Cellini's "Perseus"
is really more of a "parlor ornament" than Barye's smallest figure.
Why is he so obviously great as well as so obviously extraordinary? one
constantly asks himself in the presence of his bronzes. Perhaps because
he expresses with such concreteness, such definiteness and vigor a
motive so purely an abstraction. The illustration in intimate
elaboration of elemental force, strength, passion, seems to have been
his aim, and in everyone of his wonderfully varied groups he attains it
superbly--not giving the beholder a symbol of it merely; in no degree
depending upon association or convention, but exhibiting its very
essence with a combined scientific explicitness and poetic energy to
which antique art alone, one may almost say, has furnished a parallel.
For this, fauna served him as well as the human figure, though, could
he have studied man with the facility which the Jardin des Plantes
afforded him of observing the lower animals, he might have used the
medium of the human figure more frequently than he did. When he did, he
was hardly less successful; and the four splendid groups that decorate
the Pavillons Denon and Richelieu of the Louvre are in the very front
rank of the heroic sculpture of the modern world.
Pages:
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193