Читать книгу Art principles in literature - Francis P. Donnelly - Страница 10
Оглавление1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART
The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has aroused the interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer, the variety, artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery gave the news a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph of the spade, which Schliemann converted into the best of historians. Dig in your back-yard, and you can read its past in the layers before your eyes. Make a cross-section of the country, and successive deposits will tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the earth, and the buried fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal the history of the world. Grave-digging is the most productive occupation to which science, art and even commerce can now be vocationally guided.
What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of the past in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it was belief in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb repeats the truth that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which were temples as well as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from which Schliemann actually shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds were also temples as well as tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic churches with their tiny loculi for the relic of a saint keep still the memory of the days when persecuted Christians found the Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as of escape from the persecutor.
The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits in France and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early “magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than Longfellow imagined.
If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s Dictionary of Religion: “The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.” “The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory, from the prayers of the priest in the Iliad, to the fulminations of the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.
Aquinas gave in his Summa a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in his Divina Comedia a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy, the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.
The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority, “without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces, classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.
