Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/98

ART. of this long period, of this lower and material stage, when the human figure was used as a higher species of hieroglyph, as a means, not an end. The long, painted processions in an Egyptian tomb; the friezes in relief of an Assyrian palace, were a part of ceremonial or contemporary liis- tory. With the Greek art of the ^^ixth and'Fifth centuries, art enters upon a liigher mission ; this mission becomes both more definite and more ideal, centring around the human figure. It is the plastic stage of ancient art. Even in archi- tecture it is questions of outline, proportion, and rhythm that predominate, in place of the earlier material ideas of colossal mass. Color became subsidiary and remained crude, never attaining among the Greeks to the harmony and subtlety of Asiatic art. The liuman form was for the first time idealized in plastic form and made to ex- press types and thoughts beside mere external facts. The next cliange was heralded in the Alex- andrine Age and fully enil^odied in Roman civili- zation. Art became pictorial and psychological; Greek simplicity became complex. Portraits re- placed types; the variegated porphyries, ser- pentines and other strong-colored marbles suc- ceeded the white Parian; in place of the cameo- like Attic reliefs on a single plane without background we have first the picturesque scenery of the Alexandrine relief and then the two and three planes of the imperial Roman sculptures. Even architecture was fundamentally modified. The Hellenic Greeks had placed their buildings singly and with an unerring eye for beauty on the appropriate natural site; but each one was for itself. Under Rome, architectural composi- tion is developed, and the grouping of coordinate structures, the planning of stupendous interiors, becomes a large part of the art, accompanied by wonderful riclmess of color in decoration. There is plastic loss and picturesque gain. In harmony with the new love of luxurv, art is made to minister to private as well as to public life. Its bounds were tlius immeasurably enlarged while its ideals were lowered. Philosophically speaking, the fit closing of an artistic era was now reached; all the changes had been rung.

When the Christian Revolution set in, art was regenerated, as a consequence of the religious and social regeneration. The second era began, of course, by a reconstruction in the higher spheres of religious and philosophic thought and the state: until their currents could reach and re- vivify the fine arts, until new artistic forms could be created to express suitably these new ideas, the result was necessarily inadequate, as it had been, for C-xampIe, in the centuries of Greek art before Phidias. As a natural reaction from the previous worship of beauty of fomi. Christian art went at first to the other extreme of caring merely for the content. The decay of skill went with a carelessness as to its acquisition. Like the Egyptians and Assyrians, the artists of the early Christian and Byzantine periods used figures largely as hieroglyphs, for purposes of iu.struc- tion, but the things taught were fundamentally different; they were the things of the spirit. A true history of Christian sculpture and painting up to the Renaissance should deal but little with the technique and mainly with the tlu>me, not with the ."esthetic pleasure, but with the internal significance. Imperfection of form was regarded as immaterial. This point of view once secured, it becomes clear how we should study the fres- coes of the Catacombs to reach the heart of Chris- tianity before the stage of theological definitions; how the dogmas and beliefs of the Eastern Cliurch are set forth in illuminated Bibles and in the mosaics and frescoes of Byzantine churches, from Saint Mark at Venice, and from Jlonreale to Jlount Athos : how the encyclopaedic learning and dominant thoughts of the Middle Ages can be grasped in the sculjitures and glass Avindows of such French Gothic cathedrals as Chartres^ Rheims, and Amiens. The intellectual quality of this art is shown in the supremacy of geo- metric law and constructive thought in an archi- tecture which is the embodiment of the triumpli of mind over matter — the antipodes of Egyptian architecture. During this pre-Renaissance period there was the greatest variety of stages: in the West the only time when the external expression was adequate to the ideas involved was the period of the Gotliic cathedrals, which in many ways wa.s the exact counterpart of the Hellenic development of the Fifth and Fourth centuries B.C. (Phidias to Lysippus). in the same way as the earlier Christian period had corresponded to the Ori- ental stage and the later Renaissance period waa to mirror the Roman stage of ancient art. It ia interesting to follow out this analogy; to see how portraiture, psychologic study, picturesque- ness, and the supremacy of painting are char- acteristics of the Renaissance as of Roman art, but on another plane, in which the keynote was furnished not by arcliiteeture, as with the Romans, but by sculpture.

The Renaissance is the last and pictorial stage of the second era in art history. Michelangelo was its supreme embodiment, the Sistine ceiling its clearest expression. Renaissance architecture was plastic, not constructive — a decorative sys- tem. The simple composition, the clear outlines of the painting of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries have also a plastic underlying basis. At this moment we have hardly enough per- spective to .see clearly just where the Renaissance merges into modern art. but one thing is cer- tain, modern art carries the standard of painting in the van. It has not yet created its own types of architecture or sculpture; in these spheres it lives mainly on models of the past. But in paint- ing it comes to self-consciousness and is truly original. This prominence of the most material of the arts is in harmony with the prevalence of the industrial ideals in science and all other forms of civilization. When, under utilitarian and rationalistic impulses, new forms of archi- tecture and sculpture develop, it is safe to say tliat they will be governed by pictorial standards. The details illustrating the historic develop- ment of the fine arts are given in both general and special articles. First, there are three gen- eral historic sl<etches on Arctiitecti're. Sculp- TT'RE. and Painting. Then come two classes of general articles: those on special styles broader than nationalities, and those on national styles. To the former belong Byzantine. Gothic. Moham- medan, Renaissance art. which spread over sever- al countries. Within such styles there are, of course, the national subdivisions ; but these are- subordinate to certain general laws or character- istics of the style. Thus French Gothic and Renaissance are very distinct from Italian and German; Armenian and Coptic Byzantine from Hellenic: Persian and Spanish Mohammedan from Egyptian. The second class, of national