Renaissance Types (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. MICHAEL ANGELO?THE AKTIST. I. The first Type of the Renaissance of whom I shall speak is Michael Angelo. And that for the reason that of all the wondrous intellectual endowments of man, the artistic or aesthetic comes first. It is excellently observed by Schopenhauer, in what is perhaps the most valuable part of his great work, The object of art, the representation of which is the aim of the artist, and the knowledge of which must therefore precede his work as its germ and source, is an Idea, in Plato's sense, and never anything else: not this special form which appears before me, but its expression, its pure significance, its inner being, which discloses itself to me, and appeals to me, and which may be quite the same, though the spatial relations of its form be very different. And as] the Idea is not the particular thing, the object of common apprehension, so is it] not the concept, the object of rational thought and of science. The concept isabstract, discursive, entirely undetermined within its own sphere, only determined by its limits, attainable and comprehensible by him who has only reason, communicable by words, without any other assistance, entirely exhausted by its definition. The Idea, on the contrary, although defined as the adequate representation of the concept, is always object of perception, and although representing an infinite number of particular things, is yet thoroughly determined. It is never known by the individual, as such, but only by him who has raised himself above all willing and all individuality to the pure subject of knowledge. Thus it is attainable only by the man of genius, and by him who, for the most part through the existence of works of genius, has reached an exalted frame of mind (in einer genialen Stim- mung ist) by inc...