The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1907. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... chapter iv differentiation Soon after the middle of the sixth century B.C., we meet something new in the drawing (in the stricter sense) of the Greeks. They begin to take a marked interest in the trunk of the human figure. They present it in aspects never seen till now, obliquely and in back view, making it bend or twist, and fitting it out amply with anatomical details. At the same date, and often applied to the same problems of drawing, there appears a more striking innovation--foreshortening (1). The new interest and the new method are related. It is easy to understand that we of to-day are relatively ignorant of the forms of the nude human trunk, but there were also good reasons for the same ignorance in the primitive art of the ancients. In every scene of which we are spectators our attention is called (1) Hartwig, Meisterschalen, pp. 154 sqq.; cf. p. 365; Delbriick, Beitrage, pp. 27 sqq. 76 first and foremost to the acting or speaking parts of the body, to the limbs or head respectively, and of the mere intermediary trunk itself there remains at best a vague memory-picture. Thus it is that in the earliest productions of art the drawing of the trunk oscillates between the front view and the profile; its forms are uncertain and ill understood. There was almost no occasion at all to exhibit the back of a body when figures were systematically juxtaposed (2). The intelligent interest in the trunk, then, is a sign of an increased observation of nature which is making energetic progress towards such images as were unknown to the unschooled imagination; and such an increased observation is required for foreshortening. (2) In the well-known archaic righting scheme (ex. the Euphorbos plate in the British Museum, A 268; Roscher, Lexikon der Mythologie, ii, 2, col. 27...