements in the picture are the poised bodies, the ordered
groups, the structural side of architecture. The backgrounds possess no
intrinsic value, merely serving to fill up between and behind the self-
sufficient present of the foreground-figures. For a while here, painting
is actually under the domination of plastic; Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and
Botticelli were goldsmiths. Yet, all the same, these frescoes have
nothing of the spirit of Polygnotus in them. Examine a collection of
Classical painted vases—not in individual specimens or copies (which
would give the wrong idea) but in the mass, for this is the one species
of Classical art in which originals are plentiful enough to impress us
effectively with the _will_ that is behind the art. In the light of such
a study, the utter un-Classicalness of the Renaissance-spirit leaps to
the eye. The great achievement of Giotto and Masaccio in creating a
fresco-art is only _apparently_ a revival of the Apollinian way of
feeling; but the depth-experience and idea of extension that underlies
it is not the Apollinian unspatial and self-contained body but the
_Gothic field_ (Bildraum). However recessive the backgrounds are, they
exist. Yet here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of
atmosphere, the great noon-calm, of the South; dynamic space was changed
in Tuscany, and only in Tuscany, to the static space of which Piero
della Francesca was the master. Though fields of space were painted,
they were put, not as an existence unbounded and like music ever
striving into the depths, but as _sensuously definable_. Space was given
a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and drawing, sharpness
of outline, definition of surface were studied with a care that
seemingly approached the Hellenic ideal. Yet there was always this
difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as singular in
contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented things as
separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness. And in proportion
as the surge of the Renaissance smoothed down, the _hardness_ of this
tendency receded, from Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel to
Raphael’s in the Vatican Stanze, until the _sfumato_ of Leonardo, the
melting of the edges into the background, brings a musical ideal in
place of the relief-ideal into painting. The hidden dynamic is equally
unmistakable in the sculpture of Florence—it would be perfectly hopeless
to look for an Attic companion for Verrocchio’s equestrian statue.[305]
This art was a _mask_, a mode of the taste of an élite, and sometimes a
comedy—though never was comedy more gallantly played out. The
indescribable inward purity of Gothic form often causes us to forget
what an excess of native strength and depth it possessed. Gothic, it
must be repeated again, is the _only_ foundation of the Renaissance. The
Renaissance never even touched the real Classical, let alone understood
it or “revived” it. The consciousness of the Florentine élite, wholly
under literary influences, fashioned the deceptive name to positivize
the negative element of the movement—thereby demonstrating how little
such currents are aware of their own nature. There is not a single one
of their great works that the contemporaries of Pericles, or even those
of Cæsar, would not have rejected as utterly alien. Their palace
courtyards are Moorish courtyards, and their round arches on slender
pillars are of Syrian origin. Cimabue taught his century to imitate with
the brush the art of Byzantine mosaic. Of the two famous domical
buildings of the Renaissance, the domed cathedral of Florence is a
masterpiece of late Gothic, and St. Peter’s is one of early Baroque.
When Michelangelo set himself to build the latter as the “Pantheon
towering over the Basilica of Maxentius,” he was naming two buildings of
the purest early Arabian style. And ornament—is there indeed a genuine
Renaissance ornamentation? Certainly there is nothing comparable in
symbolic force with the ornamentation of Gothic. But what is the
provenance of that gay and elegant embellishment which has a real inward
unity of its own and has captivated all Europe? There is a great
difference between the home of a “taste” and the home of the expression-
means that it employs: one finds a great deal that is Northern in the
early Florentine motives of Pisano, Maiano, Ghiberti and Della Quercia.
We have to distinguish in all these chancels, tombs, niches and porches
between the outward and transferable forms (the Ionic column itself is
doubly a transfer, for it originated in Egypt) and the spirit of the
form-language that uses them as means and signs. One Classical element
or item is equivalent to another so long as something un-Classical is
being expressed—significance lies not in the thing but in the way in
which it is used. But even in Donatello such motives are far fewer than
in mature Baroque. As for a strict Classical capital, no such thing is
to be found.
And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something
wonderful that music _could not_ reproduce—a feeling for the bliss of
perfect _nearness_, for pure, restful and _liberating_ space-effects,
bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and
Baroque. It is not Classical, but it is a dream of Classical existence,
the only dream of the Faustian soul in which it was able to forget
itself.
VI
And now, with the 16th Century, the decisive epochal turn begins for
Western painting. The trusteeship of architecture in the North and that
of sculpture in Italy expire, and painting becomes polyphonic,
“picturesque,” infinity-seeking. The colours become tones. The art of
the brush claims kinship with the style of cantata and madrigal. The
technique of oils becomes the basis of an art that means to conquer
_space_ and to dissolve things in that space. With Leonardo and
Giorgione begins Impressionism.
In the actual picture there is transvaluation of all the elements. The
background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as
space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A
development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in
the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The
background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible
foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the
depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the
Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. The space-relief
of Mantegna’s plane layers dissolves in Tintoretto into directional
energy, and there emerges in the picture the great symbol of an
unlimited space-universe which comprises the individual things within
itself as incidentals—the _horizon_. Now, that a landscape painting
should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we
have never asked ourselves the important question: _Is_ there always a
horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint
of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vase-
paintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the
Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line,
in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent
symbol of the far, contains the painter’s version of the “infinitesimal”
principle. It is out of the remoteness of this horizon that the _music_
of the picture flows, and for this reason the great landscape-painters
of Holland paint only backgrounds and atmospheres, just as for the
contrary reason “anti-musical” masters like Signorelli and especially
Mantegna, paint _only_ foregrounds and “reliefs.” It is in the horizon,
then, that Music triumphs over Plastic, the _passion_ of extension over
its _substance_. It is not too much to say that no picture by Rembrandt
has a foreground at all. In the North, the home of counterpoint, a deep
understanding of the meaning of horizons and high-lighted distances is
found very early, while in the South the flat conclusive gold-background
of the Arabic-Byzantine picture long remained supreme. The first
definite emergence of the pure space-feeling is in the Books of Hours of
the Duke of Berry (that at Chantilly and that at Turin) about 1416.
Thereafter, slowly and surely, it conquers the Picture.
The same symbolic meaning attaches to clouds. Classical art concerns
itself with them no more than with horizons, and the painter of the
Renaissance treats them with a certain playful superficiality. But very
early the Gothic looked at its cloud-masses, and through them, with the
long sight of mysticism; and the Venetians (Giorgione and Paolo Veronese
above all) discovered the full magic of the cloud-world, of the
thousand-tinted Being that fills the heavens with its sheets and wisps
and mountains. Grünewald and the Netherlanders heightened its
significance to the level of tragedy. El Greco brought the grand art of
cloud-symbolism to Spain.
It was at the same time that along with oil-painting and counterpoint
the _art of gardens_ ripened. Here, expressed on the canvas of Nature
itself by extended pools, brick walls, avenues, vistas and galleries, is
the same tendency that is represented in painting by the effort towards
the linear perspective that the early Flemish artists felt to be the
basic problem of their art and Brunellesco, Alberti and Piero della
Francesca formulated. We may take it that it was not entirely a
coincidence that this formulation of perspective, this mathematical
consecration of the picture (whether landscape or interior) as a field
limited at the sides but immensely increased in depth, was propounded
just at this particular moment. It was the proclamation of the Prime-
Symbol. The point at which the perspective lines coalesce is at
infinity. It was just because it avoided infinity and rejected distance
that Classical painting possessed no perspective. _Consequently_ the
Park, the deliberate manipulation of Nature so as to obtain space and
distance effects, is an impossibility in Classical art. Neither in
Athens nor in Rome proper was there a garden-art: it was only the
Imperial Age that gratified its taste with ground-schemes of Eastern
origin, and a glance at any of the plans of those “gardens” that have
been preserved[306] is enough to show the shortness of their range and
the emphasis of their bounds. And yet the first garden-theorist of the
West, L. B. Alberti, was laying down the relation of the surroundings to
the house (that is, to the spectators in it) as early as 1450, and from
his projects to the parks of the Ludovisi and Albani villas,[307] we can
see the importance of the perspective view into distance becoming ever
greater and greater. In France, after Francis I (Fontainebleau) the long
narrow lake is an additional feature having the same meaning.
The most significant element in the Western garden-art is thus the
_point de vue_ of the great Rococo park, upon which all its avenues and
clipped-hedge walks open and from which vision may travel out to lose
itself in the distances. This element is wanting even in the Chinese
garden-art. But it is exactly matched by some of the silver-bright
distance-pictures of the pastoral music of that age (in Couperin for
example). It is the _point de vue_ that gives us the key to a real
understanding of this remarkable mode of making nature itself speak the
form-language of a human symbolism. It is in principle akin to the
dissolution of finite number-pictures into infinite series in our
mathematic: as the remainder-expression[308] reveals the ultimate
meaning of the series, so the glimpse into the boundless is what, in the
garden, reveals to a Faustian soul the meaning of Nature. It was _we_
and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and
sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of
vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be _alone_ with
endless space. The great achievement of Le Nôtre and the landscape-
gardeners of Northern France, beginning with Fouquet’s epoch-making
creation of Vaux-le-Vicomte, was that they were able to render this
symbol with such high emphasis. Compare the Renaissance park of the
Medicean age—capable of being taken in, gay, cosy, well-rounded—with
these parks in which all the water-works, statue-rows, hedges and
labyrinths are instinct with the suggestion of long range. It is the
Destiny of Western oil-painting told over again in a bit of garden-
history.
But the feeling for long range is at the same time one for history. At a
distance, space becomes time and the horizon signifies the future. _The
Baroque park is the park of the Late season_, of the approaching end, of
the falling leaf. A Renaissance park is meant for the summer and the
noonday. It is timeless, and nothing in its form-language reminds us of
mortality. It is perspective that begins to awaken a premonition of
something passing, fugitive and final. The very words of distance
possess, in the lyric poetry of all Western languages, a plaintive
autumnal accent that one looks for in vain in the Greek and Latin. It is
there in Macpherson’s “Ossian” and Hölderlin, and in Nietzsche’s
Dionysus-Dithyrambs, and lastly in Baudelaire, Verlaine, George and
Droem. The Late poetry of the withering garden avenues, the unending
lines in the streets of a megalopolis, the ranks of pillars in a
cathedral, the peak in a distant mountain chain—all tell us that the
depth-experience which constitutes our space-world for us is in the last
analysis our inward certainty of a Destiny, of a prescribed direction,
of _time_, of the irrevocable. Here, in the experience of horizon as
future, we become directly and surely conscious of the identity of Time
with the “third dimension” of that experienced space which is living
self-extension. And in these last days we are imprinting upon the plan
of our megalopolitan streets the same directional-destiny character that
the 17th Century imprinted upon the Park of Versailles. We lay our
streets as long arrow-flights into remote distance, regardless even of
preserving old and historic parts of our towns (for the symbolism of
these is not now prepotent in us), whereas a megalopolis of the
Classical world studiously maintained in its extension that tangle of
crooked lanes that enabled Apollinian man to feel himself a body in the
midst of bodies.[309] Herein, as always, practical requirements, so
called, are merely the mask of a profound inward compulsion.
With the rise of perspective, then, the deeper form and full
metaphysical significance of the picture comes to be concentrated upon
the horizon. In Renaissance art the painter had stated and the beholder
had accepted the contents of the picture for what they were, as self-
sufficient and co-extensive with the title. But henceforth the contents
became a _means_, the mere vehicle of a meaning that was beyond the
possibility of verbal expression. With Mantegna or Signorelli the pencil
sketch could have stood as the picture, without being carried out in
colour—in some cases, indeed, we can only regret that the artist did not
stop at the cartoon. In the statue-like sketch, colour is a mere
supplement. Titian, on the other hand, could be told by Michelangelo
that he did not know how to draw. The “object,” i.e., that which could
be exactly fixed by the drawn outline, the near and material, had in
fact lost its artistic actuality; but, as the theory of art was still
dominated by Renaissance impressions, there arose thereupon that strange
and interminable conflict concerning the “form” and the “content” of an
art-work. Mis-enunciation of the question has concealed its real and
deep significance from us. The first point for consideration should have
been whether painting was to be conceived of plastically or musically,
as a static of things or as a dynamic of space (for in this lies the
essence of the opposition between fresco and oil technique), and the
second point, the opposition of Classical and Faustian world-feeling.
Outlines define the material, while colour-tones interpret space.[310]
But the picture of the first order belongs to directly sensible nature—
it _narrates_. Space, on the contrary, is by its very essence
transcendent and addresses itself to our imaginative powers, and in an
art that is under its suzerainty, the narrative element enfeebles and
obscures the more profound tendency. Hence it is that the theorist, able
to feel the secret disharmony but misunderstanding it, clings to the
superficial opposition of content and form. The problem is purely a
Western one, and reveals most strikingly the complete inversion in the
significance of pictorial elements that took place when the Renaissance
closed down and instrumental music of the grand style came to the front.
For the Classical mind no problem of form and content in this sense
could exist; in an Attic statue the two are completely identical and
identified in the human body.
The case of Baroque painting is further complicated by the fact that it
involves an opposition of ordinary popular feeling and the finer
sensibility. Everything Euclidean and tangible is also popular, and the
genuinely popular art is therefore the Classical. It is very largely the
feeling of this popular character in it that constitutes its
indescribable charm for the Faustian intellects that have to _fight_ for
self-expression, to win their world by hard wrestling. For us, the
contemplation of Classical art and its intention is pure _refreshment_:
here nothing needs to be struggled for, everything offers itself freely.
And something of the same sort was achieved by the anti-Gothic tendency
of Florence. Raphael is, in many sides of his creativeness, distinctly
popular. But Rembrandt is not, cannot be, so. From Titian painting
becomes more and more esoteric. So, too, poetry. So, too, music. And the
Gothic _per se_ had been esoteric from its very beginnings—witness Dante
and Wolfram. The masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that
matter, were never intelligible to the average member of the
congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and
regard music generally as something for which one is or is not in the
mood. A certain degree of interest in these matters has been induced by
concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the
phrase “art for all.” But Faustian art is not, and by very essence
cannot be, “for all.” If modern painting has ceased to appeal to any but
a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because it
has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street
can understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from
contents to space—the space _through_ which alone, according to Kant,
things _are_. And with that a difficult metaphysical element has entered
into painting, and this element does not give itself away to the layman.
For Phidias, on the contrary, the word “lay” would have had no meaning.
His sculpture appealed entirely to the bodily and not to the spiritual
eye. _An art without space is a priori unphilosophical._
VII
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.
And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina
right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl,
great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while
the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and
instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were
comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts—
Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits _prime phenomena_.
They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this
they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few
beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden-art, or
architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no
longer a _style_ of plastic in the sense that there were styles of
painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the
works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to
despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and
that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from
Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And
yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the
plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that
Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful
performances no doubt, but not one single _work_ of the same order as
the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that expresses, as
these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen
out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What
there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust.
Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of
the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom,
naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand
symbolism), but such an artist is always visibly either a belated
imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like
Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator
like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more
clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no
longer a mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of
specific style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical
world, correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with
probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give
way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian
arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to
renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher
art.
VIII
The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow,
red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and,
since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely
material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account for it,
e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. Even Nietzsche
discussed this (_Morgenröte_, 426).
But why did this painting in its great days _avoid_ blue and even blue-
green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow
and bluish-red? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue
and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that
they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade-
painting used _all_ the colours that were technically available. There
are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-
painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The
ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the
Euclidean soul by its prime symbol.
Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful
plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote
mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours.
They are _cold_, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse
and distance and boundlessness.
For this reason they were kept out of the frescoes of Polygnotus. And
for this reason also, an “infinitesimal” blue-to-green is the space-
creating element throughout the history of our perspective oil-painting,
from the Venetians right into the 19th Century; it is the basic and
supremely important tone which _supports_ the ensemble of the intended
colour-effect, as the _basso continuo_ supports the orchestra, whereas
the warm yellow and red tones are put on sparingly and in dependence
upon this basic tone. It is not the full, gorgeous and _familiar_ green
that Raphael and Dürer sometimes—and seldom at that—use for draperies,
but an indefinite blue-green of a thousand nuances into white and grey
and brown; something deeply musical, into which (notably in Gobelin
tapestry) the whole atmosphere is plunged. That quality which we have
named aerial perspective in contrast to linear—and might also have
called _Baroque_ perspective in contrast to Renaissance—rests almost
exclusively upon this. We find it with more and more intense depth-
effect in Leonardo, Guercino, Albani in the case of Italy, and in
Ruysdael and Hobbema in that of Holland, but, above all, in the great
French painters, from Poussin and Claude Lorrain and Watteau to Corot.
Blue, equally a perspective colour, always stands in relation to the
dark, the unillumined, the unactual. It does not press in on us, it
pulls us out into the remote. An “enchanting nothingness” Goethe calls
it in his _Farbenlehre_.
Blue and green are transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colours. They
are missing in the strict Attic fresco and _therefore dominant_ in oil-
painting. Yellow and red, the Classical colours, are the colours of the
material, the near, the full-blooded. Red is the characteristic colour
of sexuality—hence it is the only colour that works upon the beasts. It
matches best the Phallus-symbol—and therefore the statue and the Doric
column—but it is pure blue that etherealizes the Madonna’s mantle. This
relation of the colours has established itself in every great school as
a deep-felt necessity. Violet, a red succumbing to blue, is the colour
of women no longer fruitful and of priests living in celibacy.
Yellow and red are the _popular_ colours, the colours of the crowd, of
children, of women, and of savages. Amongst the Venetians and the
Spaniards high personages affected a splendid black or blue, with an
unconscious sense of the aloofness inherent in these colours. For red
and yellow, the _Apollinian, Euclidean-polytheistic_ colours, belong to
the foreground even in respect of social life; they are meet for the
noisy hearty market-days and holidays, the naïve immediateness of a life
subject to the blind chances of the Classical _Fatum_, the point-
existence. But blue and green—the Faustian, monotheistic colours—are
those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to a past and
a future, of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from
within.
The relation of Shakespearian destiny to space and of Sophoclean to the
individual body has already been stated in an earlier chapter. All the
genuinely transcendent Cultures—that is all whose prime-symbol requires
the _overcoming_ of the apparent, the life of struggle and not that of
acceptance—have the same metaphysical inclination to space as to blues
and blacks. There are profound observations on the connexion between
ideas of space and the meaning of colour in Goethe’s studies of
“entoptic colours” in the atmosphere; the symbolism that is enunciated
by him in the _Farbenlehre_ and that which we have deduced here from the
ideas of Space and Destiny are in complete agreement.
The most significant use of dusky green as the colour of destiny is
Grünewald’s. The indescribable power of space in his _nights_ is
equalled only by Rembrandt’s. And the thought suggests itself here, is
it possible to say that his bluish-green, the colour in which the
interior of a great cathedral is so often clothed, is the specifically
_Catholic_ colour?—it being understood that we mean by “Catholic”
strictly the Faustian Christianity (with the Eucharist as its centre)
that was founded in the Lateran Council of 1215 and fulfilled in the
Council of Trent. This colour with its silent grandeur is as remote from
the resplendent gold-ground of Early Christian-Byzantine pictures as it
is from the gay, loquacious “pagan” colours of the painted Hellenic
temples and statues. It is to be noted that the effect of this colour,
entirely unlike that of yellow and red, depends upon work being
exhibited _indoors_. Classical painting is emphatically a public art,
Western just as emphatically a studio-art. The whole of our great oil-
painting, from Leonardo to the end of the 18th Century, is not meant for
the bright light of day. Here once more we meet the same opposition as
that between chamber-music and the free-standing statue. The climatic
explanation of the difference is merely superficial; the example of
Egyptian painting would suffice to disprove it if disproof were
necessary at all. Infinite space meant for Classical feeling complete
nothingness, and the use of blue and green, with their powers of
dissolving the near and creating the far, would have been a challenge to
the absolutism of the foreground and its unit-bodies, and therefore to
the very meaning and intent of Apollinian art. To the Apollinian eye,
pictures in the colours of Watteau would have been destitute of all
essence, things of almost inexpressible emptiness and untruth. By these
colours the visually-perceived light-reflecting surface of the picture
is made effectively to render, not circumscribed things, but
circumambient space. And that is why they are missing in Greece and
dominant in the West.
IX
Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of
the _gold ground_ of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny
wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known
to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish
and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the
influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the
Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine
purple codices.
In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon
very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture
recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and
place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The
Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it
projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance
by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression
of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual
substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background,
that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours.
Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a
complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence
that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured
substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment
applied with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is
practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[311] It
recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and
Kabbala, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque,
the inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The
gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their
substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus
or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of
space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost
unintelligible to _our_ world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism
of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a
principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-
Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra.
Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the
body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm
pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling
character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions
that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic
philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive
part in the disputes of the Councils upon the substantiality of
Christ.[312] And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography
of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an
express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It
represents the _Arabian_ form of the Christian world-consciousness, and
with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this
treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically—
and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations of the
Christian legend. When “natural” backgrounds, with their blue-green
heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early
Gothic, they had at first the appearance of something profane and
worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged,
at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real
depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it
dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the
_Faustian_ (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of
itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new
religion in the old garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the
mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[313] transformed
the whole meaning of painting.
The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the
symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final schism
took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The
landscape-background of the depicted scene and the _dynamic_
infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and,
simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there
vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem
of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon
and all the Councils of the East.
X
The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space-
forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the _visible brush-
stroke_. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the
fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ—of smoothing out all
turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even
colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of
_being_, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent
_motion_-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in
from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a
denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains
permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the
_historical_ feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the
painter not merely something that _has become_ but something that _is
becoming_. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A
piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is
ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes—
first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of
Titian—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the
orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary
Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one
another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending
movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical
Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every
painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a
Faustian who stands before it feels that he too has a spiritual
evolution. Before any great landscape by a Baroque master, the one word
“historical” is enough to make us feel that there is a meaning in it
wholly alien to the meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also
this of the restless outlineless brush-stroke is part of the dynamic
stability of the universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and
Destiny. The opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a
particular aspect of the general opposition of historical and
ahistorical form, of assertion and denial of inner development, of
eternity and instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western
is a deed. The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the
living course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an
ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and
peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply _musical_. It is no
mere conceit to compare the _allegro feroce_ of Frans Hals with the
_andante con moto_ of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the major
of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion of _tempo_ is comprised in the
execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is the art
of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing and will
let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aëry web of brush-strokes
immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things. Contours melt into
chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very long way back to obtain
any corporeal impression out of our coloured space values, and even so
it is always the chromatic and active air itself that gives birth to the
things.
At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another
symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the
actuality of all colour—the “studio-brown” (atelierbraun). This was
unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and Rhenish
masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong as their
tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it, and its
reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This brown
does not repudiate its descent from the “infinitesimal” greens of
Leonardo’s, Schöngauer’s and Grünewald’s backgrounds, but it possesses a
mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space
against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more
primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its
Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the
Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring
and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible
existences of the sense-world—the world of moments and foregrounds—into
atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The
Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled
and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence
within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a
prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery
marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its
becoming. _As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has
something Protestant in it._ It anticipates the hyperbolic[314] Northern
pantheism of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue
of Goethe’s “Faust.”[315] The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of
Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving of instrumental music
towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca Marenzio) and
towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of string and wind
choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency of oil-painting to
create _pictorial chromatics_ out of pure colours, by means of these
unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of immediately
juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts spread through their
worlds of tones and colours—colour-tones and tone-colours—an atmosphere
of the purest spatiality, which enveloped and rendered, no longer body—
the human being as a shape—but the soul unconfined. And thus was
attained the inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of
Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets themselves—the inwardness
which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic art to _keep
at bay_.
From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the Classical
tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as deliberate
contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant to set off and
emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course Rembrandt). This
atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the
unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major colour that _does
not exist in the rainbow_. There is white light, and yellow and green,
and red and other light of the most entire purity. But a pure brown
light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that we know. All the
greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold tones that appear in
their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow bolder and bolder in the
great Dutch painters and lose themselves towards the end of the 18th
Century, have the common quality that they strip nature of her tangible
actuality. They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious
profession of faith; we feel that here we are not very far from Port
Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the other hand—who is the founder
of the painting of _Civilization_—it is a different will that seeks
expression; and the very brown that he had learnt from the Dutch meant
to him not what it had meant to them—Destiny, God, the meaning of life—
but simply romance, sensibility, yearning for something that was gone,
memorial of the great past of the dying art. In the last German masters
too—Lessing, Marées, Spitzweg, Diez, Leibl[316]—whose belated art is a
romantic retrospect, an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a
precious heirloom. Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last
relic of the great style, they preferred to set themselves against the
evident tendency of their generation—the soulless and soul-killing
generation of _plein-air_ and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has
never yet been), this battle of Rembrandt-brown and the _plein-air_ of
the new school is simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up
by soul against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the
opposition of symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan “applied” art
which affects building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike.
Regarded thus, the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough.
When it dies, an entire Culture dies with it.
It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above all—who
best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his most
telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-
windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the gold
tone of the great Venetians—Titian, Veronese, Palma, Giorgione—is always
reminding us of that old perished Northern art of glass painting of
which they themselves know almost nothing. Here also the Renaissance
with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is seen as merely an episode,
an event of the very self-conscious surface, and not a product of the
underlying Faustian instinct of the Western soul, whereas this luminous
gold-brown of the Venetian painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of
the old glass-painting and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides
precisely in time with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour-
music by the work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the
elder Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.
Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the _soul_, and more
particularly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I think,
spoken somewhere of the “brown” music of Bizet, but the adjective is far
more appropriate to the music which Beethoven wrote for strings[317] and
to the orchestration that even as late as Bruckner so often fills space
with a browny-golden expanse of tone. All other colours are relegated to
ancillary functions—thus the bright yellow and the vermilion of Vermeer
intrude with the spatial almost as though from another world and with an
emphasis that is truly metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red
lights of Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In
Rubens, on the contrary—brilliant performer but no thinker—the brown is
almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in Watteau, the
“Catholic” blue-green disputes precedence with the brown.) All this
shows how any particular means may, in the hands of men of inward depth,
become a symbol for the evocation of such high transcendence as that of
the Rembrandt landscape, while for other great masters it may be merely
a serviceable technical expedient—or in other words that (as we have
already seen) technical “form,” in the theoretical sense of something
opposed to “content,” has nothing whatever to do with the real and true
form of a great work.
I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes
the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and _future_,
and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may
be represented. The other colours of distance have also this
significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly
bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end
come to prefer bronze and even gilt-bronze to the painted marble, the
better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep
blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal
thing.[318] Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found
them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic
spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this—and from that
time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of
distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a
bronze—an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of
art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a
cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which
transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of
time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing
this patina?[319]
But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to the
level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek would
have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work, we can
hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on account of its
“distant” quality, was avoided by him on spiritual grounds. Patina is a
symbol of _mortality_ and hence related in a remarkable way to the
symbols of time-measurement and the funeral rite. We have already in an
earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for
ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection
of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum
Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which
appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to
a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns?[320]
Every Greek knew his “Iliad” but not one ever thought of digging up the
hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to
preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of
Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes,
Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish—but we keep them _as
ruins_, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive
them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be
reproduced.[321] Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this
reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It
cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never
was the old preserved because it was old. After the Persians had
destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns, statues, reliefs,
broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to start afresh with a
clean slate—and the resultant scrap-heaps have been our richest sources
for the art of the 6th Century. Their action was quite in keeping with
the style of a Culture that raised cremation to the rank of a major
symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life to a chronology. _Our_
choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The heroic landscape of the
Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without ruins. The English park
with its atmospheric suggestion, which supplanted the French about 1750
and abandoned the great perspective idea of the latter in favour of the
“Nature” of Addison, Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of
motives perhaps the most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the
_artificial ruin_, in order to deepen the historical character in the
presented landscape.[322] The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its
early period, but it would never have ventured to _build_ ruins as the
symbols of the past. Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the
Classical _torso_ that we really love. It has had a destiny: something
suggestive of the past as past envelops it, and our imagination delights
to fill the empty space of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of
invisible lines. A good restoration—and the secret charm of endless
possibilities is all gone. I venture to maintain that it is only by way
of this _transposition into the musical_ that the remains of Classical
sculpture can really reach us. The green bronze, the blackened marble,
the fragments of a figure abolish for our inner eye the limitations of
time and space. “Picturesque” this has been called—the brand-new statue
and building and the too-well-groomed park are not picturesque—and the
word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weathering is
the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both express
is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of Polycletus,
standing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel eyes and gilded
hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened age? Would not the
Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty impressiveness if, one fine
day, the missing parts were discovered and replaced? And would not the
towers and domes of our old cities lose their deep metaphysical charm if
they were sheathed in new copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian,
ennobles all things. For Classical man, it depreciates them.
Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it
to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much demonstrably
actual or even possible, but _remote and crusted_ subjects. That which
the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any
event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place,
or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our
tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future—the
latter category, in which men yet to be are shown as carriers of a
Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and
the “Götterdämmerung.” But tragedies of the present we have _not_, apart
from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century.[323] If Shakespeare
wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he
at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for
preference—in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take
England or France—always for the sake of getting rid of that _nearness_
of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a
mythological subject.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
II
ACT AND PORTRAIT
CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
II
ACT AND PORTRAIT
I
The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and the
Northern as a culture of the Spirit, and not without a certain _arrière-
pensée_ of disprizing the one in favour of the other. Though it was
mainly in trivialities that Renaissance taste made its contrasts between
Classical and Modern, Pagan and Christian, yet even this might have led
to decisive discoveries if only men had seen how to get behind formula
to origins.
If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with respect to
him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an immense aggregate of
symbols, then the man himself, in so far as he belongs to the fabric of
actuality, in so far as he is _phenomenal_, must be comprised in the
general symbolism. But, in the impress of him made upon men like
himself, what is it that possesses the force of Symbol, viz., the
capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly presenting the
essence of that man and the signification of his being? Art gives the
answer.
But this answer is necessarily different in different Cultures. As each
lives differently, so each is differently impressed by Life. For the
mode of human imagining—metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike—
it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels
himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in
endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on
the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus,
that the directional character is asserted or, on the contrary, denied
in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the prime-symbol
of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a world-
feeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal
followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western
a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul,
Euclidean and point-formed, felt the empirical visible body as the
complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into
all distances, found this expression not in _person_, σῶμα, but in
_personality_, _character_, call it what you will. “Soul” for the real
Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body—and thus Aristotle
defined it. “Body” for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul—and thus
Goethe felt it.
But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly
in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck
expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing
tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in
Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic
portraiture tries to draw a spiritual _type_ in the structure of its
heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a _wholly
personal_ inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the
mouth.
The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole spokesman is
emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in the race (to the
man of σωφροσύνη wantonness was not permitted[324]), it was _not_, as
Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of untrammelled energy and perfervid
passion. This sort of thing is much nearer to the ideals of Germanic-
Christian or of Indian chivalry. What Apollinian man and Apollinian art
can claim as their very own is simply the apotheosis of the bodily
_phenomenon_, taking the word perfectly literally—the rhythmic
proportioning of limbs and harmonious build of muscles. This is _not_
Pagan as against Christian, it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was
Baroque mankind (Christian or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that
first utterly put away the cult of the palpable σῶμα, carrying its
alienation indeed to the extremes of bodily uncleanliness that prevailed
in the entourage of Louis XIV,[325] whose full wigs and lace cuffs and
buckled shoes covered up Body with a whole web of ornament.
Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely
from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open,
free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on
logically till the _naked_ body became its only subject. And, moreover,
it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in
that its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is
_anatomically convincing_. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried
to the extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction,
however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have indicated,
however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.
In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in
the proportions of the structure[326] and the equivalence of the axes in
respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always
self-secure, the body has, like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no
“soul.” The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in
the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the columns;
both contain the _whole_ of the form-language of the work.
It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-symbol
for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art, which under
all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is not true that this
language of the outer surface is the completest, or the most natural, or
even the most obvious mode of representing the human being. Quite the
contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent theory and its immense
misconception of its own tendency, had not continued to dominate our
judgment—long after the plastic art itself had become entirely alien to
our inner soul—we should not have waited till to-day to observe this
distinctive character of the Attic style. No Egyptian or Chinese
sculptor ever dreamed of using external anatomy to express his meaning.
In Gothic image-work a language of the muscles is unheard of. The human
tracery that clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless
figures and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than _ten thousand_
such) is not merely ornament; as early as about 1200 it is employed for
the expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the
grandest of Classical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute a
_tragic_ unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the
historical feeling of the Faustian soul—of which the deep sacrament of
_Contrition_ is the spiritual expression and the rite of _Confession_
the grave teacher—is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world-
drama. That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in
his Apulian cell—the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a
Divine History and succession of three world-ages[327]—the craftsmen
were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial presentation of it
from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the scenes, each of the
great symbolic figures, had its significant place in the sacred edifice,
each its rôle in the immense world-poem. Then, too, each individual man
came to feel how his life-course was fitted as ornament in the plan of
Divine history, and to experience this personal connexion with it in the
forms of Contrition and Confession. And thus these bodies of stone are
not mere servants of the architecture. They have a deep and particular
meaning of their own, the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to
expression with ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St.
Denis onward; they speak of a _personality_. Just as Classical man
properly meant, with his perfected working-out of _superficial_ body
(for all the anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in
the end), to exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and
by the rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less
logically found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expression of his
life-feeling in the _Portrait_. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is
the great exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an
art of the high order.[328]
_Act_ and _Portrait_ have never hitherto been felt as constituting an
opposition, and consequently the full significance of their appearances
in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is in the conflict
of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds is first
manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is made to show
itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here, on the other
hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of itself, as the
interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or face. A mosque
had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic movement of the Moslems
and the Paulicians—which under Leo III spread to Byzantium and beyond—
necessarily drove the portrait-element quite out of the arts of form, so
that thenceforward they possessed only a fixed stock of human
arabesques. In Egypt the face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon,
the face of the temple-plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-
mass of the body, as we see in the “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis and the
portrait of Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full
of wrinkles and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the
portrait is _musical_. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head
and hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a
composition of many voices that _sounds_ to the understanding beholder.
But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West
more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we
have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began
in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This
change extended _equally_ over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but
it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming
Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The
change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of
these languages and their “influence” of one upon another; the
explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of
using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of _sum_, Gothic _im_, we
say _ich bin_, _I am_, _je suis_; instead of _fecisti_, we say _tu habes
factum_, _tu as fait_, _du habes gitân_; and again, _daz wîp_, _un
homme_, _man hat_. This has hitherto been a riddle[329] because families
of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when
we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is
here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the
most varied provenance. The coming of this specific “I” is the first
dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the
sacrament of Contrition and _personal_ absolution. This “ego habeo
factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries “have” and “be” between a doer
and a deed, in lieu of the “feci” which expresses activated body,
replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of
force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the
key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an
attitude—a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the
understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something _sui
generis_, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed
in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around,
exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes the centre of force in
the Faustian sentence.
It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in
the living _direction_, _time_, _destiny_. In the perfected “being” of
the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the
“look” of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous
infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near and tangible
and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause between two
movements, the last moment _before_ Myron’s athlete throws the discus,
or the first moment after Pæonius’s Nike has alighted from the air, when
the swing of the body is ending and the streaming draperies have not yet
fallen—attitudes devoid equally of duration and of direction, disengaged
from future and from past. “Veni, vidi, vici” is just such another
attitude. But in "I—came, I—saw, I—conquered" there is a becoming each
time in the very build of the sentence.
The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become, signifies time
and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical. Living direction
marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as 1230 the Madonna of
the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams of this future: so, later,
the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-blossom” of Meister Wilhelm. Long
before the Moses of Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter’s well in the
Chartreuse of Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the
Sistine Chapel are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant’
Andrea at Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the
Gothic tombs—how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how
completely they contrast with the _timeless_ grave and gay that is
represented on the stelæ of Attic cemeteries.[330] The Western
portraiture is endless in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the
stone from about 1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th
Century. It takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature
which as phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but,
above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is
a piece of present “Nature” and nothing besides. The Classical poetry is
statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that ascribes to
the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall never entirely
shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared with the Greek is
“unnatural.” Of course it is, for it is _more than_ Nature; only we are
unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a deficiency in the Greek that
our feeling has detected. The Western form-language is richer—
portraiture belongs to Nature _and_ to history. A tomb by one of those
great Netherlanders who worked on the Royal graves of St. Denis from
1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian or Rembrandt or Goya, is a
_biography_, and a self-portrait is a historical _confession_. To make
one’s confession is not to avow an act but to lay before the Judge the
inner history of that act. The act is patent, its roots the personal
secret. When the Protestant or the Freethinker opposes auricular
confession, it never occurs to him that he is rejecting merely the
outward form of the idea and not the idea itself. He declines to confess
to the priest, but he confesses to himself, to a friend, or to all and
sundry. The whole of Northern poetry is one outspoken confession. So are
the portraits of Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and
Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the language
of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the _greatness_
of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been denied him
... goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the _consciousness_
of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The
Greek lives point-wise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have
been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As the phenomenon of the nude
statue is the completely ahistoric copy of a man, so the Western self-
portrait is the exact equivalent of the “Werther” or “Tasso”
autobiography. To the Classical both are equally and wholly alien. There
is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that Scopas or Polycletus should
make an image of himself is something quite inconceivable.
Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later
than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the
lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely
non-personal, plantlike, _soulless_ vitality? And may we not ask
ourselves whether this is the form-language that is capable even of
hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all
passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works
out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and
organs of the _inside_; without deliberate intention, the living that is
under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not
a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that
the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-
point of the form-feeling. There is more psychology (and less “Nature”)
in the arm of one of his Slaves[331] than there is in the whole head of
Praxiteles’s Hermes.[332] Myron’s Discobolus,[333] on the other hand,
renders the exterior form purely as itself, without relation of any sort
to the inner organs, let alone to any “soul.” One has only to take the
best work of this period and compare it with the old Egyptian statues,
say the “Village Sheikh”[334] or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with
Donatello’s “David,”[335] to understand at once what it means to
recognize a body purely with reference to its material boundaries.
Everything in a head that might allow something intimate or spiritual to
become phenomenal the Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most
carefully avoid. Once this characteristic has struck us, the best heads
of the great age sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective
of our world-feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the
biographical element, devoid of any _destiny_. It was not out of caprice
that that age objected so strongly to votive images. The statues of
Olympian victors are representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down
to Lysippus there is not one single character-head, but only masks.
Again, considering the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks
avoid giving any impression that the head is the favoured part of the
body! That is why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their
pose, so un-thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the
body like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an “I.”
At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say effeminate)
look of many of these heads of the 5th, and still more of the 4th,
Centuries[336] as the—no doubt unintentional—outcome of an effort to get
rid of personal character entirely. We should probably be justified in
concluding that the ideal facial type of this art—which was certainly
not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-sculpture
at once shows—was arrived at by rejecting all elements of an individual
or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing down the field
of view to the pure Euclidean.
The portraiture of the great age of Baroque, on the contrary, applies to
historical distance all those means of pictorial counterpoint that we
already know as the fabric of their spatial distance—the brown-dipped
atmosphere, the perspective, the dynamic brush-stroke, the quivering
colour-tones and lights—and with their aid succeeds in treating body as
something intrinsically non-material, as the highly expressive envelope
of a space-commanding ego. (This problem the fresco-technique, Euclidean
that it is, is powerless to solve.) The whole painting has only one
theme, a soul. Observe the rendering of the hands and the brow in
Rembrandt (e.g., in the etching of Burgomaster Six or the portrait of an
architect at Cassel), and again, even so late, in Marées and Leibl[337]—
spiritual to the point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical.
Compare them with the hand and brow of an Apollo or a Poseidon of the
Periclean age!
The Gothic, too, had deeply and sincerely felt this. It had draped body,
not for its own sake but for the sake of developing in the ornament of
the drapery a form-language consonant with the language of the head and
the hands in a fugue of Life. So, too, with the relations of the voices
in counterpoint and, in Baroque, those of the “continuo” to the upper
voices of the orchestra. In Rembrandt there is always interplay of bass
melody in the costume and motives in the head.
Like the Gothic draped figure, the old Egyptian statue denies the
intrinsic importance of body. As the former, by treating the clothing in
a purely ornamental fashion, reinforces the expressiveness of head and
hands, so the latter, with a grandeur of idea never since equalled (at
any rate in sculpture), holds the body—as it holds a pyramid or an
obelisk—to a mathematical scheme and confines the personal element to
the head. The fall of draperies was meant in Athens to reveal the sense
of the body, in the North to conceal it; in the one case the fabric
becomes body, in the other it becomes music. And from this deep contrast
springs the silent battle that goes on in high-Renaissance work between
the consciously-intended and the unconsciously-insistent ideals of the
artist, a battle in which the first—anti-Gothic—often wins the
superficial, but the second—Gothic becoming Baroque—invariably wins the
fundamental victory.
II
The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be
stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space,
instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical
number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground,
Music (and the Western portrait _is_ music, soul woven of colour-tones)
invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to
the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the “picture” on canvas
or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The
Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows
above all a becoming.
It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst
the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art. In
the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and although in
Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto came into
favour, it was expressly as a being _different_ from the other beings
and not at all as a person growing or becoming. The child links past and
future. In every art of human representation that has a claim to
symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal
change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life exhausted itself
in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time-
distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself whom he
saw around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has
never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate
representation of children as the Greek art did. Consider the multitude
of child-figures that our own art has produced from early Gothic to
dying Rococo—and in the Renaissance above all—and find if you can in
Classical art right down to Alexander one work of importance that
intentionally sets by the side of the worked-out body of man or woman
any child-element with existence still before it.
Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of _Motherhood_, Woman as
Mother _is_ Time and _is_ Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-
experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through
motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in
which thereupon he _has_ a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are
also symbols of maternity. _Care_ is the root-feeling of future, and all
care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of
Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies
both. Care may be either affirmed or denied—one can live care-filled or
care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or
in the light of the instant, and the drama of begetting and bearing or
the drama of the nursing mother with her child may be chosen as the
symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India
and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the
second.[338] There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus
and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic
statue as well. But the nursing Mother points into the future, and she
is just the figure that is entirely missing in the Classical art. She
could not possibly be rendered in the style of Phidias. One feels that
this form is opposed to the sense of the phenomenon.
But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood
is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the
Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German
mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga
and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger
fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of
early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring
and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity—when it had ripened into
full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments
and created its Gothic Style—placed _not the suffering Redeemer but the
suffering Mother_ in the centre of its world-picture. About 1250, in the
great epic of statuary of Reims Cathedral, the principal place in the
centre of the main porch, which in the cathedrals of Paris and Amiens
was still that of Christ, was assigned to the Madonna; and it was about
this time, too, that the Tuscan school at Arezzo and Siena (Guido da
Siena) began to infuse a suggestion of mother-love into the conventional
Byzantine Theotokos. And after that the Madonnas of Raphael led the way
to the purely human type of the Baroque, the mother in the sweetheart—
Ophelia, Gretchen—whose secret reveals itself in the glorious close of
Faust II and in its fusion with the early Gothic Mary.