In some of the
feebler allegorical designs of the middle age, we find isolated qualities
portrayed as by so many masks; its religious art has familiarised us with
faces fixed immovably into blank types of placid reverie; and men and
women, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one
absorbing motive, from which it is said death sets their features free.
All such instances may be ranged under the grotesque; and the Hellenic
ideal has nothing in common with the grotesque. It allows passion to play
lightly over the surface of the individual form, losing thereby nothing
of its central impassivity, its depth and repose. To all but the highest
culture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of
insipidity. Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobility
has been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever kept in
reserve, which is very seldom committed to any definite action. Endless
as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of
the Greeks in this direction, the actions or situations it permits are
simple and few.
Pages:
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290