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The Greeks introduced into their house the world of the air and the plants. The cadaver of Pompeii, a city of Magna Graecia, built and decorated by Greeks, is covered with flowers. In the inner rooms, in the markets, everywhere are garlands of flowers, fruits, and leaves; there are birds and fishes, dense, shining, fiery still-life pieces surrounding false windows and painted floors which open on perspectives of streets and squares, of architecture and streets. It is doubtless only a translated, Latinized Greece, different from classic Greece and much affected by influences of Alexandria, of Asia, and inspired above all by the sea-sky, the vegetation, the red rocks, the flame, and the wine mulled on hot coals. Theocritus was a Syracusan, it is true. But on the soil of Greece there are bas-reliefs, vase-sculptures, Tanagra groups—satyrs, nymphs, young women, dancers, divinities of the woods and torrents—around whom we hear the purling of water, the rustle of leaves, the lowing and sharp bleating of the beasts, and flutes laughing and crying in the wind. And if surrounding nature stilled her voices for a moment to let Phidias commune with himself as he wrote into the human form alone his understanding of the world, Sophocles went to sit in the grove of Colonna, the grove of orange trees with its many crickets where the brooks ripple under the moss; Pindar, the rugged poet of the north, while journeying to the games by routes which took him to gorges and beaches, picked up on his way some formidable images, full of the sky and the ocean; Aeschylus, from the top of the Acropolis of Argos, watched the night sparkle, and from the most distant past of Hellas a cool breeze was blown. Aegean art is already alive with forms of the sea. The sea wind, the water of the river, and the murmur of the foliage are witnesses to the meeting of Ulysses and Nausicaa, whom the hero compares to the stem of a palm tree. Does not Vitruvius affirm that the Doric comes from the male torso, the Ionic from the female torso ?
The Greeks introduced into their house the world of the air and the plants. The cadaver of Pompeii, a city of Magna Graecia, built and decorated by Greeks, is covered with flowers. In the inner rooms, in the markets, everywhere are garlands of flowers, fruits, and leaves; there are birds and fishes, dense, shining, fiery still-life pieces surrounding false windows and painted floors which open on perspectives of streets and squares, of architecture and streets. It is doubtless only a translated, Latinized Greece, different from classic Greece and much affected by influences of Alexandria, of Asia, and inspired above all by the sea-sky, the vegetation, the red rocks, the flame, and the wine mulled on hot coals. Theocritus was a Syracusan, it is true. But on the soil of Greece there are bas-reliefs, vase-sculptures, Tanagra groups—satyrs, nymphs, young women, dancers, divinities of the woods and torrents—around whom we hear the purling of water, the rustle of leaves, the lowing and sharp bleating of the beasts, and flutes laughing and crying in the wind. And if surrounding nature stilled her voices for a moment to let Phidias commune with himself as he wrote into the human form alone his understanding of the world, Sophocles went to sit in the grove of Colonna, the grove of orange trees with its many crickets where the brooks ripple under the moss; Pindar, the rugged poet of the north, while journeying to the games by routes which took him to gorges and beaches, picked up on his way some formidable images, full of the sky and the ocean; Aeschylus, from the top of the Acropolis of Argos, watched the night sparkle, and from the most distant past of Hellas a cool breeze was blown. Aegean art is already alive with forms of the sea. The sea wind, the water of the river, and the murmur of the foliage are witnesses to the meeting of Ulysses and Nausicaa, whom the hero compares to the stem of a palm tree. Does not Vitruvius affirm that the Doric comes from the male torso, the Ionic from the female torso ?
In any
case, this rather limited Pompeiian art, made up, as it is, of recollections
and distant imitations, and due almost entirely to the brush of hired
decorators and of house painters, breathes the animal and the material world,
the swarming and confused world that surrounds us. How young it still is,
despite the old age of the pagan civilizations; how vigorous it is with all its
vague mossiness; how profound and full of the antique soul! What persuasion
there is in its power, and, on the monochrome backgrounds—red, black, green, or
blue—how broad and spontaneous the stroke is, how sure, how intense in
expression, and how having the form! Amors, dancers, winged geniuses, gods or
goddesses, animals, forms nude, draped, or aureoled with wavy gauzes, legends,
battles, and all the ancient symbolism so near the soil live again here, with a
slightly gross sensualism and with the candor of the workmen who interpret,
certainly, but with that calm, that almost unspoiled freshness, that virginity
of life which were known only to the ancient world. The dancing forms appear
half veiled, with their pure arms and pure legs continuing the pure torso, like
balanced branches. The nude bodies emerge gently from the shadow, floating in
their firm equilibrium. Here and there are implacable portraits with large,
ardent eyes—with life in its brutal austerity, undiminished by any visible
intermediary. At times, side by side with the Greek soul, and bearing a germ of
academism that, fortunately, is still unconscious, there is that ardent
expressiveness which, thirteen centuries later, was to characterize the
awakening of Italy. It is to be seen in that "Theseus Victorious over the
Minotaur," which the great Masaccio would have loved. It is an anxious,
uneven world, with currents of influence running through it in every direction,
but fiery and brilliant, rotten at the top, and yet ingenuous underneath.
See in
these portraits the sense of immensity that is in the gaze, how the great
figures are steeped in thought, and how a tremor seems to run inward through
their living immobility. This arrested life is almost terrible to look upon.
One would say that it had been suddenly fixed, as if seized by the volcano at
the same hour as the city was. Impressionism, do you say? Yes, in its fire, in
its breadth, in the way in which the movement is instantaneously surprised; but
however much weakened, however enervated the voice of the artisans of a corrupt
and skeptical age, this painting expresses a power of comprehension and a depth
of love that only a few isolated men attain to-day. It is the only real
renascence of Greek heroism. It responds, like the "Hercules of the
Belvedere" and the Venuses of the valley of the Rhone, to the shock of
Hellenic intelligence as it meets with Latin force and, in a flash, creates an
art complete in its vigor, its ardent life, and its feverish concentration.
Although
these paintings are not, properly speaking, copies (if we admit that a copy is
possible and that the copyist, whether mediocre or touched with genius, does
not in every case substitute his nature for that of the master), although they
are only reminiscences, the transplantation of Greek works on a renewed soil,
it is through them that we can get an idea—even if a distant one—of the
painting of antiquity, which the crumbling of the temples has wiped out. The
most celebrated frescoes of the dead city recalled the works of Polygnotus,
Zeuxis, Parrhasios, and Apelles. The painting related the ancient myths and the
story of the national wars. At first it knew flat colors, only very much
simplified, doubtless, very brilliant and hard tones, brutal in their
oppositions, before modeling appeared with Parrhasios. The lines which inclosed
the powerful polychromy must have had the firmness of the uninterrupted curve
which the passage of the hills to the plains and of bays to the sea taught to
the men who were at this time making the gods. Always decorative in its
beginnings, it undergoes the fate of the painting of modern schools, where the
easel picture appears when the statues descend from their heights on the
temples to invade the public squares, apartments, and gardens. Like sculpture,
this painting had to bend to the will of the rich man. But doubtless it
retained its character better, being more supple, more a thing of shades, more
individualistic, more the master of saving only what it did not want to hide. I
see it, after Parrhasios, as somewhat like Venetian painting around Giorgione
and Titian: ripe, warm, autumnal, with an evanescent modeling in the colorful
shadows and dazzling in the parts which stand out and which seem turned to gold
by the sap from within. It is less fluid and musical, however—more massive,
more compact. Oil painting has not been discovered, and the wax renders the
work slower and less immaterial.
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