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Greece troubles herself but little, and then only at the very beginning of her art, with the enemy powers which hamper our first steps. Although man already places himself under the protection of the intelligent forces, he has not forgotten the struggles which his ancestor was forced to maintain against the brutal forces of a universe which repulsed him. This memory is inscribed in the sculptures which, on the pediment of the Parthenon of Pisistratus, showed Zeus struggling against Typhon, or Herakles throwing Echidna to earth. A barbarous work, violently painted with blues, greens, and reds, a memory of avalanches, of terrifying caverns, of the storms of the north, it was a nightmare of savages still ill taught by Asia and Egypt, but becoming curious and already eager to comprehend. The hell of the pagans will last but a short time.
Greece troubles herself but little, and then only at the very beginning of her art, with the enemy powers which hamper our first steps. Although man already places himself under the protection of the intelligent forces, he has not forgotten the struggles which his ancestor was forced to maintain against the brutal forces of a universe which repulsed him. This memory is inscribed in the sculptures which, on the pediment of the Parthenon of Pisistratus, showed Zeus struggling against Typhon, or Herakles throwing Echidna to earth. A barbarous work, violently painted with blues, greens, and reds, a memory of avalanches, of terrifying caverns, of the storms of the north, it was a nightmare of savages still ill taught by Asia and Egypt, but becoming curious and already eager to comprehend. The hell of the pagans will last but a short time.
The
temple where these idols reign, these bulls, these twisted serpents, these
astonished visages with green beards, is, moreover, in its principle, what it
will be in the greatest periods. Architecture is the collective, necessary art
which appears first and dies first. The primordial desire of man, after food,
is shelter, and it is in order to erect that shelter that, for the first time,
he appeals to his faculty of discovering in natural constructions a certain
logic whence, little by little, the law will issue forth and permit him to
organize his life according to the plan of the universe. The forest and the
cliffs are the powerful educators in the geometrical abstraction from which man
is to draw the means of building houses which are to have a chance of resisting
the assault of rain and storms. At Corinth there already rises a temple with heavy
and very broad columns, coming straight up from the ground as they mount in a
block to the entablature. Several of them still stand. They are terrible to
see, black, gnawed like old trees, as hard as the mind of the Peloponnesian
countries. The Doric order came from those peasant houses which one still sees
in the countryside of Asia Minor, trees set in the ground in four lines making
a rectangle, supporting other trees on which the roof was to be placed. The
form of the pediment comes from the slope of this roof, which is designed to
carry off the rain. The Greek temple, even when it realizes the most lucid and
the most consciously willed intellectual combinations, sends its roots into the
world of matter, of which it is the formulated law.
On the
sculptures of these temples the mind of Asia has left its trace. They are
continued until the great century, but so assimilated in the nascent Hellenic
genius that on seeing them one cannot think of direct imitation, but rather of
those uncertain and fleeting resemblances which hover on the face of children.
The archaic Dorian Apollos, those smiling and terrible statues through which
force mounts like a flood, make one think, it is true, of the Egyptian forms,
because of the leg which steps forward and the arms glued to the stiff torso.
But on this hieratism the theocratic spirit exercises no action. Dorian art is
all of a piece, far less subtle, far less refined, far less conscious than that
of the sculptors of Thebes. The passages between the very brusque sculptural
planes are scarcely indicated. What dominates is the need to express the life
of the muscles.
It is
because these Apollos are athletes. The great cult of gymnastics is born, that
necessary institution which is to permit Greece to develop the strength of arms
and of legs, while parallel with it there develops suppleness of the mind in
its constant search for the universal equilibrium. Already, from all the
regions of the Greek world, from the islands, from the distant colonies, from
Italy and from Asia, the young men come to Olympia and Delphi to contest the
crown of olive leaves. In running, in wrestling, and in throwing the discus
they are nude. The artists, who hasten to these national meeting places, like
everyone else who calls himself a Hellene, have before their eyes the spectacle
of the movements of the human frame and of the complex play of the muscles
rolling under the brown skin, which shows them as if they were bare themselves,
and which is hardened by scars, Greek sculpture is born in the stadium. It was
to take a century to climb the steps of the stadium and to install itself in
the pediments of the final Parthenons, where it was to become the educator of
the poets and, after them, of the philosophers. They were to feast their mind
on the spectacle of the increasingly subtle relationships which sculpture
established in the world of forms in action. There was never a more glorious or
more striking example of the unity of our activity: athleticism, by the
intermediary of sculpture, is the father of philosophy, at least, of Platonian
philosophy, whose first concern was to turn against sculpture and athleticism
in order to kill them.
Through
the Dorian Apollo Greece passes from primitive art to archaism, properly
so-called. The artist considers the form with more attention, painstakingly
disengages the meaning of it, and transports that meaning to his work in so
uncompromising a manner that he imposes on it the appearance of an edifice,
whose architectonic quality seems destined to know no change. The Peloponnesus
becomes the great training school of the archaic marble workers; Cleoethas,
Aristocles, Kanakhos, and Hagelaides open workshops at Argos, Sicyon, and
Sparta; the citadel of the Dorian ideal becomes, before Athens, the focus of
Greek thought. But Hellenism in its entirety is not to find its nourishment
there. Sparta is far from the routes of the Old World, imprisoned in a solitary
valley where mountain torrents flow; it is a fertile but a jealous country,
separated from the great horizons by the hard ridges of the Taygetes, which are
covered with snow even in summer. The people which dwells there is as closed as
the valley itself, and it is these isolated surroundings which are for so long
a time to keep up its voluntary egoism. Athens, on the contrary, is at the
center of the eastern Mediterranean, and near the sea. It is the meeting point
of the positive and disciplined Dorian element, which mounts from the south
toward Corinth, Aegina, and Attica in its search for lands to dominate, and of
the Ionian element which brings to the city, through the sieve of the islands,
the artist spirit of Asia, made supple and subtle by the habits of trade,
diplomacy and smuggling. The glory of Sparta, in reality, is that of having
offered to Athens a virgin soil to fertilize and also, by harassing her without
mercy, to have kept her in condition, to have compelled her for a long time to
cultivate her energy. Athens, tempered by these struggles, was not slow in
showing her superiority. When the soldiers of Darius followed the traders of
Asia to the European coast, it is she who was at the head of the Greeks, while
Sparta, inclosed in the blind cult of her personal interest, took her place
only after the combat.
Where
are we to find the first step of Ionian art in its march toward Attica, the
uncertain dawn of the great Oriental sensualism rendered healthy by the sea and
sharpened by commerce, which will flood the Dorian soul with humanity? The Hera
of Samos is, perhaps, even stiffer than the Peloponnesian athletes, as it is
nearer to Saite Egypt, which is unfolding at this moment and investing hieratic
form with a humanity of its own. A tight sheath of cloth imprisons the legs,
which are close together, but under the figure's light veil, with its lines
like those on water, the shoulders, the arms, the breast, and the hollowed back
have profiles of a moving grace, and planes which meet one another and
interpenetrate with the delicacy of a confession. It is this spirit of
abounding tenderness which is soon to take root on the Greek continent. From
the end of the sixth century Dorian art and Ionian art were neighbors
everywhere without having yet recognized each other fully. At Delphi, at the
threshold of the Treasury of the Cnidians, Asiatic Greece saluted with a mysterious
smile the rude statue maker of the Peloponnesus who had set up the women, the
lions, and the formidable horses in the pediment of the Sanctuary of Apollo.
The caryatids which supported the Asiatic architrave were strange, secret
women; they had a winged grace, like that of an animal and of a dance; they
seemed to guard the gate of temptation, which led to a warmth within, like that
of the sun, and to untasted intoxications. The Dorian spirit and the Ionian
spirit—the young countryman bursting with vigor and the woman bedecked,
caressing, questionable—met and loved. Attic art, which in its adult age was to
be the great classic sculpture, austere and living, was to be born of their
union.
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