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The same transformation everywhere—in painting, in sculpture. The copy, even when conscientious, is always unfaithful. It is made heavy, pasty, and laborious; it is dead. The Greek statue maker, working in Rome, sometimes has beautiful awakenings, but he obeys the fashion—now he is classical, now decadent, now archaistic. As to the Roman statue maker, his work is to manufacture for the collector innumerable replicas of the statues of the great period of Athens. It is the second step in that academism from which the modern world is still suffering. The first dated from those pupils of Polycleitus, of Myron, of Phidias, and of Praxiteles who knew their trade too well.
The same transformation everywhere—in painting, in sculpture. The copy, even when conscientious, is always unfaithful. It is made heavy, pasty, and laborious; it is dead. The Greek statue maker, working in Rome, sometimes has beautiful awakenings, but he obeys the fashion—now he is classical, now decadent, now archaistic. As to the Roman statue maker, his work is to manufacture for the collector innumerable replicas of the statues of the great period of Athens. It is the second step in that academism from which the modern world is still suffering. The first dated from those pupils of Polycleitus, of Myron, of Phidias, and of Praxiteles who knew their trade too well.
Rome
encumbers itself with statues. There are the dead and the living. All those who
have held public office, high or low, want to have under their eyes the
material and durable witness of the fact. Far more, each one, if he can pay for
it, wants to know in advance the effect that will be produced by the trough of
marble in which he is to be laid away. It is not only the Imperator who is to
see his military life made illustrious in the marble of the triumphal arches
and columns. The centurion and the tribune surely have, in their public life;
some high deed to hand down for the admiration of the future. The sculptors of
the sarcophagi devise the anecdotal bas-relief. Historical "genre,"
that special form of artistic degeneration, which at all times has so
comfortably kept house with academism, is invented. The great aim is to find
and relate as many heroic deeds as possible in the life of the great man. On
five or six meters of marble adventures are heaped up, personages, insignia,
weapons, and fasces are squeezed in. Everything is episodic, and one seizes
nothing of the episode; whereas in the sober Greek bas-relief where nothing was
episodic, the whole signification of the scene appeared at a glance. And yet it
is, above all, in these bas-reliefs that the harsh Roman genius has left its
trace. There is very often a kind of somber force and a solemnity there which
affect us sharply, carrying with them a train of crushing memories—the laurels,
the lictors, the consular purple. In these bas-reliefs there bursts forth a
barbarous power which no education can restrain. Sometimes, even, in the heavy
chiseled garlands where the fruits, the flowers, and the foliage accumulate and
heap up like the harvests and vintages of the strong Latin Campagna, one feels
the mounting of the rustic sap which Rome could not dry up and which swells in
the poems of Lucretius as in an old tree that sends out green shoots again.
Then the Greeks are forgotten, and the sculptors from Athens must laugh in pity
before these confused poems to the riches of the earth. And doubtless they
prefer the heavy imitations of themselves that are made. There are no more
empty places, to be sure, no more silent passages, no longer any wave of
uniting volumes that reply to one another in their constant need for musical
equilibrium. But it is a disciplined orgy, even so, whose opulence is an
element to be incorporated with the intoxication of the flesh rather than
inscribed in the mind. The landscape background of the Roman, on the whole,
affirms itself as less stylized, doubtless, but more moving and sensual than
the Greek setting. One hears the crunch of the vintagers' feet on the grapes,
the oak offers armfuls of firm acorns and black leaves, the ears of wheat
loaded with grains group themselves into thick sheaves, we smell the floating
perfume of green boughs and the odor of the plowed soil—and the richness and
density of all this sculpture are due, probably, to workmen only. In the
production of the official statue maker, on the contrary, a violent confusion
reigns, monotonous ennui and immobility.
Such a
spirit is entirely foreign to man, it is devoted entirely to glorifying beings,
things, and abstractions toward which man is not drawn by his true nature, but
by prejudice, or the cult of the moment. And it was to this spirit that
allegory owed the favor which it enjoyed under Roman academism. The great
artist does not love allegory. If it is imposed on him, he dominates it, he
drowns it in form, drawing from form itself the sense that is always in it.
Allegory, on the other hand, dominates the false artist, to whom form says
nothing. Allegory is the caricature of the symbol. The symbol is the living
visage of the realized abstraction; allegory has to mark the presence of the
abstraction by external attributes.
These
cold academic studies, these mannikins of bronze and of marble, these frozen
gestures—always the same—these oratorical or martial attitudes which knew no
change, these rolls of papyrus, these draperies, these tridents, lightnings,
and horns of plenty crowded themselves, heavy and tiresome, into all the public
places, into, forums, squares, and sanctuaries. Sarcophagi and statues were
made in advance; the orator dressed in his toga, the general in his cuirass,
the tribune, the quaestor, the consul, the senator, or the imperator, could be
supplied at any Lime. The body was interchangeable. The head was screwed on to
the shoulders. To recognize the personage one had to look at the face, which
would sometimes be placed too high to be distinguishable. It was the only thing
that did not' have the appearance of having come from the factory. It alone
responded to a need for truth, an obscure and material need, but a sincere one.
It was made only after the order had been given and from the person who ordered
it; thereafter, the artist and the model collaborated honestly.
There
is something implacable about all these Roman portraits. There is no
convention, but also no fantasy. Man or woman, emperor or noble, the model is
followed feature by feature, from the bone-structure of the face to the grain
of the skin, from the form of the hair dressing to the irregularities of the
noses and the brutality of the mouths. The marble cutter is attentive,
diligent, and of complete probity. He does not think even of emphasizing the
descriptive elements of the model's face, he wants to make it a likeness. There
is not the least attempt at generalizing, no attempt at lies or flattery or
satire—no concern with psychology and little character, in the descriptive
sense of the word. There is less of penetration than of care for exactitude. If
the artist does not lie, neither does the model. These are historical
documents, from the real Caesars of Rome to the adventurers of Spain or of
Asia, from deified monsters to Stoic emperors. Where is the classic type of the
"profile like a medal" in these heads? They may be heavy or delicate,
square, sharp-featured, or round, at times dreamy, often wicked, but they are
always true, whether puffed-up play actors, slightly foolish idealists, wholly
incurable brutes, weather-beaten old centurions, or crowned hetairae who are
not even pretty. Some of these heads, certainly, through their quality of
attention, and the intensity with which life concentrates in them, by their
density and mass, by the pitiless pursuit of the profound modeling which the
bone structure of the interrogated face possesses by chance and reveals to the
sculptor, are of a powerful beauty. In the statue of the Great Vestal, for example,
immediate truth attains the stage of typical truth: then the whole of Rome,
with its domination of itself, and the weight it laid on the world, appears in
this strong and grave woman; it is as solid as the citadel, as safe as the
hearth, without humanity, without tenderness, and without weakness, until the
day when slowly, deeply, irresistibly, it is to have plowed its furrow.
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