When this
environment is heightened, and universal instead of logical and
particular, we have the "grand style;" but we have the grand style
generally in poetry, and to be sure of style at all prose--such prose as
Goujon's, which in no wise emulates Michael Angelo's poetry--may
justifiably neglect in some degree the specific personality that tends
to make it poetic and individual.
IV
After Goujon, Clodion is the great name in French sculpture, until we
come to Houdon, who may almost be assigned to the nineteenth century.
There were throughout the eighteenth century honorable artists,
sculptors of distinction beyond contest. But sculpture is such an
abstract art itself that the sculpture which partook of the
artificiality of the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less
that is concrete and appealing than even the painting of the epoch. It
derived its canons and its practice from Puget--the French Bernini, who
with less grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian
exemplar had more force and solidity. With less cleverness, less
charm--for Bernini, spite of the disesteem in which his juxtaposition to
Michael Angelo and his apparent unconsciousness of the attitude such
juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, cause him to be held, has a
great deal of charm and is extraordinarily clever--he is more sincere,
more thorough-going, more respectable.
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