Читать книгу A History of Sculpture онлайн

43 страница из 75

The “ssss1” of Phidias and the “ssss1” of Polyclitus are the most famous examples of the Greek statues which we have designated as “religious.” The term is, however, misleading. Religious art proper, religious art in the modern sense of the term, did not exist for the citizens of Periclean Athens: “personal” religion—with its intense subjectivity—was a closed book to him. The mysticism—that yearning to be at one with the ultimate reality—which is the keynote of what we moderns deem religion, would have been simply meaningless to the Argive, the Spartan, or the Athenian of the fifth century. No Greek could ever have said with Bacon, “Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.” Such sentiments as those of the mystic, Antony, the Egyptian, would have struck him as sheer nonsense. “He who sits still in the desert is safe from three enemies—from hearing, from speech, from sight; and has to fight against only one—his own heart.” The Greek had no conception of a “personal” and quasi-human intelligence working in and through the human agent. Human speech, human sight, and, above everything, the promptings of the heart, were all in all to him.

Правообладателям