It is true that the highest Beauty is characterless, but so we say
of the Universe that it has no determinate dimension, neither length,
breadth nor depth, since it has all in equal infinity; or that the Art
of creative Nature is formless, because she herself is subjected to no
form.
In this and in no other sense can we say that Grecian art in its
highest development rises into the characterless; but it did not aim
immediately at this. It was from the bonds of Nature that it struggled
upward to divine freedom. From no lightly scattered seed, but only
from a deeply infolded kernel, could this heroic growth spring up.
Only mighty emotions, only a deep stirring of the fancy through the
impression of all-enlivening, all-commanding energies of Nature,
could stamp upon Art that invincible vigor with which from the rigid,
secluded earnestness of earlier productions up to the period of works
overflowing with sensuous grace, it ever remained faithful to truth,
and produced the highest spiritual Reality which it is given to
mortals to behold.
In like manner, as their Tragedy commences with the grandest
characteristicness in morals, so the beginning of their Plastic Art
was the earnestness of Nature, and the stern goddess of Athens its
first and only Muse.
This epoch is marked by that style which Winckelmann describes as the
still harsh and severe, from which the next or lofty style was able to
develop itself by the mere enhancement of the Characteristic into the
Sublime and the Simple.
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