Living Age Volume 194 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ...we take a cast of the cardinal s head and look down upon it, or hang a cast of the dead warrior on the wall, the whole appearance alters, the expression is almost reversed and the features are distorted. On the other hand, a cast from a real head, placed on high like the cardinal s, would become insignificant; and laid at the height of a table, like the dead warrior s, would look lumbering and tumid. Thus, again, the head of Donatello s Poggio, which is visible and intelligible placed high up in the darkness of the Cathedral of Florence, looks as if it had been gashed and hacked with a blunt knife when seen in the cast at the usual height in an ordinary light. Now this subtle circumventing of distance, height, and darkness; this victory of pattern over place, this reducing of light and shadow into tools for the sculptor, means, as we see from the above examples, sacrificing the reality to the appearance, altering the proportions and planes so rigorously reproduced by the Greeks, means sacrificingthe sacred absolute form. And such a habit of taking liberties with what can be measured b the hand, in order to please the eye, alowed the sculptors of the Renaissance to think of their model no longer as the homogeneous u//lite man of the Greeks, but as a creature in whom structure was accentuated, intensified, or contradicted by color and texture. Furthermore, these men of the fifteenth century possessed the cunning carving which could make stone vary in texture, in fibre, and almost in color. A great many biographical details substantiate the evidence of statues and busts that the sculptors of the Renaissance carried on their business in a diflerent manner from the ancient Greeks. The great development in antiquity of...