Читать книгу Greek Tragedy in the Light of Vase Paintings - John H. Huddilston - Страница 7

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Painting as a fine art has never been developed to any great degree of perfection independent of literature. The two are, in a sense, handmaids, each inspiring the other and assisting it to solve new problems. A great literature is, furthermore, a necessary precursor of great achievements in art, since the latter is the more dependent of the two, and seeks its inspiration from the poet. This may not be clear to one who looks about at painting in this age of eclecticism, and endeavours to satisfy himself that literature and art are thus related, and that the former is required to give the initial impetus to the latter. The principle can, however, be made plain by going back nearer the fountain spring of modern literary and artistic development. One should turn to the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—to the period when Dante became the teacher and guide of artistic notions—in order to observe the full meaning and force of the supremacy of literature. There, where for the first time in the modern world a great genius fashioned the thought of more than a century, one can study easily the power of the poet over the artist. The influence of Dante upon artistic notions from Giotto down to the present has, indeed, been incalculably great. No painter of the quattrocento, at least, worked in any other than the Dantesque spirit; whether consciously or unconsciously, he was under the spell of the father of Italian letters. Dante’s Hell and Paradise became the Hell and Paradise of Signorelli and Michel Angelo. Botticelli, Flaxman, Doré, and many others left their canvasses and frescoes to interpret the hidden secrets of the Divina Commedia. The great Christian Epic which Cornelius developed through many years of study and contemplation of Dante, and which he considered the crowning work of his life, is told in the altar fresco of the Ludwig’s Church in Munich. Yet this is but one of the many monumental works of this century which owes its existence to this poet. Delacroix’s ‘Barque of Dante,’ exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1822, has been called the first real painting of the century. When one turns to England there is Rossetti, with ‘Beatrice and Dante,’ ‘Dante’s Dream,’ and several other famous paintings that witness again to the influence of the Italian poet. But one may remark that Dante’s position in the history of human progress is unique. This is true. The world has not known another whose authority was so absolute or whose philosophy appeared so final. The influence of poets of less power has been correspondingly smaller. The principle, however, remains true. The poet ventures where the boldest artist has not gone and prepares, as it were, the way for him.

The closest parallel to Dante’s influence upon the trend of artistic notions must be looked for in ancient Greece; Homer must be named with Dante. The Homeric poetry has exercised a power which the Divina Commedia has scarcely surpassed; the thousand and more streams of influence which rose in the Greek epic literature went out in every direction to water the fields of art and letters in Greece and Rome, and flowed on again after Petrarch’s time, and are to-day mighty forces. Events and incidents of the Iliad and Odyssey have taken so permanent a place in modern art that one hardly stops to think that this or that is from Homer. But this company of persons which the world calls Homer was not the only vital force that shaped men’s thoughts and furnished the artist with fresh inspiration. The tragic poets are to be named with Homer. Had Aischylean, Sophoklean, and Euripidean elements not entered into ancient and modern works of art the world would never have known some of its most beautiful monuments. This is not, however, the place to linger over the influence of the Greek epic and tragic literature in modern times, interesting though this would be. It is in ancient times, when there was still among the people a peculiar interest in the mythic legends, that the contact of poet and artist is most apparent; it is with the three Greek tragedians that we have to do at present, and some traces of their work may be pointed out in the various classes of monuments before the vase paintings are examined.