Читать книгу A History of Sculpture онлайн

73 страница из 75

APHRODITE OF CNIDUS

Vatican, Rome

Nevertheless the representation of a goddess in the guise of a woman shrinking from the revelation of her beauty to mankind argues the loss of a certain morality. True, the Greek sculptor had never aimed at the inculcation of moral ideas. But in an age before the religious sense of the Greek had become dulled, he would have confined himself to the creation of an atmosphere in which moral ideas could range without friction. The “ssss1” belongs to a time which made no such demand upon its artists. The sculptor no longer believed that he owed a duty to the state in this particular respect. Every work now stood or fell by virtue of its innate truth and beauty.

But Praxiteles was in no sense “a brilliant exponent of decadent art.” On the contrary, his sculptures bear witness to perhaps the most magnificent endowment of the Attic brain—the fineness with which it felt. To-day, we are too apt to regard clarity of thought as the chief attribute of genius. Really genius depends upon the power to call up delicate tones of feeling, of infinite subtlety of texture when compared with the ideas which we often regard as its sole endowment.