Mere physical beauty, which contains no spiritual element, no drawing of
the immortal soul, no suggestion of purer and nobler sentiments
struggling for expression in the cunning marble, can never satisfy the
requirements of the Christianized taste of modern times.
The Venus de Medici was undoubtedly the ideal type of womanly perfection
in the age which produced it, but now the sex would hardly feel
themselves flattered by so poor an interpretation. The form is all that
could be desired, but the head and features are positively insipid, and
a phrenologist would tell you by the development of the cranium that
female education was not a part of the Grecian policy. There is in this
statue a certain air of wantonness, a perceptible consciousness of being
valued and admired solely for physical beauty, which just as plainly
tells the estimate placed upon woman in those times as we can read the
fact in history.
Thus we perceive sculpture as a representative art has become a
chronicler of the world's advancement, so that those who accept the
theory of human progression would naturally look for purer and more
spiritual conceptions in the artist's soul, with a corresponding
nobility in the creations of his genius. The aesthetic principle in its
higher manifestations is not the product of pagan mind, because ideal
beauty and the rules governing its expression can only be conceived by
him to whom Faith has opened the glorious possibilities of our existence
beyond the grave.
Pages:
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42