Читать книгу A History of Sculpture онлайн

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The task of estimating these actions and counteractions and their effects cannot be an easy one. It calls for heart as well as mind, both from writer and reader. It would be fatal to treat the bronzes of Polyclitus, the marbles of Phidias, Donatello, and Michael Angelo, as too many historians do the documents from which they presume to create the past. Even if political history can be profitably reduced to a dull catalogue of charters and enactments—which we deny—the history of an art cannot. That must take human passion and emotion into account, and must be written by those who are not afraid to feel or ashamed of their feelings. From any other standpoint, art becomes divorced from life. The reader is denied a glimpse of its most potent force—its mysterious power of arousing echoes in his own heart.

Fortunately, the ground to be covered is pregnant with interest. The story of the meteoric rise of the art in Greece, so sudden that a paltry half-century separated the dead work of the sixth century from the vitalised marbles of the Parthenon, will be followed by an account of the “Golden Age,” in which sculpture expressed the whole nature—physical, mental, and spiritual—of the most complete men who have ever lived. Thence to the art of the Alexandrian and Roman Empires, leading up to the great revival of sculpture in the city states of Northern Italy. Finally, a consideration of the sculpture of Monarchical, Imperial, and Republican France will lead up to the works of our own time and the final problem—how near such a sculptor as Rodin is to assimilating and expressing the strange and wonderful experiences arising from the stress of modern life.