-4 Mawr Note; 
 
 .WD Monograph; 
 
BERKELEY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVEP.SITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
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BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 • I 
 
 THE ESTHETIC BASIS 
 OF GREEK ART 
 
 OF THE FIFTH AND FOURTH CENTURIES B.C. 
 
THE ESTHETIC BASIS 
 OF GREEK ART 
 
 OF THE FIFTH AND FOURTH CENTURIES B.C. 
 
 By 
 RHYS CARPENTER 
 
 Professor of Classical Archaeology 
 in Bryn Mawr College 
 
 BRYN MAWR COLLEGE 
 Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 
 
 LONGMANS. GREEN AND CO. 
 Xph' York, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madra' 
 
 1921 
 
yya, 33 ^ 
 
 Copyright, 1921. bv 
 BRYN MAWR COLLEGE 
 
GREEK ART 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER > PAGE 
 
 I. THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF GREEK 
 
 ART 1 
 
 II, THE FORMS OF ARTISTIC PRESENTA- 
 TION 28 
 
 III. THE ESTHETICS OF GREEK SCULP- 
 
 TURE 76 
 
 IV. THE ESTHETICS OF GREEK ARCH- 
 
 ITECTURE 153 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
 486 
 
vi 
 
 E S T H E TIC BASIS 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 vii 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 The present monograph is a critique not 
 of artistic taste but of artistic behaviour. 
 It makes no attempt to eulogise or appre- 
 ciate or evaluate ancient Greek art, but 
 solely to examine Greek artistic procedure 
 and by such an examination to arrive at 
 some fundamental esthetic problems and 
 principles. 
 
 Such a study, since it tries to be funda- 
 mental, must aim at a method suffi- 
 ciently general to be appHcable not to 
 Greek sculpture only, but to sculpture in 
 all times, and not to Greek architecture 
 alone, but to architecture the world over. 
 The chapters which deal with these arts 
 overpass, therefore, the boundaries of 
 Hellenic antiquities and attempt an esthetic 
 critique of sculpture and architecture as 
 human (and not merely as Grecian) artis- 
 tic activities. But the starting-point for 
 theorising has alwaj^s been Greek practice. 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
Vlll 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Those who are famiHar with the little 
 of value which ancient esthetic speculation 
 offers, will perhaps have noticed that the 
 best of this speculation comes, not from 
 the philosophers, but from the practicing 
 artists themselves and from the historians 
 of art. I have tried to follow and incor- 
 porate every such hint or indication of the 
 intellectual attitude of the ancient artists 
 toward their craft. 
 
 The bibliography of my subject is ^'•ery 
 nearly negligible. One debt (outside of 
 Greek archaeology altogether) is, however, 
 a heavy one; and I wish to acknowledge 
 great obligation to the keen and serious 
 dialectic which distinguishes Geoft'rey 
 Scott's Architecture of Humanism. 
 
 R. C. 
 
 Bryii Mtnvr College 
 September, 1921 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 1 
 
 I 
 
 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF GREEK 
 ART 
 
 Specimens of Greek hand-mirrors may be 
 found in any of the great museums of 
 classical art. The worn and patina-cov- 
 ered disk was once a plate of burnished 
 bronze. To it was fastened a handle, often 
 Icmiinating in a base on which the mirror 
 could be made to stand upright. A circle 
 to reflect the circle of the human face, a 
 handle by which to grasp and turn the 
 disk, a support on which to stand it — 
 these three elements arose out of the ser- 
 vice for which mirrors are made. With the 
 Greeks, art was closely wedded to mere 
 utility; and the modem museum-goer can 
 discover something of the essential beha- 
 viour of Greek art if he pauses to see what 
 the ancient artist contributed to these 
 three utilitarian elements of an old-time 
 looking-glass. 
 
 An intro- 
 ductory in- 
 stance 
 
 • 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
Unity of 
 matter 
 
 Unity of 
 form 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Disk, handle, and base — a circle, a shaft, 
 and a spreading bottom — joined and made 
 one, since all are parts of the same mirror. 
 Joined, but how? By rivets, usually. 
 But these are mere material links, holding 
 disk to handle and handle to base. But 
 how join a circle to a columnar shaft and 
 this in turn to a spreading stand? It is 
 easy to fuse the matter; but how shall we 
 fuse the form? The straight boundary- 
 lines of the shaft should swing out and 
 curve and in their curve go over into the 
 disk's full circle; tlic broad bottom of the 
 stand should rise up and narrow to the 
 shaft's straight ascent. By some sort of 
 geometric transition each characteristic 
 shape must pass over into the adjoining 
 one, and a continuity of outline must hold 
 all three fomis togetlier into one. 
 
 This is simple and good, so far; l.)ut is 
 there no more to do? are the surfaces 
 within these interflowing boundary-lines to 
 be left unformed? If the shaft holds up the 
 disk, it can make that service compre- 
 hensible to us not merely by the patent 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 3 
 
 facts of gravitational support, but in a 
 !nore direct visual manner. 
 
 Perhaps the most effectual way to sug- 
 gest to the beholder this function of sup- 
 port would be to model the shaft into the 
 Ukeness of a himian being who carries the 
 disk upon his head. Looking at such a 
 representation, one could hardly fail to 
 appreciate the relation between shaft and 
 disk. We might claim that gravitation had 
 been as it were visualised and given to us 
 directly by a sympathetic analogy. An- 
 other way to suggest this function of sup- 
 port might be to seek an analogy with 
 architecture and to carve the shaft like a 
 fluted colm-nn. Our apprehension would 
 then be less immediate, perhaps, since the 
 appeal to human experience is no longer 
 direct; but there might be a compensation 
 in the up-and-down of the fiuting-channels 
 and the emphatic simple shape divested of 
 all irrelevant associations. Best of all, 
 these two methods might be combined. 
 The shaft could be modelled as a human 
 figure architecturally formalised by means 
 of vertical ridges and channelings and a 
 • 
 
 Functiun 
 
 visualised 
 
 A X D M O N OGR APHS 
 
 I 
 
ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 general column-like outline. Then the ap- 
 peal would be two-fold: a linear unpic- 
 torial suggestion borrowed from architec- 
 ture would be fused with an animate rep- 
 resentation, and both would be perfectly 
 consonant with the simple mechanical func- 
 tion of a mirror-stand. 
 
 There M^ould remain only the transition 
 from the shaft to the disk, to be *'ani- 
 mised" and presented in some sort of pic- 
 torial analogy. On an ancient mirror 
 loaned to the Metropolitan Museum in 
 New York two little winged love-gods fly 
 above either shoulder of the central figure 
 and thereby carry the outline over into the 
 curve of the disk, spreading the rectilinear 
 shaft out into a circle. To justify the 
 occurrence of these Erotes, the human- 
 figured shaft has become Aphrodite, whose 
 presence upon a mirror-support needs no 
 excuse. So, everything has been taken 
 into account — structure and shape and 
 meaning and use — and the result is not a 
 mere blind embellishment to make pretti- 
 ness out of plainness, but an ordered, con- 
 sonant, and intellectual humanisation of a 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 5 
 
 number of abstract and not exactly ob- 
 vious properties and relations. 
 
 And therein, it would seem, lies much of 
 the characteristic behavior of Greek art— 
 in rethinking certain essential matters of 
 structure, purpose, and fitness, and in re- 
 embodying them in a fusion of geometric 
 form with pictorial illusion. 
 
 "A charming thing!" comments the 
 museum-goer who pauses to look at the old 
 mirror. But it is not really a question of 
 charm; it is a question of a language which 
 speaks through the eye instead of through 
 the ear, but appeals just as insistently and 
 directly to the intelligence and the emotions 
 of the stirred imagination as do the spoken 
 syllables of intelligible speech. As a prod- 
 uct of artistic craftsmanship, it was made 
 not for a vague delight, but for sharp and 
 definite emotional comprehension. It is 
 not such stuff as dreams are made on, but 
 a product of logical thought of a very par- 
 ticular bent, inventing a visual embodi- 
 ment for itself (in conformity, be it added, 
 with a sense for loveliness). 
 
 Into the inner workings of this "sense 
 
 Greek art 
 self- 
 conscious 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
and open to 
 intellectual 
 analysis 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 for loveliness" it is difficult to penetrate. 
 Esthetic philosophy has wasted its energy 
 in rather. a priori and abstract discussions 
 of the nature of beauty. It has perhaps 
 succeeded in defining its realm, but it has 
 scarcely managed to reduce it to anything 
 other than itself. Be5''ond the restrictions 
 of such theorising, the canon of taste con- 
 tinues to operate according to its own good 
 pleasure. 
 
 But if we are determined not to enter 
 upon discussions on the nature of the beau- 
 tiful in art, but confine ourselves to exam- 
 ining the worldng of this ''logical thought 
 of a very particular bent, inventing a vis- 
 ual embodiment for itself," we shall be 
 dealing with a more intellectual process 
 amenable to intellectual analysis, about 
 which words can be written and read and 
 definite ideas formulated. We shall find 
 that we are dealing with something \'ery 
 concrete and very tangible, concerning 
 which statements may be made with a 
 content demonstrably true or false. By 
 means of such an inqviiry we shall not be 
 able to answer the question. "What con- 
 
 B R Y N M A W R N T E vS 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 stitutes good art?" but we should be able 
 to reply intelligently and definitely to the 
 question, ''What does the artistic process 
 do? how does it behave?" In the specific 
 field of ancient Greek art, this is the ques- 
 ion to which this monograph attempts an 
 answer. 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 which is the 
 purpose of 
 this book 
 
A more 
 general 
 beginning 
 
 Art is the 
 great 
 magician 
 who makes 
 life of the 
 unliving 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 The impulse which drives man to employ 
 imitative art for the purpose which we call 
 decoration — apart from those utilitarian 
 ends which magic or superstition may 
 suggest — is (apparently) the desire to ani- 
 mate the inanimate and fill the unliving 
 world with living forms. It would seem 
 that this might be only another manifesta- 
 tion of that tendency to regard ever5rthing 
 as an animate agency which is at the back 
 of pagan religious superstition. Just as 
 the primitive man peoples his stones and 
 trees, his hills and rivers, with living spirits 
 having always more or less human forms 
 and passions, until the physical world of 
 unfeeling objects about him lives for him 
 as a more intelligible (even though not al- 
 ways more companionable) place of hu- 
 manised demons, so the craftsman and 
 artist seizes upon inert wood and stone and 
 metal, and converts it into the likeness of 
 animate things, that he, too, may people 
 his surroundings and raise the lifeless to 
 guise of the living. To see a spirit in every 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 tree and rock and fountain-head and cave 
 and stream, and to see a resemblance to a 
 living creature in every chance outhne and 
 surface and pattern — these are scarcely one 
 and the same. But it may be that both 
 hark back ultimately to the same primitive 
 instinct. The child makes persons out of 
 the senseless furnishings of his nursery, as 
 the savage can make persons out of his 
 environing objects and, with fear and fail- 
 ure working on him, can beget him a fear- 
 ful theogony. But where the savage takes 
 his animism for terrific and malevolent 
 truth and believes in all the spirits of wind 
 and com, there is always in art this reaS' 
 suring measure of sophistication, that 
 craftsman and public know that what is 
 imitated is not truly real, but a work of un 
 tyrannised fancy.^ The artist, working for 
 delight and not from fear, gives us again 
 the child's pleasure of peopling our dull 
 surroimdings with interesting and kindly 
 life; and with this simple pleasure we fuse 
 those more intelligent and thoughtful de- 
 lights that come with artistic contempla- 
 tion. 
 
 AND M ONOGRAPHS 
 
10 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 This conversion of things whose shape is 
 but arbitrary and conventional into the il- 
 lusion of nature-given shapes of living 
 things plays upon us with a thrill that I can 
 best illustrate by offering an instance of 
 the converse process of converting the 
 chance outlines of living things into the 
 stately, immovable, and unbetterable con- 
 tours of a shape of art. A poet, seeing 
 girls with water-jugs on their heads, has 
 written : 
 
 Voici bien, Jacob, le geste dont tes 
 
 filles 
 Savent, en avan^ant d'un pas jamais 
 
 trop prompt, 
 Soutenir noblement I'amphore sur leur 
 
 front. 
 Elles vont, avec un sourire taciturne, 
 Et leur forme s^ajonte a la forme de 
 
 Vurne, 
 Et tout leur corps 11 est plus qu'un vase 
 
 svelte, auquel 
 Le bras leve dessine une anse sur le dell 
 
 Much of the wizardry of poetry rests 
 upon this same instinct for animising the 
 inanimate by discovering analogies with 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 living things or informing formless things 
 with familiar shapes : 
 
 He will watch from dawn to gloom 
 The lake-reflected sun illume 
 The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, 
 Nor heed nor see what things they be ; 
 But from these create he can 
 Forms more real than living man. 
 Nurslings of immortality ! 
 
 One might almost maintain that it is the 
 poet's office (like the artist's) to animise 
 the dead world, his medium being, instead 
 of direct visual presentation, the verbal 
 suggestion attaching to epithet, analogy, 
 and metaphor. The truth of such a state- 
 ment would of course have to be proved by 
 an appeal to the whole corpus poeticiim; 
 but it may be briefly substantiated by 
 quoting a strophe of Shelley's Ode to the 
 West Wind as an outstanding instance of 
 this envitalising instinct of poetic art: 
 
 O wild West Wind, thou breath of 
 
 Autumn's being, 
 Thou, from whose imseen presence the 
 
 leaves dead 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
12 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Are driven, like gJwsts from an enchanter 
 
 fleeing, 
 Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic 
 
 red, 
 Pesiilcnce-stricken multitudes: O thou, 
 Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 
 The winged seeds, where they lie cold and 
 
 low, 
 Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
 Thine azure sister of the Spring shall 
 
 hloiv 
 Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and 
 
 fill 
 {Driving sweet buds like flocks to Jeed in 
 
 air) 
 With living hues and odours plain and 
 
 hill: 
 Wild Spirit, which art moving every- 
 where ; 
 Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! 
 
 Every element of the windy autumn land- 
 scape turns to living form and animate 
 activity. Nor does the rest of the poem 
 appreciably abate this same process of 
 verbal sorcery. 
 
 Craftsmen in all times and places have 
 pursued this practice of artistic animism. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF {] ]l\: \i K ART 
 
 13 
 
 wliose chief procedure is the discovery of 
 aiudogies between the form of the objects 
 to be decorated and that of some denizen 
 of the animate world. Just as the poet 
 clutches at every suggestion of similarity 
 through which to create metaphors by 
 analogy with living things, so the Greek 
 decorative craftsman sought analogies be- 
 tween the shapes of the inanimate objects 
 on which he worked and those of animate 
 beings into whose likeness he could modify 
 them. The "legs" of chairs become the 
 legs and claws of beasts; the stand of a 
 mirror becomes a human being; the shaft 
 of a column becomes a giant or a maiden 
 with a basket on her head; a bracelet be- 
 comes a twisted snake; the ''nose" of a 
 lamp becomes the muzzle of a beast; the 
 handles of a cauldron become two wrestlers 
 leaning over at grips w4th each other. In 
 other epochs, weather-vanes become cock 
 or fish; salt-cellars are ships or windmills 
 (and therefore half-way animate, since they 
 now can appear to move); nut-crackers 
 are dwarves; andirons are beasts; door- 
 knockers are demons; bellows are dragons; 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
14 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 and so on, without limit, but b}^ no means 
 without reason. 
 
 Just so in Egyptian art a spoon becomes 
 a <^irl lying prone with outstretched arms 
 holding a duck whose movable wings are 
 covers for the bowl of the spoon. In 
 mediaeval illuminations the initial letters 
 of manuscripts suggested grotesque animal 
 analogies to the embellishing copyist. 
 
 In the Scythian art of the Russian 
 steppes this animistic principle finds a 
 characteristic and strange complication: 
 the various parts of an animate representa- 
 tion are in their turn subjected to a similar 
 scrutiny for possible analogies, as when the 
 antlers of a deer become the long-necked 
 heads of birds and the muscle-folds at the 
 shoulders acquire beaks and eyes, or the 
 wings of winged lions are decorated to the 
 semblance of fish. In the Maya art of 
 Central America the very same practice 
 obtains; each portion of a pictured person 
 or object becomes a new field on which the 
 artist can uncurb his imagination until the 
 whole surface of a design is a puzzle-pic- 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 15 
 
 ture of ramifications into avian, reptilian, 
 floral, and human motives. 
 
 Greek art did not permit itself these 
 mixed metaphors until a late period. 
 There was a sound esthetic practice which 
 refrained from treating an animate repre- 
 sentation as a field for further invention, 
 since to do so would be to destroy the or- 
 ganic unity and animate value of the orig- 
 inal design. The esthetic objection to 
 Scythian and Mayan decoration is that it 
 fails in the primary purpose of raising in- 
 animate objects to an animate status. We 
 can see how a quiver-cover might become 
 deer or gryphon if we are ready to allow 
 that inanimate matter may be informed to 
 an organic structure; but we cannot under- 
 stand how a wing can be a fish or a fish be 
 a wing, because each has animate existence 
 in its own right. For the same reason an 
 animate representation cannot carry irrel- 
 evant decoration. Greek taste would not 
 have countenanced the Vettersfelde fish, 
 whose scaly body is adorned with animal 
 motives in good early Ionic style, while 
 his double tail curls up into rams' heads; 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
16 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 nor would it have approved the Kul Oba 
 gold deer, whose flanl^s are overlaid with 
 image of gryphon, hare, lion, and dog. Yet 
 both these objects were probably made by 
 Greeks — for barbarian trade. 
 
 In the decorative arts, as we have seen, 
 the representational subject-matter is sug- 
 gested by the chance shape and appearance 
 and purpose of the material to be decorated. 
 In the ''pure" arts, such as sculpture and 
 painting when they are producing works 
 which have no other use or purpose than 
 their purely artistic and esthetic aim, the 
 choice of subject-matter is not dependent 
 on the invention of animate analogies. 
 Yet theirs is the same underlying impulse 
 of shaping the inert and merely material 
 into the illusion of animate existence. I 
 cannot therefore see much merit in the 
 current distinction between ''pure" and 
 "applied" arts, between the work of art 
 which exists in its own right merely for the 
 artistic pleasures that it gives and the 
 work made for a practical and utilitarian 
 purpose but embellished with such artistic 
 touches as may be conveniently and in- 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 17 
 
 cidentally applied. This is the current 
 conception in the popular niind; but of 
 this distinction there comes but little good. 
 Sooner or later it leads to the impression 
 that art is something external to material 
 objects, something which may be added or 
 omitted at will, like the interior furnishings 
 of a house, and so occasions the idea of the 
 Superfiuousness of Things Esthetic — an 
 idea which is only too commonly the pop- 
 ular attitude toward art nowadays. This 
 idea still has a tenacious hold upon archi- 
 tecture and even upon professional archi- 
 tects, who are prone to act as though they 
 thought that artistic effects were something 
 accessory which were only added for the 
 sake of good appearances. 
 
 In "pure" and "applied" art alike, we 
 shall find among the Greeks this same 
 process of animism, so that it should occa- 
 sion little surprise that the subject-matter 
 of Greek art is almost wholly confined to 
 the world of men and animals and that the 
 Greek artists showed little fondness for 
 portraying inanimate nature. So strongly 
 did they feel their province to be with the 
 
 Therefore 
 art imitates 
 the ani- 
 mate: 
 Greek art 
 most of all 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
18 
 
 ESTHETIC BAvSIS 
 
 
 higher animate forms that they rethought 
 the inanimate, wherever possible, into ani- 
 mate terms which could be substituted for 
 it. This practice, which may be consid- 
 ered fundamental in their attitude toward 
 art, necessitated a sort of symbolism in 
 terms of animate objects. Thus, though a 
 chevron or scroll may often typify water, 
 the favorite method was to select some 
 aquatic animal. The beast stands for its 
 habitat. A crab at the foot of a boulder 
 gives us the Saronic Gulf washing the base 
 of the Scironian cliffs; dolphins stand for 
 the sea, freshwater fish for rivers, a heron 
 for marshland, a swan for a lake.' At times 
 the symbolism seems forced, as when a 
 maid stands for a spring of virgin water, 
 or a man-headed bull for a roaring stream; 
 but that is because we to-day have dropped 
 out an essential link in the chain and for- 
 gotten how the Greek mind peopled foun- 
 tain, tree, and hill, and river with local 
 divinities — an instance of this same proc- 
 ess of animising natural phenomena by 
 visualising them in animal or human form. 
 Largely because of this process (but also 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 because the Greek was little interested in 
 showing in his art those objects whose 
 typical form he could not clearly catch) 
 Greek artists paid so little attention to 
 landscape. A large part of the delight of 
 landscape-composition lies in the s^'-nthesis 
 of intelligible but rather haphazard ap- 
 pearances into a design full of the illusion 
 of spatial depth and into a color harmony 
 full of the suggestion of lights and shadows ; 
 but of typical form there is little, and of 
 human analogy there is none. A Greek 
 mountain has only its skyline; the rest of 
 it is a flat plane with haphazard splotches 
 of rock, herbage, and tree. Each tree may 
 have a characteristic shape when examined 
 singly and close at hand; but at a dis- 
 tance, merged with others, it contributes 
 vaguely to a whole which has no unity of 
 structure or necessity of interior form. 
 On the Arezzo amphora where Pelops car- 
 ries Hippodameia on his chariot, the es- 
 sential constituents of the landscape are 
 timidly and disjointedly given; above, a 
 lightly scratched profile typifies mountains 
 against the sky (those marvellous moun- 
 
 A X D MONOGRAPH S 
 
20 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 Lains of the opposing shoreland that 
 stand so glorious across the blue Corinthian 
 Gulf); by the chariot two isolated tree- 
 forms suggest the olive-groves of the 
 Achaean shoreland; in front, a wave pat- 
 tern and a plunging dolphin symbolise the 
 windy blue reach of sea. But there is no 
 synthesis of a seen and solid landscape. 
 The actual and complex scenic setting was 
 apparently formless to the Greek mind: 
 there was no way of drawing it, and there 
 was no way of animising it. 
 
 It may be remarked in passing that our 
 discussion suggests that a scrutiny of Greek 
 drawings and sculpture will throw no light 
 on that often-raised and rather fruitless 
 question whether the ancients were sen- 
 sitive to the beauties of Nature. From the 
 striking absence of landscape scenes, 
 whether of forest or cornland or olive groves 
 or rocky shores or pine-covered heights, no 
 conclusion may be drawn as to the senti- 
 ments of the ancient people who lived in 
 that (still to-day) marvellously beautiful 
 country-side. 2 
 
 In Greek art Nature is rethought in 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
O F GREEK A R T 
 
 terms of human or animal analogy. Greek 
 coins are the locus classicus for a study of 
 the workings of this process. 
 
 We of to-day are generally content to 
 convey our meaning on our coins by en- 
 graving verbal information: "United 
 States of America One Dime E Pluribus 
 Unum Liberty 1921 In God We Trust." 
 To this expHcit announcement the "art" 
 is fairly superfluous, something by way of 
 ornament and cultural tradition. Any 
 more or less frigid allegory will serve; a 
 young woman with a Phrygian bonnet will 
 visually embody the abstract concept 
 Liberty, however little connection there 
 may be apparent between idea and symbol. 
 The Greek used more thought and was more 
 conscious of his aim. He used non-repre- 
 sentational matter such as letters and 
 legend very sparingly and succeeded in im- 
 parting a surprising amount in purely 
 visual terms. On the coins of the various 
 ancient cities the geographical situation, 
 the historical and mythical events of the 
 past, often the very names of the towns and 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 21 
 
 The in- 
 animate 
 must be re- 
 thought in 
 animate 
 terms 
 
22 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 the value of the coin were all conveyed with- 
 out a single written word. . • 
 
 Syracuse showed its spring of pure 
 water on a sea-girt island (the fountain 
 Arethusa on Ortygia) as a young girl's 
 head encircled by dolphins. The lake into 
 which near Camarina a river widened be- 
 fore it reached the sea was shown by a 
 nymph upon a floating swan surrounded 
 by a scroll of little waves, while on the 
 other side of the coin a horned river-god 
 with a sea-fish below him told the rest of 
 the geography. At Selinus the story of 
 Empedocles' success in draining the pesti- 
 lential swamp was converted into terms of 
 gods and bulls and marsh-birds and other 
 simple visual apparatus. At Syracuse a 
 four-drachma piece had a four-horse 
 chariot, rmd two horses and a single horse 
 indicated the two-drachma and the one- 
 drachma pieces, while a wheel, as part of a 
 chariot, was used for subdivisions of the 
 drachma. There were no inscriptions 
 stating the current value of these coins. 
 
 The freciuent ''punning" or "canting 
 badges," such as the rose for Rhodes, the 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 goat for Aegae, were due to the desire to 
 set even so unvisual a thing as the name of 
 the town into representational form. 
 
 In order to succeed in so thorough-going 
 a conversion into visual terms, art obvi- 
 ously must have recourse to symbolism; 
 and to this extent Greek art became sym- 
 bolic, since its reprcsentata often stood for 
 things other than themselves — as when a 
 swan and nymph stand for a lake, a man- 
 headed bull for a river, a marsh-bird for a 
 marsh, or an object for its homonym (Hke 
 Rliodes and the rose). But there was no 
 mystic or mysterious intention and none of 
 that deliberate obscurantism with which 
 symbolism has so often allied itself. The 
 symbolism of Greek coins was a kind of 
 picture-writing; but it was not a hieratic 
 script with an esoteric meaning for the 
 initiate (as Christian iconography was at 
 times), nor was there anything arbitrary 
 and inevident in the relation between sym- 
 bol and meaning, as tends to be the case 
 when symbolism has literary or ritual as- 
 sociations. It was not in an effort to point 
 at mysteries or to obscure the obvious 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 23 
 
 which 
 
 produces 
 
 symbolism 
 
 but for no 
 
 mystical 
 
 purpose 
 
34 
 
 EvSTHETIC BASIS 
 
 with pretended subtleties, that Greek art 
 had recourse to symbols. 
 
 The Greek taste insisted on a thorough 
 fusion of intellectual and artistic content, 
 so that neither should obtrude itself to the 
 detriment of the other. The Arethusa 
 heads on Syracusan coins owe nothing of 
 their artistic excellence to an understand- 
 ing of their reference to a sea-girt island; 
 nor is the simple picture-language ob- 
 scured by irrelevancies added to improve 
 the design or increase the artistic appeal. 
 This canon is markedly inapplicable to the 
 arbitrary and conventional symbolism of 
 mediaeval iconography, where not to be 
 initiate in the meaning is often to miss the 
 artistic intention. The Greek artist was 
 evidently no mystic: knowing clearly what 
 he was about, he merely strove to make his 
 intention equally clear to others. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 25 
 
 Having reduced the material content of 
 his design to simple animate visual terms, 
 the Greek coin-engraver further limited his 
 range by making these terms conform to 
 the material medium and to the shape and 
 size of the field and background. Coin- 
 stamping was a kind of relief sculpture in 
 silver and gold, and no visual conception 
 was acceptable unless it was appropriate to 
 such an art. A town near a lake is in itself 
 a visible thing, which can be shown by 
 di-awing; but it was unfitting to those 
 formal artistic demands which coin-design 
 suggested to a Greek artist. The nymph 
 and the swan were animate equivalents, 
 sculptural subject-matter, amenable to 
 spatial arrangement within a circle as a bal- 
 anced pattern with ordered lines and sur- 
 faces. They had not merely an intellec- 
 tualised meaning as symbolic of a god-held 
 (and therefore man-beneighbored) lake, 
 but an artistic import, in that they em- 
 bodied artistic form and evoked artistic 
 emotion. Heads, rather than full-length 
 
 Our first 
 conclusion: 
 Greek art 
 was very 
 well aware 
 that art's 
 true 
 
 province is 
 the repre- 
 sentation of 
 animate 
 things. We 
 now ask 
 how this 
 animate 
 representa- 
 tion was 
 performed 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
26 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 figures, became favorite coin designs, be- 
 cause the small size of the coin admitted 
 sufficient detail for such a theme (but not 
 for a larger one) while the metal was espe- 
 cially fitted for those contrasts of smooth 
 surfaces and chased areas which the sub- 
 ject occasioned. And, finally, there was 
 an inherent harmony of shape between 
 coin and head, combined with an effective 
 contrast between the unvaried ciurve of the 
 one and the changing profile-lines of the 
 other. With us the presence of heads on 
 coins is rather an empty tradition: with 
 the Greeks it was a discovery of the in- 
 herent fitness of the theme to all the 
 artistic requirements which could legiti- 
 mately arise. It became canonised, be- 
 cause of its artistic rightness, in days when 
 no mortal except the distant Persian king 
 yet dared to put his own image on a coin 
 to mark his own greatness and authority. 
 It has survived for reasons of political and 
 dynastic convenience rather than through 
 any feeling for the singularly happy solu- 
 tion which it offers to a difficult artistic 
 problem. 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 We have considered various impulses 
 and interests which determined the choice 
 of artistic subject-matter in Greek art. 
 And it has been indicated that the artistic 
 procevSS did not consist wholly in servile 
 imitation of seen appearances to the best of 
 the workman's technical ability. On the 
 contrary, the representational subject- 
 matter is presented imder the modifications 
 imposed by artistic forms. Art has its 
 own devices of harmonisation of part to 
 part, its own devices of spatial suggestion, 
 its own devices for arousing and appealing 
 to the esthetic sensibilities; and to the 
 dictates and demands of these devices the 
 representational subject-matter must con- 
 form. Our study passes therefore from the 
 subject-matter of Greek Art to the Forms 
 of its Artistic Presentation. 
 
 AN D MONOGRAPHS 
 
 27 
 
 Whicli 
 
 leads us 
 
 into a new 
 
 field of 
 
 inquiry 
 
28 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 
 II 
 
 THE FORMS OF ARTISTIC 
 PRESENTATION 
 
 An often used (but perhaps not over-used) 
 analogy speaks of art as though it were a 
 language. In place of sounds art uses 
 seen appearances and arranges these ac- 
 cording to its own syntax and grammar in 
 order to convey its artistic meaning. The 
 analogy is inexact because the sounds which 
 we use as words are nothing in themselves, 
 whereas the sights of art are iinitations of 
 independently existent objects. Never- 
 theless the comparison has the very great 
 value of diverting the attention from the 
 mere representational subject-matter of art 
 and directing it toward non-representa- 
 tional form. As this is the initial step in 
 esthetics which the general public is so loth 
 and so slow to take, there is no better 
 philosophic approach than this metaphor 
 or comparison. 
 
 Under this analogy, the reprcscntata of 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 art do service as the words of the language. 
 The formal arrangement is the grammar 
 and syntax. The esthetic emotion is the 
 meaning. In order to impart this emo« 
 tion, the artist puts representata in artistic 
 form — very much as we put sounds which 
 are words in coherent grammatical con- 
 struction in order to impart intelligible 
 information. Under the same analogy, 
 just as we cannot make a sentence with- 
 out syntax, we cannot make art without 
 artistic form; and just as a sentence with 
 correct grammar may yet have only an 
 idle or empty meaning, so representata in 
 artistic form may have only a trivial or 
 empty emotional ^•alue. Accurate repre- 
 sentation through painting or drawing, and 
 accurate imitation through modelling, will 
 not in themselves constitute art, any more 
 than a random picking-up of words con- 
 stitutes a use of language. 
 
 The representational subject-matter, 
 moulded to artistic forms, fuses its imita- 
 tive content with their non-representational 
 appeal; from this fusion results the mate- 
 rial of our esthetic contemplation. The 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 29 
 
 A piiiuary 
 distinction 
 of great im- 
 portance 
 for the 
 argument 
 
30 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 mind, trying to understand what it is that 
 the eyes are conveying to it, is at the same 
 time affected by the purely formal emotions 
 of linear structure, pattern, balance, and a 
 host of half-unclear suggestions and ap- 
 peals; and all this emotional stimulation 
 fuses with the recognition of the object 
 represented. On the appropriateness or 
 unappropriateness of the formal emotion 
 depends the whole colour and feeling of our 
 recognition. Indeed, the fact that our 
 recognition is more than a mere identifying 
 and naming of the object, that it is an 
 esthetic perception with a distinct emo- 
 tional colouring, seems to be due prin- 
 cipally to two causes: (1) the knowledge 
 that the represented object is an illusion, 
 and not a real object which must be 
 treated as we treat real objects in our real 
 world, and (2) the fusion of representa- 
 tional illusion with something non-repre- 
 sentational and yet emotionally appro- 
 priate to the representation in which it 
 occurs. 
 
 Our argument is much in need of con- 
 crete illustration; and for this purpose a 
 
 B R Y N U A W R NOTE S 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 very well-known statue from the opening 
 years of tlie fifth century will serve ad- 
 mirably. 
 
 With so generous an admixture of Thor- 
 waldsen's restorations in them, the pedi- 
 mental figures from Aegina cannot be used 
 without caution. But the kneeling archer 
 with the lion's-head cap, the so-called 
 Herakles, has suffered less than most of 
 his comrades and is apparently original 
 save for his right forearm and the lower 
 part of his left leg. The pose and the out- 
 line are therefore assured, and Furt- 
 waengler's investigations leave little doubt 
 as to the angle from which he was intended 
 to be seen. It can scarcely be accident 
 that from this point of view, as from no 
 other, the figure pattemises to an intensely 
 formal presentation in which an almost 
 diagrammatic indication of the mechanics 
 of an archer drawing his bow dominates 
 the pattern. In the shooting of an arrow 
 two forces are prominent, the strain of the 
 bow-string back-drawn and the impetus of 
 the released arrow on its flight. The 
 strain and the direction-of -flight are nearly 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 An example 
 
32 
 
 ESTHETIC B A S I vS 
 
 at right angles to the body of the archer. 
 To offset this strain, a bowman will com- 
 municate its thrust through some diag- 
 onal prop or pose of his legs. Were we to 
 make a diagram of the mechanics of an 
 archer drawing a bow, it would look almost 
 like a diagrammatic simplification of the 
 sculptured figure of Herakles. "Natu- 
 rally" (one might say), "because if those 
 are the actual mechanics of a man shooting 
 a bow. the archer cannot help displaying 
 them." But the truth of the matter is 
 that he can very easily avoid displaying 
 them," for the mechanical strain and 
 counter-adjustment are within, and not 
 along the surface line of his limbs and 
 clothes. That the pose can be shown 
 without right angles or supporting diagon- 
 als is patent from numerous drawings of 
 bowmen which can be foimd in modern 
 illustrations, l^ut in the Aeginetan war- 
 rior every line that is not suggestive of 
 these forces is rigorously altered or sup- 
 pressed. Even the ornamentation of the 
 jerkin is made of squares and right angles 
 above and diagonal folds below, as though 
 
 B R Y N ]\I A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 to force the eye into picking up th^it no- 
 tion. Thanks to the lion's-head cap, even 
 the head-form of Herakles is square. And 
 what could better evoke the emotion of the 
 straight, swift flight of an arrow when the 
 string is loosed, than the long, forward 
 stretch of arm with the flickering motion- 
 line of its contours? 
 
 Of course the artistic intent is not to 
 present a dynamic graph of the equilibrium 
 of forces: art is not interested in the in- 
 tellectual presentation of physico-mathe- 
 matical information. The purpose of the 
 device is to awaken in the spectator a sense 
 that there are such forces at work, in order 
 that what he sees may not be only a casual 
 picture on his retina but may come to him 
 as an apprehension of a thing muscularly 
 alive and full of powerful forces. While 
 we are recognising the carved and coloured 
 marble as Herakles the Bowman, we are 
 at the same time being affected by purely 
 fonnal emotions; and this emotion fuses 
 with our recognition to produce the whole 
 emotional state of our artistic contempla- 
 tion. 
 
 AND MONOGRAPH vS 
 
34 
 
 The prim- 
 ary distinc- 
 tion again 
 
 Pure forms 
 per se are 
 not 
 significant 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 In the statue of Herakles the right angles 
 in which the Unes and masses meet do not 
 in themselves represent anything, any 
 more than a geometric theorem repre- 
 sents actual objects (however much actual 
 objects may exemplify and embody geo- 
 metric theorems). The right angles are 
 a pure form: pure, because we are consid- 
 ering them apart from any material con- 
 tent or representational significance; form, 
 because they are an abstract schema into 
 which representational matter may be 
 fitted, as the kneeling man is fitted into the 
 abstract pattern of lines. 
 
 What is the emotional value of this ab- 
 stract pattern? That would be hard to 
 say. It is possible to make a drawing of 
 such an underlying pattern without sug- 
 gesting the silhouette of a human figure, 
 and any one may experiment on himself to 
 see whether he derives any emotion from 
 contemplating such a pattern (provided he 
 is able to look at it without thinking of it 
 as a picture of a kneeling man or any other 
 recognisable object of the real world). My 
 own experience is that I have no clear or 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 definite emotions from such a test. If I 
 were to assert that I derived feelings of 
 solidity, maintenance of equilibrium amid 
 disturbing forces, power, endurance, or any 
 similar sensations, I should be quite dis- 
 honest with myself and be doing consid- 
 erable violence to my real state of mind in 
 forcing myself to believe that I was having 
 any sort of definite, vivid, tangible emo- 
 tion. But that I am affected (however un- 
 analysably, however vaguely, as though by 
 a dream without characters or scene) I 
 could honestly maintain; and as the lines 
 and surfaces are changed and the pattern 
 changes with them, I can appreciate that 
 my affection alters pari passu. But it is 
 only when this abstract play of lines and 
 angles and surface-shapes appears incar- 
 nate in recognisable objects derived from 
 the real world of my experience, that it 
 seems to get sufficient emotional focus and 
 bearing for me to appreciate clearly (or 
 even describe) its character and range. 
 
 This is the reef on which non-representa- 
 tional sculpture and painting strikes and 
 founders. In very recent times there have 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 35 
 
 and there- 
 fore cannot 
 stand alone 
 
36 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 been attempts at a purely "dynamic" art 
 in which we are asked to apprehend merely 
 the emotion of surfaces, the clash of forces, 
 the strife of line, the delights of linear 
 motion, the appeal of contrasted and 
 mingled colours. But no matter how we 
 educate our sensibilities, we can never ex- 
 perience anything tangible or definite out 
 of these disembodied pure forms. The 
 play cannot go on without characters. 
 The spiritual kernel of a drama may be 
 \'ery abstract and lofty and vague and 
 universal; but unless it embody itself in 
 concrete human actors who speak intel- 
 ligible words, those spiritual powers will 
 never recreate themselves in the minds of 
 an audience. Representational art is rep- 
 resentational not by accident but because 
 only so can it have its full effect. How- 
 ever, this effectiveness does not lie in the 
 mere picturing of objects from the real 
 world, but in a successful fusion of this ol)- 
 jective matter with the formal suggestions 
 which are the province of the particular 
 art. 
 
 Seldom is the reason for the appropriate- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 ness of a particular pattern to a given 
 work of art so manifest as in the Herakies 
 from Aegina. And yet most of us, if we 
 are sensitive to the appeal of sculpture or 
 painting, are aware and can feel (e\'en 
 though we cannot assign a reason for our 
 impressions) whenever a pattern or play of 
 line contributes to the emotion with which 
 we contemplate an instance of those arts. 
 In fact, it is a plausible theory that one 
 essential distinction between esthetic and 
 ordinary contemplation is the appreciation 
 of abstract formal values in the field of 
 vision and the fusion of these with the 
 normal process of recognition of the ob 
 jects, so that there results an emotional 
 (instead of a merely pragmatic or prac 
 tical) apprehension. If this is so — formal 
 values being accidental in Nature and not 
 generally looked for by the spectator, but 
 deliberately chosen for their influence and 
 appropriateness by the artist and intro- 
 duced into his work — it should be obvious 
 why esthetic contemplation may be emo- 
 tionally so much more intense when it is 
 directed toward a "copy of Nature" such 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
38 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 as a work of painting or sculpture, than it 
 is when in the presence of Nature itself, 
 from which all such art confessedly derives 
 its material themes. 
 
 3 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N MA W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 I have referred to the modernist sugges- 
 tion that pure forms might he created 
 without any representational content. It 
 is worth a moment's attention, since it will 
 have an ultimate bearing on our theory of 
 Greek art. 
 
 In a certain London studio I was 
 once shown an inlaid table-top whose 
 geometric assortment and arrangement of 
 planes and lines were intended to give me 
 (so I was told) emotions of speed and power, 
 of thwarted effort, and energy ready to 
 burst forth. But I stood dully by and felt 
 none of this intarsiate vitality rush over 
 me. For it is not abstract speed and 
 power that I can understand, but the speed 
 of a railway train or the power of a goaded 
 ox. Nor does the flying apart of six-inch 
 lines give me a sense of flight except on a 
 six-inch scale; but if I have the illusion 
 that those lines are somehow (let us say) 
 morsels of clod and bridge-rail, something 
 of the sundering energy of a bursted shell 
 comes vividly before my senses. The 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
40 
 
 but must 
 be fused 
 with repre- 
 sentational 
 illusion 
 
 The same 
 argument 
 in another 
 instance: 
 Pure forms 
 in painting 
 
 ESTHETIC B A vS I vS 
 
 table-top was a demonstration in pure form. 
 It was also a demonstration of the futility 
 of such fonnal effects when they are not 
 immanent in the illusion of sensuous ob- 
 jects, amid whose time and space we .put 
 ourselves with that strange sympathetic 
 power which we employ whenever we see 
 pictures in a mere square of painted cloth. 
 
 By considering the art of painting, it is 
 still easier to establish our argument con- 
 cerning the artistic function of pure fonns. 
 
 The most obvious and easily distinguish- 
 able pure forms which painting employs 
 are line, mass, colour relations, from which 
 are occasioned motion, pattern, and 
 rhythm, with their accessories balance and 
 thrust. I call these pure forms because 
 they are independent of the subject-matter 
 of the picture. They could exist whether 
 the picture represented anything or not, 
 and it is irrelevant to their existence 
 whether the represented objects are rightly 
 or wrongly drawn. They are pure forms, 
 therefore, because they are not represenlata 
 but schemata into which representata may 
 be fitted. They are abstract in the same 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 sense that geometric figures or kaleido- 
 scopic designs are abstract, having for con- 
 tent no objects of the world of experience, 
 governed not by fidelity to Nature, but 
 formulable according to some intellectual 
 requirement, expressible perhaps in mathe- 
 matical terms. 
 
 How can line in an actual concrete paint- 
 ing be an abstract form? does it not always 
 bound or enliven the objects represented? 
 then where is the abstraction, where the 
 irrelevance to the represented object? 
 
 True; but suppose that we isolate vari- 
 ous lines by removing them from a picture 
 and putting them by themselves. For 
 lack of context, we have no notion of the 
 objects which these lines helped to depict 
 We are treating them as unrepresenta- 
 tional lines, as lines that show nothing. 
 Are they all emotionally alike? do we get 
 the same feeling from every one? Not 
 quite. We may be somewhat at a loss on 
 being asked to derive emotions from them 
 at all. The performance is artificial and 
 savoiu-s of the supersensitive behaviour of 
 the avowed esthete. But I do not suggest 
 
 41 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 are not 
 significant 
 per se 
 
42 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 glutting a healthy appetite on a morning 
 rose, nor pretend that the contemplation of 
 a page covered with lines of varying curva- 
 ture should yield any profound emotional 
 state. My theorem is quite simple and 
 rather banale. A straight line looks stiff; 
 certain curves appeal to us as graceful; 
 wavy lines have a restless effect; and more 
 complex lines compound more complicated 
 phenomena of the same general sort. That 
 is all that I mean by emotions derived from 
 contemplating lines — very vague, rather 
 undefinable impressions. Whether they 
 are suggestions borrowed from familiar ob- 
 jects which show that particular line, or 
 reactions due to an instinctive appeal to 
 our gravitational and muscular sense, or 
 products of our intellectual appreciation 
 of the relations of the various component 
 portions of these lines, is a matter of 
 psychological mquiry which is ii'relevant 
 here and of no particular importance for 
 the contention. If to this vague and 
 feeble degree we are prepared to say that 
 lines are not emotionally alike, no matter 
 whether we can define or clearly dis- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 tinguish our feelings about them, if we are 
 ready to say that not merely do the lines 
 differ one from another, but that we differ 
 when we look at one line and another, 
 however slight and however trivial w^e judge 
 this difference to be — then I have estab- 
 lished the purely formal character of lines. 
 But lines may also be representational. 
 Such and such a combination of lines de- 
 picts such and such an object — a tree, a 
 fish, a frog, the Virgin Mary. Does a line 
 lose its formal value, the moment we see 
 that it represents a real object to us? 
 Just here is the fundament and base of the 
 contention. From the fusion of the two 
 aspects of a line — its purely formal value 
 with its representational quality — arises a 
 new thing which I call the esthetic or 
 artistic emotion. This new thing, which 
 may be surprisingly intense and vivid, is 
 not discoverable either in the represented ob- 
 ject per se or in the mere formal value of the 
 lines used. It is a product of the fusion, 
 often as unexpected and as novel as a 
 chemical reaction. I admit the miracle, 
 but I plead the fact. It is no more remark- 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
44 
 
 and there- 
 fore cannot 
 itand alone 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 able than the extreme intensification of 
 emotion attendant upon the fusion of 
 language with the recurrent beat of met- 
 rical rhythm on wliich poetry draws so 
 lavishly. 
 
 The forms of art, considered in and for 
 themselves, are nearly always trivial and 
 irrelevant. The esthetician, knowing this, 
 never judges them thus for what they are, 
 but for what they can do. Surety we might 
 hold that the jingling of words of similar 
 ending and the constant ordering of words 
 into alternatingly accented and unaccented 
 syllables is a puerile pastime for a grown 
 man; but if w^e proceed to rule them out of 
 poetry on that ground, we shall soon find 
 out where we stand — or some of the modem 
 formless poets will soon instruct us. 
 
 There is another formal function which 
 line may perform — that of suggesting mo- 
 tion. The eye has a tendency to follow 
 lines and to travel with greater or less ease 
 according to the kind of line. It would be 
 childish to claim that any very extensive 
 spiritual experience is derived from thus 
 travelling around on the lines of a picture. 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 If we concentrate on the purely formal cle- 
 ment, the result is extremely trivial. But 
 if all these effects of acceleration and re- 
 tardation, continuity and disconnection, 
 intricate volution and open sweeping prog- 
 ress be encountered and scarce-consciously 
 performed during our contemplation of the 
 objects presented by the picture, the triv- 
 iality vanishes. The things in the picture 
 take to themselves the emotional qualities 
 which are latent in the pure forms. Swift- 
 ness to otir eye in travelling over lines is 
 indeed great swiftness when those lines, 
 measurable in inches, appear to us as wide 
 uplands stretching to remote hills. And 
 when difficult progress over broken hnes. 
 around uncomfortable angles, and through 
 perplexing interlacings, is performed along 
 what we accept for beams and joists and 
 stays of a vast dungeon-room, our whole 
 being seems confined and shut in, because 
 we have transferred our ocular perplexity 
 and fatigue to our imagined corporeal exist- 
 ence amid the presented scene. ^ 
 
 But (it will be said) if each of the lines 
 which depict a given object has its par- 
 
 45 
 
 but must 
 be fused 
 with some 
 representa- 
 tional 
 illusion 
 
 A N D M O N (3 G R A P H S 
 
46 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 ticular formal value, the resulting emotion 
 depends on the particular shape of the ob- 
 ject and not on the artist. That is true, to 
 a certain extent. It is difficult to alter the 
 emotional valne of the lines of a very stout 
 woman or an Ionic capital. But the ob- 
 jection will quickly be seen to be super- 
 ficial. There are numberless angles from 
 which an object can be drawn, and hence 
 numberless modifications of the necessfiry 
 lines; interior lines can be modified almost 
 at pleasure; the relations of the object to 
 the lines and surfaces of the rest of the 
 pictm-e are at the artist's discretion; and, 
 finally, the object can be "misdrawn" so 
 as to give it lines which would not actually 
 occxH- in the photographically correct de- 
 lineation. To what extent is this artistic 
 ''misdrawing " allowable? That is scarcely 
 the esthetician's affair; \mt I am inclined 
 to think that the only limit which can be 
 demanded is the limit beyond which the 
 spectator ceases to recognise what the 
 represented object is intended to be. But 
 artistic taste will nearly always assign a 
 
 1 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 limit much closer to the photographically 
 correct. 
 
 Extreme painters — the Outragists, if I 
 may so dub them — often depart very 
 widely from Nature. I must confess that 
 to me distortions and malformations of 
 decent human anatomy invariably intro- 
 duce a strong element of displeasure and a 
 revulsion away from all sympathetic con- 
 templation, so that my final emotion is 
 strongly modified by these unfavorable ele- 
 ments. Now it is a matter of experience 
 that wherever dislike and repulsion are 
 markedly present as components, the re- 
 sultant esthetic emotion is not likely to be 
 of much value. (There must be a fascina- 
 tion in ugliness before it can successfully 
 heighten our artistic emotion.) Our friends 
 the Outragists would have us concentrate 
 purely on formal considerations and forget 
 the unpleasant modifications insofar as 
 they touch the real world. We are not to 
 think how we should scream if we en- 
 countered in the open a woman with cubical 
 hips and a mouth curling \'aguely beneath 
 one ear. ''Forget all such reflections," 
 
 47 
 
 Must the 
 pure forms 
 and the 
 representa- 
 tions be 
 completely 
 fused? 
 
 AND M ONOGRAPHS 
 
48 
 
 Disadvan- 
 tages of in- 
 complete 
 fusion 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 they might bid us; "this is not Nature, but 
 Art. These Unes and surfaces are ex- 
 pressive, significant. They introduce the 
 potency of abstract values conceived by 
 the artist and undiscoverable by the an- 
 atomist or the photographer. Something 
 new has been created, a new and more 
 primal emotion. To that lay yourself 
 open." 
 
 A new emotion, truly; but of what sort? 
 Into the fusion of pure form with repre- 
 sented object there enters a host of com- 
 ponent elements. The represented object 
 which here goes into the crucible is not 
 just woman in general, but this particular 
 woman with the bodily characteristics wdth 
 which she is depicted, and along with these 
 go all our associations, our attractions and 
 repulsions, our memories and imaginations 
 that are awakened by the sight of this 
 woman as she is presented to our sight. 
 There is no way of keeping these out of the 
 crucible; for art is not an intellectual or 
 geometric abstraction from ordinary ex- 
 perience, but a transformation of our own 
 sensuous world with all its inimitably com- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 plex ramifications of feelings, pleasures, de- 
 sires, fears, superstitions, instincts, mem- 
 ories, associations. All these go into the 
 crucible. And if the brew be full of im- 
 pleasant and distasteful humours, so that 
 the final draught is bitter and puckers the 
 lips, it is idle for the artist to bid us con- 
 centrate our palate on some one fla\-our 
 and ignore all the rest. 
 
 As long as the resulting emotion depends 
 on a fusion of form and matter (and it is 
 our contention that this is the case) we 
 must be prepared to recognise that the 
 *'new emotion" is an emotion about an old 
 world with which we are irrevocably allied 
 for our delights and our dislikes; and as 
 long as we suggest that world by repre- 
 senting its objects, we must be prepared 
 for all the worldly suggestions that such 
 representation entails. We can "mis- 
 draw" as much as we like — only, we must 
 be prepared to accept the consequences. 
 
 If we make this reply to the initiate mod- 
 ernist, he will tell us that we ignore the 
 special intention by being insensitive to 
 the formal values. If we ask him then, 
 
 AND AI O N O G R A P H vS 
 
50 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 "Suppose that, in order to introduce cer- 
 tain formal values, the object came to be 
 represented like (forgive the levity) an 
 elephantiac scrub-woman recovering from 
 a railway accident, do you hold that these 
 formal values are arising around Woman- 
 As-Such or around that particular dis- 
 tressing specimen of her sex?" From this 
 point the discussion should become more 
 entertaining. For our contention must be 
 that either the fact that a woman is repre- 
 sented is irrelevant (in which case, why a 
 woman at all? why not pure pattern?) or 
 else this particular woman, just as she 
 appears in all her discouraging deformity, 
 is an integral part of the emotion. For 
 that a painter can introduce ''woman 
 in general" into his painting and draw her 
 or misdraw her as he likes without affecting 
 her "womanliness" or our conception 
 thereof, I entirely refuse to allow. The 
 extremist idea seems to be that so long as 
 we recognise what the object is intended 
 for — a house, a tree, a human being — the 
 formal values will fuse with our general 
 concept of house, tree, and human being, as 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 though the whole process went on in a 
 region of abstract thought instead of amid 
 our immediate vision of particular objects 
 every detail of which was effective. 
 
 Pure fonn to the detriinent of repre- 
 sentational fidelity, or representational 
 fidelity to the detriment of pure form — 
 both are esthetically mistaken; for both 
 tend to suppress an essential factor of the 
 artistic appeal. 
 
 51 
 
 AND U O N O G R A P H S 
 
52 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 A new step 
 in the argu- 
 ment. 
 
 Spatial pre- 
 sentation a 
 convenient 
 index or 
 criterion of 
 pure forms. 
 One- 
 
 We ha\e insisted tliat there must be a 
 sufficient measure of representational il- 
 lusion; but it is also equally clear that 
 thorough-going representational accuracy, 
 because it tends to eliminate the artistic 
 form, cannot be a criterion of artistic 
 achievement. In representational art 
 actual sensuous deception is rarely in- 
 tended. By imitation, the appearances of 
 the real world are shown in artistic form; 
 but it is not art's desire to have that 
 imitative presentation actually mistaken 
 for objective reality. Of this we can read- 
 ily convince ourselves by examining the 
 various devices of spatial presentation 
 which the arts employ. Often we shall 
 find that the presentation is one-dimen- 
 sional in its emphasis (insofar as there is 
 an insistence on the linear aspect, with a 
 consequent suppression of the more solid 
 and extensive spatial qualities). Of this 
 class are many of the Greek vase-designs, 
 especially during the Early Red-Figiu-e 
 period; and one essential element of Greek 
 
 r 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 low-relief is this insistence upon linear 
 presentation. In other artistic products 
 the presentation is two-dimensional in its 
 emphasis (in that there is an insistence 
 upon the surfaces which the objects of 
 esthetic contemplation occupy in the field 
 of vision, with a consequent diminution of 
 the illusion of solid spatial existence). Of 
 this class are certain vase-designs, much 
 relief-carving, and (presumably) most of 
 the earlier wall-paintings. Here too we 
 shall have to classify the essential element 
 in the esthetic appeal of Greek architec- 
 ture. Finally, there is three-dimensional 
 presentation, the cardinal problem of 
 sculpture-in-the-round and one of the 
 great preoccupations of architecture 
 (though not in classical Greece) and of 
 painting (in certain very developed periods 
 of its career). Since successful three- 
 dimensional presentation occasions a very 
 vivid impression of completely objective 
 existence in space, and since three-dimen- 
 sional presentation alone can achieve this, 
 it is only in the arts which aim at such 
 presentation that imitative illusion ever 
 
 53 
 
 and three- 
 dimensional 
 emphasis 
 
 AND M ONOGRAPHS 
 
54 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 There are 
 other pure 
 forms and 
 other 
 
 methods of 
 analysis; 
 but we will 
 continue 
 our argu- 
 ment 
 
 threatens to be complete and to become 
 delusion. Against such a fatality sculpture 
 usually guards itself by an insistence on its 
 material medium and the constant dis- 
 crepancy between what actually is and 
 what by imitation appears to be. Painting 
 averts a similar mischance by creating its 
 own luminous environment in which its 
 imitations are kept within a spatial con- 
 struction of its own, which will not fuse 
 and therefore cannot be confused with the 
 objective space in which the beholder 
 stands. Architecture, content to imitate 
 conventional objects of its own choosing, 
 has no need to seek to avoid the appear- 
 ance of solid reality for its creations, but 
 on the contrary strives to present them in 
 their spatial actuality with all vividness 
 and a heightening insistence, achieving for 
 itself almost the distinction of a fourth and 
 unique genus of spatial presentation, the 
 presentation of solids enclosing space. 
 
 It is to these devices of spatial presenta- 
 tion to which particularly this study will 
 turn, rather than to the more familiar and 
 well-understood formal devices such as 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 composition, balance, **mass," "tonality," 
 rhythm, and the other commonplaces of 
 ordinary artistic appreciation. 
 
 * * * 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
56 
 
 Greek art 
 uses one- 
 dimensional 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 In early fifth century Greek vase-designs 
 the representational subject-matter is pre- 
 sented seemingly without desire to impart 
 an illusion of spatial depth or solid exist- 
 ence in space. The draughtsmen of the 
 early red-figure period turn their attention 
 to the discovery of linear equivalents for 
 the objects which they purpose to draw. 
 The gods and heroes, athletes and revellers, 
 whom they present to our sight, exist 
 mainly by virtue of the encompassing lines 
 which mark them off from their back- 
 ground. Internal Hnes are used for de- 
 tails of muscular grooving and drapery 
 folds; but these lines are not used to 
 create plastic illusion, they do not model 
 or occasion any apparent spatial pro- 
 trusion or recession, toward or away from 
 the eye. The world of real objects is re- 
 duced to terms of linear appearances, and 
 other spatial qualities have evaporated or 
 disappeared. With their disappearance a 
 subtle and barely describable change at- 
 taches to our impressions of the world in 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 57 
 
 which these figures move — the world of 
 these legendary people and athletes and 
 revellers to whom we somehow allow exist- 
 ence as though they were real and alive, 
 and yet whom we never mistake for flesh 
 and blood. In our impressions of them we 
 scarcely admit that they have the weight 
 which belongs to solid material objects, nor 
 that they must exert effort in order to 
 move themselves. We ascribe to them a 
 life of extraordinarily heightened anima- 
 tion and know somehow that the impulse 
 of movement rules and runs through them, 
 holding ankle and knee and hip and shoul- 
 der and arm together in one control. 
 These are perhaps but vague and partial 
 descriptions of what we feel; yet they will 
 serve to suggest that the presentation of a 
 human body wholly through linear equiv- 
 alents — what I should like to call a presen- 
 tation with one-dimensional emphasis — 
 carries with it a power of peculiar sugges- 
 tion and that this power is one of the spe- 
 cific esthetic resources of any art which 
 chooses to employ such means of presenta- 
 tion. 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 1 
 
58 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 As long as we are foolish enough to be- 
 lieve that realistic illusion is the end and 
 aim of art, we shall be wholly unable to do 
 justice to the intentions of such an art's 
 more purely linear methods. But if we are 
 prepared to see in esthetic phenomena a 
 fusion of objective representation with 
 artistic forms capable of transmuting (even 
 to the point almost of destroying) the 
 sense of objective reality in the interest of 
 artistic emotion, we shall have little dif- 
 ficulty in understanding the devices of 
 Greek vase-design. 
 
 For example, we shall readily appre- 
 ciate that it was not so much because the 
 pigment dried rapidly (as is frequently 
 asserted) that the ancient vase-drawings 
 show outlines which must have been drawn 
 quickly, continuously, and without hesi- 
 tation, but, rather, because the whole ob^ 
 jective existence of the portrayed figure and 
 all those impressions of which we have just 
 spoken depended on these lines. An in- 
 terrupted contour, an incoherency of linear 
 connection, would lessen the power of these 
 impressions and work against the very pur 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 59 
 
 poses for which Hnear presentations were 
 employed. The eye must be made to fol- 
 low the run of contours and inner lines, so 
 that the mind may never rest in the illu- 
 sion that the pictured figiu-es actually fill 
 and occupy the space in which they are 
 shown. And further, all suggestions of 
 motion and those impressions consequent 
 on the travel of the eye along lines, depend 
 for their vividness on the clarity and insis- 
 tence with which the linear exceeds any 
 other spatial emphasis. 
 
 On the white-ground Attic lekythi later 
 in the fifth century, although the nicthod of 
 presentation is still very linear, there is in- 
 troduced the practice of making solid areas 
 of color and of using these to build up area- 
 relations in the field of the design. There is 
 still no illusion of spatial depth; but the 
 objective world is now no longer conjured 
 up solely through linear equivalents. The 
 eye, instead of moving continually under the 
 incitement and to the lead of lines, now 
 rests on the full areas of color. In fact, the 
 pictured objects of this world are pre- 
 sented largely in two-dimensional guise and 
 
 two- 
 dimensioiia! 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
60 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 with two-dimensional emphasis: they exist 
 surely as surfaces, though still very pre- 
 cariously and uncertainly as solids in space. 
 
 Two-dimensional presentation very gen- 
 erally avails itself of the device called pat- 
 tern. This device is so familiar that it 
 scarcely needs elucidation. The textile 
 arts, the arts of decorative metal-work, in 
 fact all arts whose representations are con- 
 ventional and ornamental rather than 
 flirectly illusionary, count much on pat- 
 tern. Even relief-sculpture and painting 
 admit it as one of tlieir major pure forms. 
 
 Now, what pattern is and why it appeals 
 to us, I hope that I shall not be called upon 
 t o discover. For one thing, it depends upon 
 symmetry of parts, a correspondence of 
 right with left or upper with lower. A 
 kaleidoscope cannot fail to produce pat- 
 terns; for however orderless and crazily 
 the central coloured sherds lie, the mirrors 
 will so echo these elements by reflection and 
 inversion that order and balance will be 
 i.uult up on disorder and there will be pat 
 tern. And in apprehending pattern there 
 is both the simple joy of recognition (when 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 we detect repetitions and inversions of tlK- 
 same theme) and the intellectual joy of 
 discovering spatial relationships and the 
 generative principles of construction. But 
 there must be some deeper appeal than this . 
 for the sense for pattern seems to be more 
 primitive and to lie deeper than such 
 sophistications and the joy in it seems to be 
 strangely clean and satisfying. Intellec- 
 tually we may feel contemptuous of the 
 triviality and practical irrelevance of its 
 behaviour. Yet something in the contempla 
 tion of pattern goes as deep as our instinct 
 against bodily deformity and approval of 
 fully and evenly developed things, whether 
 they be flowers or children or our lovers' 
 bodies, (is it then to be wondered at if pat - 
 tern is insistently present among the artis 
 tic forms of a people so addicted to athletic 
 training and the sight of the nude as were 
 the Greeks?) 
 
 Whatever this sense of pleasure and ajj 
 proval may be in itself, it is carried over tu 
 the represented objects of art when these 
 objects are visually grasped as inherent 
 components of a patterned design. Fur- 
 
 A N D MONOGRAPHS 
 
62 
 
 EvSTHETIC BASIS 
 
 thermore pattern unifies the objects to 
 which it is appHed and gives a consequent 
 sense of internal cohesion, so that scattered 
 elements of a landscape or discrete human 
 beings of a sculptural group may impart, 
 merel}^ because of the pattern in which they 
 are put, a sense of relevancy and fitness to 
 appear together. We are aware of a unity 
 wliich we may take for the all-penetrating 
 unity of Nature or the unifying force of an 
 artist's creative idea, though it arise merely 
 from the unity of the unmeaning pattern 
 in which the trees and fields and hilltops 
 of a painting are shown. 
 
 What art may do with a pure form, with 
 pattern void of representation, may be well 
 studied in Mohammedan art. The religious 
 ban on imitating and reproducing the 
 appearances of living things turned the 
 craftsmen of Islam toward a half-mystical, 
 highly geometric, and thoroughly interest- 
 ing pursuit of the decorative possibilities 
 of i^attern. Rugs and carpets, wliose orna- 
 mentation is an Oriental tradition (our 
 western methods of presentation went into 
 the picture-world of tapestries) show a 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 similarly highly developed art based on the 
 pure form, pattern. Birds and trees and 
 flowers enter in, but scarcely for their own 
 sake. They are usually patternised in 
 appearance, with no pictorial space-rela- 
 tionship to one another or other setting 
 than their appropriate position within the 
 pattern. Form has the upper hand, repre- 
 sentation is incidental. Such work, what- 
 ever other artistic value it may have, seems 
 to miss the spiritual opportunities of more 
 representational design, because it does 
 nothing with every-day human experience. 
 It can appeal to certain deep-seated likes 
 and pleasures and instincts; but it does 
 nothing with them, it does not humanise 
 them, it does not bring them to bear upon 
 that world of sensuous life in which our 
 spiritual experience is rooted. 
 
 It would be possible to classify the Greek 
 use of artistic pattern under the captions 
 Decorative, Unifying, and vSuggestive. Dec- 
 orative patterns would be those in which 
 the pattern contributes merely tlie pleasures 
 attendant upon its orderliness and loveli- 
 ness of arrangement. Unifying patterns 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
64 
 
 E vS T H E T I C BASIS 
 
 would be those in which the synthesising 
 pOAver of the pattern is transferred and 
 apphed to the represented objects. Sug- 
 gestive patterns would be those in which the 
 geometric constmction of the pattern 
 conveys some suggestion of equilibrium, 
 conflicting forces, or other mechanical 
 effect. This last use is most common dur- 
 ing the latter half of the fifth century and 
 is conspicuous in the metope compositions 
 of the great Doric temples of that period. 
 The Lapith-and-Centaur metopes of the 
 Parthenon arc generally composed about a 
 central polygon of uniformly coloured 
 background; the enclosing sides of these 
 polygons are the bodies of the two contest- 
 ants; a A^ery brief analysis shows that pat- 
 tern is here functioning in all three of the 
 aspects just mentioned, and that truth to 
 Nature, spatial, and all other illusions are 
 rigorously subordinated and distorted in the 
 interest of these three aspects of pattern. 
 In conseciuence these metopes have been 
 generally criticised adversely. I know of 
 no critic or WTiter who has appreciated 
 them for what they really are and for what 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 they manifestly ir)' to be — two-figure 
 compositions presenting intense physical 
 strain of bodily contest wholly through the 
 artistic forms of line, surface, and pattern. 
 They were to be seen at a considerable dis- 
 tance and at a height of at least forty- 
 five feet above the ground — in a position, 
 consequent^, where simplifications of line 
 and pattern would be effective and minor 
 fidelities to representational truth would 
 be inconsequent. 
 
 Familiar as pattern is, artists and esthe- 
 ticians seem seldom a^^'are that it is wholly 
 a two-dimensional form and that therefore 
 its occurrence in three-dimensional presen- 
 tation is a matter of \'ery unusual interest 
 and importance. In a painted scene there 
 is intentionally the illusion of depth: we 
 construct a space in which the objects 
 occupy positions at various imagined dis- 
 tances from the eye. Insofar as we accept 
 this space as actual, no pattern is possible; 
 we only apprehend the pattern Iw reducing 
 all the objects to that which they really are 
 — fiat surfaces of colour lying in a single 
 plane. One peculiar effect of pattern in 
 
 AND M O N O ( T R A P U S 
 
66 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 such a painted scene, therefore, is the de- 
 mand which it makes on us to apply a two- 
 dimensional arrangement of coloured areas 
 to a three-dimensional spatial construction 
 and (impossible as it may sound) recognise 
 that this space without depth and the 
 space with depth are somehow fused, some- 
 how one and the same. It should follow 
 that, the more insistence there is on pat- 
 tern, the less actuality we ascribe to our 
 construction of a three-dimensional space 
 in which the objects stand; and this might 
 be carried to such a degree that we should 
 be so dominated by the sense of pattern as 
 to be wholly unable to make a three-dimen- 
 sional construction at all. 
 
 I hazard the conjecture that this was 
 actually the case with Greek wall-painting 
 during the fifth century because the empha- 
 sis was almost entirely on the two dimen- 
 sional devices of areal composition (pat- 
 tern, balance, repetition of similar shapes) 
 and on the one -dimensional devices of 
 Hnear presentation.- But of the actual 
 effect of Greek wall-paintings we know so 
 little that it will be wiser to confine the dis- 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 cussion to a kindred art whose products 
 are abundantly preserved to us. 
 
 Carved relief in Greece, notoriously, is 
 subject to a seemingly arbitrary convention 
 of execution in planes. Instead of a uni- 
 form abbreviation of depth (according to 
 which, although two or three inches of pro- 
 jection may have to do duty for the entire 
 depth of a represented scene, this projec- 
 tion will be correctly distributed pro rata, 
 and every element will get its proper share) 
 in the Greek convention of planes there is a 
 very uneven distribution of depth. A 
 human torso will be carved as an almost flat 
 surface with undercut outline; and in 
 general all the depth will be concentrated 
 at the contours, within whose boundary all 
 will be treated practically as a continuous 
 plane-surface. A succession of planes, each 
 stepped back at its edges to the next plane, 
 will make up the entire relief. Of this series 
 of planes, two will be much more prominent 
 than the rest: the front plane, which agrees 
 with the original smoothed surface of the 
 marble slab, and the rear plane, which is 
 
 .\ X D M ONOGRAPHS 
 
68 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 the (uniformly coloured) background against 
 which the figures appear. 
 
 The origin of this convention is well 
 known. Relief originated in Greece in the 
 practice of cutting away the background 
 from a drawn or painted figure, leaving a 
 flat drawing raised above a flat background. 
 Where elements in the drawing overlapped 
 or were intended to be at different distances 
 from the eye, the farther element w^as set 
 back from the hither one by the same device 
 of cutting it back a stage. Out of this prac- 
 tice there arose quite natm^ally the conven- 
 tion of composition in successive planes. 
 
 To have understood the origin of this 
 convention is a very different thing from 
 comprehending its artistic validity once it 
 was established. If the Greek sculptors 
 adhered to this convention throughout the 
 fifth century, it is only fair to assume that 
 they did so because they found it artisti- 
 cally useful and not because they were 
 unable to hit upon any different method. 
 
 The frieze of the Parthenon presents the 
 Pan-athenaic procession so divested of all 
 scenic setting and of all recognisable spatial 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTE S 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 surroundings that archaeologists have ser- 
 iously asked the question whether it is the 
 real procession or some sort of a rehearsal 
 which is shown. Riders and chariots, 
 elders and musicians afoot, youths with 
 animals, maidens with sacrificial vessels, 
 all move as though on a narrow shelf, Seen 
 sharp against the sky. The horsemen are 
 often three figm-es deep, their arrangement 
 even demands that they should be inter- 
 preted as riding six and seven abreast; yet 
 space has somehow lost its density, and we 
 fail to see them in the space which we know 
 tliey must occupy. There is an abstraction 
 of all else, and an insistence on our sense 
 for harmonious and effortless motion, 
 which gives to the contemplation of the 
 Pan-athenaic frieze a quality of delight such 
 as no actual procession may give. The es- 
 thetic explanation is apparent. Thanks to 
 the convention of planes, the presentation 
 is largely two-dimensional. Depth is a 
 half-unreal assumption, and of it we have 
 only as much as will satisfy the require- 
 ment of making motion in space a possible 
 inference. Thanks to the convention of 
 
 A N D M ONOGRAPHS 
 
70 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 planes, we are forced to rely upon the con- 
 tours to give these figures spatial existence; 
 and so we are enthralled in the illusions of 
 linear presentation. But also because of 
 the convention of planes, the pure forms of 
 two-dimensional presentation are given 
 freer rein. In the cavalcade the set recur- 
 rence of horses' heads and riders' heads at 
 the top of the frieze, the smooth areas of 
 the horses' bodies at mid-height of the frieze, 
 the rapid beat of recurrent horses' legs at 
 the bottom of the frieze, can affect us with 
 their spaced rhythms to an extent whicli 
 would be impossible with a stricter illu- 
 sion of deptli. For, as we have seen, all 
 these devices of pattern exist only insofar 
 as we are able to reduce the presented 
 objects to areas on a single surface. 
 
 'Until the last quarter of the lifth cen- 
 tury (the frieze from Bassae is one of tl.c 
 earliest instances to the contrary) tlic men 
 and animals on a Greek relief, if they seem 
 to move, always suggest motion in tl;c plane 
 of the background and not toward or away 
 from the eye. This was largely a result of 
 the frontal presentation which early draw- 
 
 BRYX MAWR XOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 71 
 
 ing naturally employs; but it had its artis- 
 tic justification because the plane of the 
 background is the only direction which does 
 not demand tlie construction of additional 
 spatial depth (since if there is to be motion 
 we must necessarily imagine a space in 
 which it can take place). But additional 
 spatial depth w411 further the three-dimen- 
 sional illusion and thereby obscure the 
 effects incident to surface and line. 
 
 The convention of planes and the con- 
 vention of motion in the plane of the back- 
 ground are therefore artistic devices which 
 are involved in the problem of two-dimen- 
 sional presentation; their presence and 
 meaning in the developed art of the fifth 
 century cannot be adequately explained in 
 any other way. 
 
 With sculpture in the round we at last 
 reach the problem of three-dimensional 
 presentation, with all its attendant intri- 
 cacies and difficulties. 
 
 Not only is the question of three-dimen- 
 sional presentation itself a difficult one ; but 
 the sculptural appeal is rendered extremely 
 
 and three- 
 dimensional 
 presenta- 
 tions 
 
 AND AI N G R A P H vS 
 
 I 
 
72 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 complex and confusing for the esthetician 
 because, just as the arts which emphasize 
 two-dimensional presentation generally in- 
 clude also the devices of one-dimensional 
 emphasis (as when carved relief employs 
 linear effects) so an art w^iose characteris- 
 tic method of presentation is three-dimen- 
 sional will impress both one- and two- 
 dimensional presentations into its service. 
 Since sculpture uses both the pattern de- 
 signs of areas and the linear suggestions of 
 contours and interior lines, there results 
 for the sculptural appeal a fusion of many 
 diverse factors and a consequent complex 
 ity such as does not characterise the arts 
 which we have thus far considered. 
 
 As an instance of this synthesis of many 
 factors, the relief of Aphrodite rising from 
 the sea (if such be the correct description 
 of the scene on the so-called Ludovisi 
 Throne) shows a masterly combination of 
 the suggestive emotional powers of all 
 three forms of spatial presentation. By 
 pattern the attention is centered on Aphro- 
 dite; by linear suggestion of parallel cate- 
 nary curves, on which as it were the figures 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 73 
 
 are hung, a sense of weight in effortless 
 equiHbrium is conveyed; by a heightening 
 of the projection of the reUef from its back- 
 ground toward the centre and a grackial 
 lessening of it toward the right and left 
 and bottom (where there is practically no 
 spatial construction, but only linear pre- 
 sentation) Aphrodite herself is presented 
 with an illusion of spatial actuality which 
 does not obtain for her two attendants, so 
 that she, herself bodily real is surrounded 
 by a sort of penumbra of unsubstantiality. 
 And this works magically upon our emo- 
 tional comprehension. 
 
 In this extraordinary effect of a fusion of 
 corporeal solidity with utter unsubstan- 
 tiality sculpture has a unique opportunity. 
 Most easily accentuated in relief -work, it 
 yet may exert a strong influence in sculp- 
 ture in the round, so that coincident with 
 a three-dimensional presentation there 
 may be the eerie negation of all the solidity 
 with which the eye is so directly and so 
 insistently affected. From linear presen- 
 tation almost all the sense of motion in a 
 statue is derived (though in a more Cyclo- 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
74 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 which le 
 us to a 
 complex 
 and sul)t 
 problem 
 
 rids 
 
 pean way it can be suggested by surfaces, 
 as in the Torso Belvedere). On relation of 
 surfaces depends much of the appeal to the 
 mechanical sense, the sense for equilibrium 
 and control of bodily movement. In order 
 to be truly effective, both this linear and 
 this areal presentation must be embodied 
 in a three-dimensional presentation, where- 
 upon the influences of these formal devices 
 will be ascribed (illusorily) to an actual 
 spatial existent to which they will impart 
 their peculiar emotional suggestions. It is 
 in this fusion of one-, two-, and three- 
 dimensional presentations that the real 
 subtlety of the sculptor's art resides. But 
 because of the complexity of the result, 
 the esthetic analysis of the sculptural 
 appeal has remained to this day largely 
 unguessed and unwritten. 
 
 It is indeed scarcely surprising that, 
 while the esthetics of the arts of one- and 
 two-dimensional presentations are compar- 
 atively well understood and correctly stud- 
 ied, the arts of three-dimensional presenta- 
 tion have kept their secrets to themselves, 
 so that sculpture has usually been con- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 sidered with the utmost naivete and archi- 
 tecture has seemed a simple, open and un- 
 ekisive art — whereas, in reaUty, because it 
 combines with its owti specific device of 
 presentation (soHds cnclosino^ space) the 
 pecuHar appeals of nearly all the other arts, 
 it affords esthetic phenomena so complex 
 in their combinations as to bewilder and 
 wholly mislead the esthetician. 
 
 Accordingly, it will perhaps be excused 
 as a not entirely disproportionate emphasis 
 if the remainder of this study be devoted to 
 a consideration of these two, esthetically 
 the most highly complex of the arts, and to 
 a scrutiny in considerable detail of the 
 attainments and devices of Greek sculpture 
 and architecture. 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 75 
 
 to whose 
 solution our 
 attention 
 is chiefly 
 
 devoted 
 
76 
 
 Spatial pre 
 sentation 
 still our 
 criterion 
 and guide 
 
 lifl"r(-t of 
 -loiir 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 III 
 
 THE ESTHETICS OF GREEK 
 vSCULPTURE 
 
 The cardinal esthetic problem in the analy- 
 sis of the sculptviral appeal is the determi- 
 nation of the way in which statuary works 
 on our sense for spatial construction. We 
 incline to view wax-works merely as arti- 
 ficial human beings that might be flesh and 
 blood if they did not happen to be wax. 
 The aim is delusion; and, beside the patent 
 fact of immobility, the only material differ- 
 ence between original and imitation is the 
 difference of material. We do not so see 
 sculpture when we view it as a work of art. 
 In order that we shall not so see it (as a 
 realistic illusion) the art is careful to omit 
 one of the essential marks of the real world 
 —its colour. Early Greek stone carving 
 did not do this: it coloured brilliantly, 
 but conventionally. During the succeed- 
 ing periods the lavish use of colour may 
 have gone gradually out of fashion. Cer- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 tainly, the Hellenic bent for representa- 
 tions of the nude tended to keep the poly- 
 chromatic influence subsidiary, and though 
 the nude parts were somewhat altered in 
 tint by the process which the Greeks called 
 gauosis, this seemingly did not produce an 
 actual illusion of human flesh; while in 
 bronze there obviously could be no inten- 
 tion of illusionary colouring (in spite of a 
 few casual anecdotes of instances to the 
 contrary) . 
 
 Gothic sculpture was in general highly 
 coloured. The Renaissance (perhaps 
 through the error of attributing a complete 
 absence of colour to the survi\-ing ancient 
 marbles from whose surface time may 
 merely have removed all traces of the tints) 
 accepted a colourless convention almost 
 without opposition. From that time on, 
 the tradition of unstained marble has 
 maintained an almost unquestioned ascen- 
 dancy. To-day it is to be justified not as 
 an accidental historical heritage, but on 
 purely practical esthetic grounds, since it 
 destroys the outright illusion and thereby 
 facilitates the peculiar power of sculpture 
 
 AND IVI O N O G R A P H S 
 
78 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 to work on us through spatial forms of its 
 own devising. 
 
 In particular, the blank unorbed eye, by 
 which the modern sculptor so readily makes 
 us accept his carven men and women as 
 purely ideal equivalents for flesh and blood, 
 was a device seemingly unknown in Greek 
 times, when it would have been at variance 
 with the essential trend toward naturalism 
 which, as we shall see, dominated the suc- 
 cessive generations of sculptors. 
 
 In the archaic period there was no ques- 
 tion of using colour to produce a material 
 illusion. Where the hair of the head and 
 the beard could be painted blue or clear 
 bright red, we need scarcely raise the ques- 
 tion of the ulterior puipose of such decora- 
 tion. (In the early Hellenistic Age, when 
 the Alexander Sarcophagus was made, the 
 realistic illusion was much heightened; 
 yet, even then, the tones seem to have been 
 so clear and pure that we may doubt 
 whether anything but a very modified 
 illusion of real appearances was intended. 
 In view of the reaHstic attainments of the 
 period, it is not safe to insist upon this 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 point. ]\Iore certainly, colouring was still 
 half conventional in the period of Pheidias; 
 but we are told on good authority that 
 Praxiteles paid considerable attention to 
 this aspect of the art, so that we may 
 assume a more naturalistic tendency to 
 have set in during the fourth century. 
 
 It would seem that insofar as the true 
 colours of the real world were applied to 
 Greek statuary the effectiveness of its 
 formal qualities was not heightened but 
 diminished. This would be a correct de- 
 duction were it not for the fact that a 
 judicious use of colour can enhance all 
 those formal effects which depend upon the 
 
 comparison and correlation of surfaces and 
 areas (such effects as those of pattern and 
 balance of masses), as well as emphasise 
 outlines by contrasting the colour of adja- 
 cent areas. If the colour-scheme be kept 
 conventional, these advantages may be 
 turned to account without the disadvan- 
 tages attendant upon illusionary colour; 
 and such a practice must have obtained in 
 Greece before the conventional colouring 
 inherited from the archaic period had 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
80 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Eflfect of 
 mass 
 
 been entirely abandoned, that is to say, 
 in all probability, during the whole of the 
 fifth and the first part of the fourth 
 centuries B.C. 
 
 To return to an earlier part of the argu- 
 ment, the cardinal esthetic problem is the 
 determination of the way in which the 
 sculptural appeal works with our sense for 
 spatial construction. The sculptor's aim 
 is to present to us a cubic soHd in such a 
 manner that we can intimately appreciate 
 its existence as a three-dimensional object. 
 He must enable us to apprehend the solid- 
 ity of solids directly by mere ocular con- 
 templation. 
 
 Ordinarily we employ a sort of intellec- 
 tual construction toward the seen world. 
 From the various appearances of objects 
 from varying points of \'iew we infer their 
 cubic shape and position in space. We read 
 off the meaning of foreshortening and per- 
 spective, and so get at an understanding of 
 the soHdity of objects not directly, but at 
 second-hand. But in the apprehension 
 of the sculptured form we get a more com- 
 plete and a more direct visual comprehen- 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 81 
 
 sion of the solid object as a soli(d. We do 
 not see all around it (that clearly is a geo- 
 metric impossibility) and yet we are inti- 
 mately aware of its further boundaries 
 (which are the surfaces on the invisible 
 sides). 
 
 The real difficulty in spatial apprehen- 
 sion lies in the fact that a three-dimensional 
 world is presented to our eyesight in what 
 amounts to a two-dimensional form and 
 we have to construct the missing dimension 
 out of such data. The dimension in depth 
 away from the eye is obviously the difficult 
 one, and it is part of the sculptor's business 
 to construct this for us so that we can appre- 
 hend it without mistake or trouble. How- 
 can he do this? By removing as much as 
 possible from the difficult dimension and 
 showing it in the two easy ones. By loading 
 the two dimensions, he lightens the third. 
 In practice, this amounts to the employ- 
 ment of three very definite devices: 
 (1) intelligible pose, (2) planes of compo- 
 sition. (3) ''modelling" lines. 
 
 The 
 problem 
 
 and its 
 solution 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
82 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Relation of 
 outline to 
 mass 
 
 (1) By intelligible pose I mean simply 
 that the model must be presented in such 
 a position that the beholder can clearly and 
 fully understand what it is that he sees. 
 This seemingly simple demand causes the 
 greatest possible amount of trouble, just 
 because there are as many aspects of a 
 statue as there arc points of view from 
 wliich the beholder can look at it. In the 
 case of a free-standing statue in the round. 
 it is apparent that theoretically there are 
 as many points of view as there are points 
 on the circumference of a circle, and that is 
 an infinite number. Practically, the 
 spectator will not demand complete intelli- 
 gibility from more than a very few stand- 
 points, and may usually deem himself for- 
 tunate if he can find £my which are wholly 
 satisfactory. Even with these limitations, 
 it must be remembered that it is one and 
 the same cubic form which determines all 
 these more or less planilinear appearances 
 (just as a hundred different photographs 
 can be taken of a single solid) and a change 
 
 1 
 
 B R Y N A [ A W R N T E S 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 occasioned in order to improve one aspect 
 will introduce a relative change into all the 
 other aspects. Yet we began by demanding 
 that from every viewpoint the pose should 
 be intelligible, so that the whole construc- 
 tion of the represented object as a solid in 
 space may be read off from any one of this 
 series of restricted and quasi two-dimen- 
 sional appearances. 
 
 More concretely, we may demand that 
 no foreshortening should take place if it is 
 not immediately intelligible as a fore- 
 shortenmg, so that we may apprehend the 
 actual depth of the element which appears 
 abbreviated. 
 
 In order to meet this demand the sculp- 
 tor may try to make the silhouette always 
 so characteristic of the bodily parts which 
 it outlines that the mere contours will make 
 them intelHgible.i In this way he will be 
 crowding as much representational sig- 
 nificance as possible into the two visible 
 dimensions and leaving as little as possible 
 to the invisible dimension. The device 
 depends for its success upon the sculptor's 
 ability to draw an expressive contour and 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
84 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 upon his sensibility to linear equivalents 
 with which to conjure up an objective 
 illusion. 
 
 The tradition of the expressive contoui* 
 grew up and matured very naturally among 
 the Greek sculptors. Primitive art draws 
 very largely in profile, since the profile 
 view is the most readily intelligible and the 
 most vividly retained by the visual mem- 
 ory. In draughtsmanship, foreshortening 
 is a difficult accomplishment because the 
 outlines which it demands are not those 
 which the mind insists upon retaining as 
 characteristic. Sixth century vase -designs 
 are all based on profile appearances. This 
 was also true of early' relief , because the 
 artist proceeded from a drawing sketched 
 upon a smooth surface of stone and chipped 
 away the background around this design. 
 More surprisingly, even sculpture in the 
 round is subject to similar influences. The 
 sculptor strove to embody the human form 
 as he visualised it. In the case of marble 
 statuary he may have drawn a fiat image on 
 the face of the stone and then hewn inward 
 for the third dimension imtil he had given 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 his sketch a solid embodiment. The early 
 statues are thus calculated from a single 
 position, from immediately in front. Their 
 depth was apparently controlled from 
 points at right angles, that is squarely from 
 the right and left flanks of the statue. In 
 consequence of such a procedure, the statue 
 was evidently fashioned for the four cardi- 
 nal viewpoints (front, back, right, left) 
 and from each of these it displayed the 
 characteristic silhouette which our visual 
 memory especially retains. 
 
 The Man with the Calf (late sixth cen- 
 tury Attic) is an admirable example of a 
 frontally composed statue. Seen from in 
 front, it exhibits a pattern of line and sur- 
 face such as a drawing or flat relief might 
 show. As we move around the stone, this 
 pattern gradually folds up and vanishes, 
 and no satisfactory viewpoint occurs until 
 we come squarely on the flank, when a 
 secondary but not wholly intelligible com 
 position arises, with profiles of the heads 
 of the calf and its carrier. 
 
 So marked is this frontality and so strik 
 ing is its two-dimensional pattern, that 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
86 
 
 E vS T H E T I C B A S I vS 
 
 when we stand squarely in front it is almost 
 impossible to see the vStatue as a solid. It 
 seems flat, in one plane. In the terms of our 
 previous discussion, the third dimension 
 has been so cbained of its content and the 
 other two dimensions have been so filled, 
 that under the influence of the plane-mak- 
 ing pattern there is nothing to give the illu- 
 sion of depth. The process has in fact been 
 can-ied too far. The contour has been made 
 so intelligible and the frontal plane has 
 been so emphasised that the dimension of 
 depth has no necessary function or obvi- 
 ous existence. 
 
 Such frontal composition has the patent 
 advantage of insuring an expressive con- 
 tour — but not for all viewpoints. How a 
 harmonious succession of expressive con- 
 tours can be comV)ined into a single solid, 
 so that from every point of view the statue 
 may be immediately intelligible, thus comes 
 to be a cardinal artistic problem connected 
 with sculptural pose. The Greeks solved 
 it gradually. A century after the Man with 
 the Calf, Polykleitos has not yet found the 
 full solution. His formula (as embodied in 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 the Doryphoros and the Diadumenos) 
 shows only a frontal solution. The rigid 
 median line now bends in a long, gentle 
 curve and counter-curve from ankle to 
 neck; but this curve is all in one plane. 
 The weight-leg and free-leg with the accom- 
 panying raised hip and lowered shoulder 
 are all vertical and lateral displacements, 
 visible from in front but barely appreciable 
 in the side view. Pliny complains that 
 Polykleitan statues are too ''square."^ 
 Praxiteles inherited and exaggerated this 
 fomiula, accentuating the curve but still 
 keeping it in the frontal plane. A fifth or 
 early fourth century statue may be imme- 
 diately recognised and dated by this adher- 
 ence to frontal composition. A century 
 after Polykleitos, Lysippos is at last in 
 command of the mysterious fonnula for the 
 pose which shall yield expressive contours 
 for every \'iewpoint. His refinements of 
 pose are no longer merely frontal but pass 
 into every plane, being based on a progres- 
 si\-e rotation of the horizontal axes of the 
 human body. Pliny's famous phrase^ 
 about Lysippos, ''nova intactaque ralione 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
88 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 quadratas veterum statiiras penmdando/' 
 makes patent reference to this innovation. 
 If we draw an imaginary line through the 
 two ears, another through both shoulders, 
 another through both hips, another through 
 both knees, another through both ankles, 
 we shall have the five horizontal axes. If 
 we make this experiment on a statue of 
 the period of the Man with the Calf, we 
 shall find these five axes all pointed in the 
 same direction. There is no torsion to such 
 a perfectly frontal composition. If we make 
 the same experiment on some of the early 
 Hellenistic statues, we shall find that the 
 axes gradually turn like the needle of a 
 compass so that the lowest one points at 
 right angles or even in opposite direction to 
 the topmost. This gradual torsion carried 
 through the whole body is the typical 
 Hellenistic (or should we say Lysippic and 
 Rhodian?) formula for producing an "om- 
 nifacial" composition. Thanks to its 
 gradual nature, the elements in intelligible 
 profile always explain the adjacent ele- 
 ments which are moving into foreshorten- 
 ing. As the axes are often distributed 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 through a right angle or more, it is Ukely 
 that there will always be some element in 
 profile.^ From the employment of this for- 
 mula comes the extraordinary complete- 
 ness of each aspect under which the statue 
 can be viewed (since each aspect is ani- 
 mated by the same formula as all the 
 others), and the remarkably harmonious 
 manner in which each aspect arises out of 
 the preceding and melts into the succeed- 
 ing one, as we move around the statue. 
 
 Excellent illustrations of an extreme use 
 of the formula are the Dancing Satyr from 
 Pompeii, the Seated Hermes from Hercu- 
 laneum, the "Narcissus" or "Listening 
 Dionysos" (all three in the Naples Muse- 
 um), and the Borghese gladiator in the 
 Louvre. 
 
 Naturally, not all Hellenistic sculpture 
 is composed to this formula nor is the for- 
 mula always carried consistently through 
 all the axes; the axis of the head is least 
 likely to conform since there is no obvious 
 
 artistic reason why it should. It is no 
 academic rule of perfection; yet it recurs 
 with surprising frequency during the later 
 
 A N D M O N GRAPHS 
 
90 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Relation of 
 surface to 
 mas3 
 
 periods. The formula (and I hope that this 
 is now clear) is involved in the artistic 
 necessity of making the two visible dimen- 
 sions expressive of the representational con- 
 tent, so as to make the construction of the 
 invisible third dimension^ easy for us. 
 
 This process of construction, of defining 
 the limits within which the solid exists, is 
 assisted and facilitated in Greek sculpture 
 by the use of patterns and planes to serve 
 as surfaces of reference, as it were spatial 
 determinatives setting the limits within 
 which our spatial construction of the solid 
 must operate. 
 
 (2) Planes of composition thus consti- 
 tute a second device for facilitating our 
 comprehension of spatial depth. The near- 
 est point (to the eye of the spectator) at 
 which empty air ceases and statue begins 
 marks a crucial distance, since it is at that 
 point that our spatial construction of the 
 work of art properly conmiences. If, how- 
 ever, the statue-solid begins for us not with 
 an isolated projection but with a considera- 
 ble surface all lying in one plane appre- 
 ciably at right angles to the line of vision. 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 91 
 
 the task of spatial construction is greatly 
 simplified. And if, instead of a complicated 
 system of varying distances from the eye, 
 the parts of the statue are ordered together 
 into a series of planes appreciably parallel 
 to the front plane, the task of referring 
 every portion of the statue to its exact 
 proper place in depth is now reduced to 
 identifying merely the plane to which it 
 belongs and to ordering the planes in their 
 proper succession. Finally, if there is a 
 similar indication of a back plane behind 
 which no element of the statue extends or 
 protrudes, the eye clearly grasps the spatial 
 limits (in the dimension running away from 
 the eye) between which the whole statue 
 lies, and proceeds easily and surely to con- 
 struct the statue-solid in its extension be- 
 tween those limits. 
 
 Now it is apparent that in the case of a 
 modelled human bodj^ there cannot be a 
 true flat frontal plane (such as we have 
 described) if for no other reason than be- 
 cause the body is everywhere rounded to a 
 greater or less degree. But an effective 
 and operative suggestion of a single plane 
 
 
 A X D MONOGRAPH S 
 
 I 
 
92 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIwS 
 
 
 can be produced by patternising the lines 
 and surfaces. It is characteristic of pat- 
 tern that it pertains to areas which are seen 
 together on an equal plane of projection. 
 The pattern of a painting exists for us when 
 we consider the painted surface as a flat 
 area on which the various patches of colour 
 lie; but the pattern vanishes insofar as 
 we project the picture spatially in agree- 
 ment with its representational content and 
 read off these colour-patches as objects of 
 a real world in spatial perspective (in fact, 
 as a picture instead of a decorative design.) 
 Insofar, then, as we visually hold together 
 various surfaces and lines of a statue into a 
 single pattern or geometric design which 
 they make up, we tend to project them all 
 upon a single plane at a uniform distance 
 from the eye. 
 
 Pattern can, therefore, force curvilinear 
 surfaces into a single plane and thus assist 
 in the process of breaking up the continuum 
 of spatial extension in the difficult third 
 dimension into a succession of a few planes 
 whose relative positions are more easily 
 apprehended. 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Pattern, it will be seen, works contrary 
 to a three-dimensional apprehension be- 
 cause everything to which it applies is by it 
 marshalled into a single plane. Yet if it is 
 not presented too insistently, pattern will 
 serve to simplify the representata and 
 thereby assist the process of visual appre- 
 hension through which solid appearances 
 are constructed. 
 
 (3) But the most potent elements in 
 this whole process are the numerous devices 
 of linear suggestion by which the third 
 dimension may be conjured up. These may 
 be classed together and called "modelHng- 
 lines." When we make drawings in black- 
 and-white, we may remove the look of flat- 
 ness which attaches to surfaces between 
 their outlines, either by appropriate sug- 
 gestion of lights and shadows to suggest 
 curvature or by adding properly curved 
 interior lines. The Greek sculptor, adopting 
 this latter device, carved lines whose cur- 
 vature lay in the plane of the visible dimen- 
 sion in order to suggest a cun^ature in the 
 invisible dimension. This is a little more 
 subtle than it sounds. Unlike a painting, a 
 
 A N D ^[ N O G R A P H S 
 
 93 
 
 Relation of 
 internal 
 line to mass 
 
94 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 statue, being actually in the round, possess- 
 es surfaces which are already correctly 
 curved; but they may seem fiat. The artist 
 adds lines which do not follow the actual 
 cur\'aturc of the projecting masses (since 
 then they would no more seem curved than 
 the whole surface in which they lie) but 
 \A'hose curve, lying in a plane more or less 
 at right cmgles, cannot fail to be fully 
 visible. He draws, in fact, a profile of 
 tlic curved mass and spreads it out fiat on 
 that curved miiss's own surface. 
 
 If this is unclear to the reader, the 
 instance of an identical procedure in the 
 decoration of architectural mouldings will 
 be helpful. Each of the mouldings of Greek 
 architecture has its particular outline or 
 profile as well as its proper surface-design 
 or decoration. In their career along the 
 side of a building these mouldings would 
 tend to look fiat. To obviate such an 
 appearance, in certain conspicuous exam- 
 ples the linear designs of the surface decora- 
 tion are based on the curvature or profile 
 of the moulding. Thus the egg-and-dart 
 uses the curve of its profile to bound the 
 
 r 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 little shields or ''eggs" of its characteristic 
 design; the Lesbian cymation employs the 
 ogee of its profile for the outline of the pecu- 
 liar leaves which are its characteristic deco- 
 ration; the outline of the little beads of the 
 string-courses echoes the profile of the 
 moulding on which it is carved, and the 
 rectangular-profiled fillet or taenia uses the 
 rectangular-lined meander. The essential 
 of the whole matter is this: these curves 
 (which determine and outline the decora- 
 tive design) lie in a plane normal to the 
 ordinary line of sight, so that they are 
 clearly visible and not foreshortened, but 
 at right angles to the plane of curvature of 
 the mouldings which they adorn. Their 
 function is to suggest the existence of that 
 curvature by putting its outline into the 
 visible dimensions. 
 
 This is just what is done in Greek sculp- 
 ture, notably in the Pheidian period. The 
 "Fates" of the Parthenon pediment are 
 outstanding examples of modelling (that 
 is, projection in the invisible dimension 
 suggested by equivalent curves lying in the 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
96 
 
 ESTHETIC BAvSIS 
 
 
 visible plane. The Venus Genetrix will 
 serve for another example. 
 
 Perhaps it is not too much to assert that 
 the sculptor who has not divined this 
 secret (however unconscious he may be of 
 its exact formulation) cannot practise his 
 art with the highest success. An attentive 
 eye will recognise this device in much of the 
 best work of the modern masters, in Michel- 
 angelo very notably, but nowhere (I ven- 
 ture to think) so consciously and consis- 
 tently carried out as in the "great century" 
 of Greek sculpture. 
 
 The device of "modelling-lines" works 
 directly contrary to the effects produced by 
 patterns and planes. This, however, does 
 not imply that these opposing formal 
 methods are mutually destructive and in- 
 imical. Rather, the combination and just 
 balance of their contrary influences in the 
 same work of art constitute one of the 
 remarkable opportunities of which a gifted 
 sculptor will not hesitate to avail himself. 
 The "Fates" of the Parthenon are again a 
 most luminous instance and argument. 
 
 Thus: (1) by intelligible pose with its 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 expressive contours, and (2) by planes of 
 composition with patterns to establish 
 them, and (3) by the correct application of 
 modelling-lines, the third dimension is 
 shorn of much of its obscure content, with 
 the result that we apprehend the statue- 
 solid directly in its depth and spatial exten- 
 sion. We apprehend it as a solid and not as 
 a flat picture-like front-appearance behind 
 which the invisible rest is assumed to lurk. 
 
 AND M N O G R A PUS 
 
98 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 Let it be granted that as a result of all 
 these devices we actually do construct the 
 solid spatially, that we do apprehend its 
 depth directly and visually, in spite of the 
 paradox that extension in the third dimen- 
 sion is invisible^ — what then? 
 
 It is here that physiological esthetics 
 may find it convenient to break off; yet 
 it is just here that they might become most 
 valuable and interesting. Clearly the mere 
 trick of apprehending a solid as a solid by 
 means of the eyesight alone is very remark- 
 able and entertaining, and may evoke the 
 pleasure attendant on a heightening of our 
 ordinary physical faculties; it may be the 
 sine qua non of specifically sculptural emo- 
 tion; but equally clearly it cannot be 
 thought to be the sole and direct cause of 
 that emotion. The visual apprehension of 
 solids may be an indispensable factor in the 
 sculptural emotion; but it is not in itself 
 an adequate description or characterisation 
 of that emotion. 
 
 It seems clear that we cannot progress 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 farther unless at this pomt we take into 
 account the representational element — the 
 fact that the sculptor is not busy with a 
 mere presentation of solids as solids, but 
 that he embodies actual images of living 
 beings and above all else delights in showing 
 forth the human body. In Greek sculpture 
 inanimate objects, except as the most 
 minor accessories, were wholly ruled out 
 during the fifth and fourth centuries. The 
 lower animal forms occur in relief, but very 
 seldom in sculpture in the round. Patently 
 this was not mere accident or casual pre- 
 ference, but betokened an appreciation that 
 the proper sculptural study of mankind 
 was man — as though in some way the 
 stereoscopic illusion obtained some secret 
 value when it was concentrated upon an 
 object which was after all essentially our- 
 selves. 
 
 There is a present-day tendency among 
 the initiate to consider the pictorial sub- 
 ject-matter unimportant and irrelevant to 
 the artistic values. This may be a good 
 corrective for the persistent blindness with 
 which a large part of the general public 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 99 
 
 Relation of 
 representa- 
 tional 
 content to 
 spatial 
 forms 
 
100 
 
 ESTHETIC BAvSIS 
 
 An impor- 
 tant para- 
 graph 
 
 fail to see anything in art except the 
 rcpresentata. Taking the illusion as a 
 reality, they proceed to interrogate their 
 every-day feelings toward the objects under 
 view, considering them as if they were real 
 objects in a real world. This is particularly 
 true in sculpture and leads to much naive 
 embarrassment in the presence of the nude. 
 Still, there can be no doubt that the repre- 
 sentational element is actually of the 
 greatest import to sculpture. 
 
 The direct visual apprehension of a solid 
 as a solid (which we have defined as the 
 prime esthetic differentia of sculptural con- 
 templation) is psychologically relevant but 
 artistically unimportant unless the solid is 
 also apprehended as an embodiment of an 
 animate object. The sculptor's device is 
 a means of giving us the most direct and 
 intimate apprehension of the animate and 
 animating qualities and forces of the object 
 whose appearance he has imitated. 
 
 Whether or not we project ourselves 
 sympathetically into the statue, I do not 
 know. I feel that the cardinal objection 
 to the empathy theories is their failure to 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N MA W R N T \l S 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 measure up to our honest and actual exper- 
 iences. They are partly tnie, certainly; 
 but they make up only a small part of the 
 mystery. They exaggerate a contributory 
 factor into a paramount issue. Still, there 
 is some very clear connection between our 
 apprehension of the solid as solid in the 
 case of a human statue and the fact that 
 the only other method of direct apprehen- 
 sion of spatial solidity is our awareness of 
 it for our own body. It may not be strictly 
 our own strength or power of movement or 
 agility or gravitational equilibrium which 
 we feel to be heightened while we contem- 
 plate the sculptural indication of these 
 qualities; but our power of spatially appre 
 hending the statue as we spatially appre 
 hend our own bodily selves makes us 
 immensely susceptible and sympathetic to 
 an emotional and almost muscular-physical 
 understanding of such qualities when they 
 are sculpturally presented. We know them, 
 not from the outside (as we comprehend 
 strength when we see a strong man pull or 
 push or lift, as we comprehend speed when 
 we watch runners, or agility as when we see 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
102 
 
 First con- 
 clusions 
 from our 
 analysis. 
 (Cf. chap.I) 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 a mountain-goat) but from the inside, in 
 terms of what they are for their possessor. 
 And we apprehend them without strain or 
 discomfort or other physical preoccupation. 
 They come to us direct, simple, intense, 
 sheerly pleasurable. Herein may be the 
 ultimate secret of the sculptural appeal. 
 It is, therefore, not enough that we appre- 
 hend a solid as a solid, nor yet that we com- 
 prehend that the solid is (let us say) a 
 human being. More than that, we must 
 apprehend the animate and animating 
 forces and qualities. We must apprehend 
 them not by an intellectual inference nor 
 by a mere second-hand sympathetic under- 
 standing; in sculptural contemplation we 
 apprehend them still more immediately, we 
 feel them directly and as it were from 
 within. The mechanism by which this is 
 accomplished is purely formal. It consists 
 in devices of line, surface, and gravitational 
 arrangement, to which the represented 
 object is made to conform. These devices 
 are in themselves abstract, geometric, and 
 little evocative of emotion; they assert 
 their magic only when they are correctly 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 fused with representational matter. So 
 used, they are all-important; indeed, the 
 proper employment of these pure forms is 
 the second great secret of the sculptor's art. 
 At the risk of repetition, these pure forms 
 of sculpture must he here enumerated. 
 They include all the devices of one-dimen- 
 sional emphasis which were discussed 
 in connection with linear presentation. 
 Through these are occasioned various 
 suggestions whose common characteristic 
 is the absence of all suggestion of gravita- 
 tional weight or mass. Then there are the 
 devices of tv\^o-dimensional emphasis which 
 were discussed in connection with relief 
 carving. Of these the most notable is pat- 
 tern; but there are numerous other ones, 
 all dealing with the arrangement of areas. 
 Through these are occasioned suggestions 
 of size, internal structure, synthesis of 
 forces, equilibrium, and other similar mat- 
 ters, of which the common characteristic is 
 their suggestion of static mechanics with- 
 out much suggestion of motion or of mater- 
 ial solidity and weight. Finally there are 
 the devices of three-dimensional emphasis, 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
104 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 and with these we have akeady dealt at 
 length. It is the fusion of the suggestions 
 accming from an artistically satisfactory 
 use of all these formal devices which raises 
 sculpture out of the category of a merely 
 imitative craft which faithfully copies in 
 terra cotta, stone, or bronze, the shapes and 
 appearances of men, women, and animals, 
 and makes of it an art with all an art's 
 equipment for arousing great human 
 emotions. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 If it is true that the sculptural art bor- 
 rows various devices peculiarly appropriate 
 to certain of its sister arts, we can perhaps 
 find therein one reason why artists are so 
 frequently impressed with a sense of the 
 community of all the arts, even though 
 they seldom manage to bring this idea to 
 the point where they can make clear what 
 it is which they think the arts have in com- 
 mon. In order to do so it is first necessary 
 to recognise the extreme complexity and 
 variety of the esthetic emotions occasioned 
 by any particular art and to sort out as 
 many contributory factors as possible. 
 One would then discover that certain of 
 these factors recur in the esthetic complex 
 of emotions incident to other arts. If we 
 have once come to recognise that nearly 
 every kind of stimulus derivable from 
 almost anything in heaven or earth may be 
 associated in the state of a cultivated mind 
 under the impression of poetical suggestion, 
 we wall not feel that there is anything un- 
 usual if the arts borrow various ranges of 
 
 105 
 
 Other 
 factors in 
 the sculp- 
 tural appeal 
 
 AND MONOGRAPH vS 
 
106 
 
 EvSTHETIC BASIS 
 
 emotion from one another. It would be 
 beside the point to make this analysis for 
 all art; but on the basis of our previous 
 discussion it sliould be quite easy to make 
 this analysis for sculpture. It would read 
 somewhat as follows: 
 
 The human body in sculptural represen- 
 tation differs from its prototype, the living 
 body, by calling attention to certain quali- 
 ties which otherwise tend to pass unnoticed. 
 By being motionless it presses on our atten- 
 tion its particular volume and configura- 
 tion. This immediate apprehension of the 
 mass or volume of a represented object is 
 the primary differentia of the sculptural 
 appeal. This apprehension of a three- 
 dimensional solid in terms of its surface 
 aspect and its bounding-lines clearly reciirs 
 in the contemplation of architecture. In 
 utilising this, architecture accordingly bor- 
 rows from the sculptural appeal. Our 
 modem architects are not sufficiently 
 aware of this. They are reliant upon paper 
 plans and paper elevations; they design 
 with one or two contours in mind, that is 
 to say, those which they set down in these 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 paper elevations. But when their building 
 is built in three-dimensional matter, it will 
 reveal a host of contours which these archi- 
 tects never considered; it will in fact be 
 subject to all the devices which occasion 
 the characteristic appeal of the sister-art 
 of sculpture. Would not greater sensitive- 
 ness to this sculptural element save us from 
 some of the paper-flat fagades, iinfeeling 
 sky-lines, and brutalised comers with which 
 our modem architects present us ; or are the 
 exigencies of rectangular building lots, 
 retailed at fabulous prices, fatally opposed 
 to such an artistic renascence? That all 
 depends, in the long run, upon what we 
 really want — humanism or industrialism, 
 the highest spiritual attainment or the great- 
 est bodily comfort of the greatest numbers. 
 In addition to this characteristic sculp- 
 tural factor there are always other factors 
 prominent in sculptural art. We cannot see 
 a statue without seeing its bounding-lines 
 or contour; and as we move around the 
 statue this contour continuously goes over 
 into a different one, so that our emotional 
 apprehension of the outlines is not merely 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
108 
 
 ESTHETIC fJASIS 
 
 
 equivalent to an almost numberless series 
 of relief appearances viewed from points 
 on the circle, but also includes the transition 
 of one aspect into the next and the mental 
 reconstruction of all these transitions in 
 agreement with the shape of the three- 
 dimensional mass which we have all the 
 time been apprehending. There is thus a 
 very powerful and inseparable fusion of a 
 linear element with the mass element, and 
 these two are in mutually complementary 
 relationship. 
 
 Thirdly, there is in sculpture the factor 
 of chiaroscuro or of light and shadow, inti- 
 mately involved in that appreciation of 
 projections and hollows which determines 
 our apprehension of mass. But the distri- 
 bution of light and dark constitutes an 
 arrangement of differently illuminated 
 surfaces whose mutual relations of size, 
 shape, and position introduce esthetic fac- 
 tors that are prevalent in the art of painting 
 and drawing and which may be called pic- 
 torial. Since every surface has a bounding- 
 line and may be diversified with interior 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N M AWR NOTES 
 
O F (; R E E K A R T 
 
 line, a further linear element has been intro- 
 duced. 
 
 Lastly, all except very small statues 
 impress us as having weight; and even if 
 we fail to be aware of the actual weight of 
 stone or metal and consider only the repre- 
 sented object, we shall have a sense of 
 weight and gravitational pull overcome in 
 that equilibrium of forces which is the secret 
 of the statue's balance and immobility. 
 This sense of weight and thrust and balance 
 is so prominent and characteristic a factor 
 of the architectural appeal, that we may 
 say that here sculpture borrows from arch- 
 itecture. 
 
 Clearly the importance of these various 
 components or factors may vary enor- 
 mously. In a figurine the sense of weight 
 and gravitational pull is at a minimum; 
 in a colossus its strength is enormously 
 enhanced so that it may become one of the 
 most prominent factors. The handling of 
 grooved troughs and hollows and under- 
 cuttings will determine the range of dark 
 and light, as will the depth to which light 
 penetrates the material before it is wholly 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
110 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 absorbed or reflected. Some sculpture is 
 much more linear than other. Gothic has 
 far more abundant shadow than Greek: 
 Greek in general has more insistent line 
 than Gothic. And these are but the most 
 obvious and powerful components in a 
 result which is after all as complex and as 
 diverse as are the works of sculpture which 
 men have made or the minds of men which 
 have contemplated them. 
 
 After tlTJs survey of the principles and 
 practice of Greek sculpture, it should be 
 possible to understand somewhat more 
 clearly the nature of the sculptural appeal 
 as it comes to us from fifth and fourth 
 century Hellenic art. 
 
 We have seen that the fundamental 
 device of the art is the visual presentation 
 of a solid so that it may be directly and 
 immediately apprehended in all its spatial 
 extent and depth; that because of the 
 immediate and sensuous character of this 
 apprehension, we are able to sense strongly 
 and clearly the play of forces which ani- 
 mate this soHd, when we see it not as mere 
 
 B R Y N IM A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 111 
 
 marble or bronze but as that which it repre- 
 sents, an animate being like ourselves 
 (though perhaps a recognisably more har- 
 monious and perfect being, devoid of the 
 imperfections of material evils) and that 
 finally certain purely formal devices of the 
 art facilitate and amplify this apprehension 
 of animating forces, which in turn reacts 
 upon our own sense of animate energy. Out 
 of this emotional apprehension, occasioned 
 in this manner, arise all those feelings of 
 physical animation, elation, exaltation, or 
 whatever vague and inexpressive words 
 we may use in trying to convey to others 
 verbally a sense of our innermost experience 
 from an artistically effective piece of 
 sculpture. 
 
 Let it not be thought, however, that the 
 foregoing is intended as an exhaustive 
 account of the emotional content of the 
 sculptural appeal. Purposely it has con- 
 fined itself to the most distinctive and 
 characteristic elements. But with these 
 are blended amazingly many minor fac- 
 tors: our associations of every-day life, 
 which are called up at sight of the repre- 
 
 Still other 
 factors 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
112 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 sented object, would alone be a highly com- 
 plex element, especially when w^e remember 
 the range from mere sensuous delight to 
 direct sexual stimulation that may be pre- 
 sent in the contemplation of the nude. It 
 w^ould be foolish to assert that these asso- 
 ciations are in no way present or involved. 
 But apart from all such artistically extran- 
 eous elements (extraneous, since they reside 
 more in the representational illusion than 
 in the actual working of the art as an art) 
 and amid all this characteristically human 
 complication of elements, it ought to be 
 possible to trace the dominant and peculiar 
 emotional contribution which the exigen- 
 cies and possibilities of the sculptor's art 
 occasion; and this I have tried to do inso- 
 far as the conventions and underlying prin- 
 ciples of Greek art may be accessible to our 
 analysis to-day, two thousand years after 
 the disappearance of the civilisation in 
 which that art was so conspicuously and 
 successfully practiced. 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Quite apart from all these devices of pure 
 form, the representational element in 
 Greek sculpture was modified in the inter- 
 est of that quality called Idealism — the 
 property of Greek art which more than 
 any other has been extolled and misunder- 
 stood by succeeding centuries of classical 
 enthusiasts. Into the true character of 
 this "idealism" in Greek sculptural repre- 
 sentation of the human form it is essential 
 that we should now enter. In order to do 
 so, it will be useful to discover first how these 
 idealising tendencies arose, since they are, 
 in their origin, almost accidental inherit- 
 ances from the primitive and archaic 
 periods. 
 
 Truth to Nature, fidelity to the actual 
 shapes and appearances, is the lodestar that 
 leads the sculptors on. It is also the song 
 of the sirens, a Lorelei to bring their ships 
 upon the rocks ; for in the very moment of 
 attainment the true art of sculpture goes 
 to wreck and vanishes from sight, broken 
 on the reefs of a mere imitative realism. 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 113 
 
 The repre- 
 sentational 
 element. 
 Truth to 
 Nature 
 
 always a 
 dominant 
 end or aim 
 
114 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 profoundly 
 influencing 
 the devel- 
 opment of 
 sculptural 
 technique 
 and 
 
 occasioning 
 its periods, 
 viz., (1) 
 primitive, 
 (2) archaic 
 
 That this is really so, may be easily (but 
 not briefly) proven by an examination of 
 the history of any gi-eat epoch of sculptural 
 attainment, though we must consider both 
 the technical history and also the esthetic 
 properties of sculptural form. For my 
 particular field of Greek art, I must assume 
 that the historical development is suffi- 
 ciently known to pennit a very brief sketch 
 of it in place of a chapter-long chronicle. 
 
 Greek sculpture in its beginnings was 
 entirely primitive. In the course of the 
 SLxth century B. C, it passed through its 
 archaic period, a period which reached at 
 the beginning of the fifth century a high 
 degree of stylistic development and yet 
 remained clearly ''archaic" in quality. 
 This quality is very clearly and accurately 
 definable, and depends primarily on the 
 substitution of set schematic forms for the 
 irregular and variegated appearances of the 
 real world. An artist of this period cannot 
 master all the torsions and tensions, the 
 projections and cavities which real objects 
 present, but confines himself to a simple 
 standard appearance from a single and 
 
 ] 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 115 
 
 favorable point of view. The long locks of 
 hair which fall over the back and shoulders 
 present in life a great complexity of disap- 
 pearing and reappearing lines and surfaces ; 
 but the archaic sculptor devises a flowing 
 zig-zag groove to suggest the general look 
 of these long locks, and repeats this in 
 parallel succession over the surface of stone 
 which he has blocked out for the hair. 
 Neatness of execution and sharpness of 
 line become the obvious criteria of success, 
 so that the great archaic craftsmen will 
 carve these zig-zags in the most mar- 
 vellous abundance and the most finished 
 delicacy. But no matter how much they 
 labor, they will not bring the stone to the 
 appearance of actual hair, because the 
 schema of the parallel zig-zag is only a 
 geometric and conventionalised equivalent 
 for the true surfaces and projections of the 
 living model. 
 
 A different schematic design will be 
 devised for the curled locks over the fore- 
 head. Schemata will be found for eye- 
 socket and eye-lid, ear, mouth, muscles of 
 torso and back, fingers, toes, and all the 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
116 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 rest of the body. And all these schemata 
 will be characterised by a geometric sim- 
 plicity and an unvarying repetition. 
 
 Consequently, as the archaic period ad- 
 vances, a wonderful decorative abundance 
 of rather abstract linear forms will cover 
 the sculptural surfaces more and more pro- 
 fusely till they seem as rich as tapestries 
 or oriental rugs. This archaic craftsman- 
 ship, full of the most loving detail and the 
 most engaging intricacies, makes a very 
 strong appeal to the modern world, which 
 has no difficulty in comprehending its 
 devices and desires. 
 
 In Italian painting Botticelli stands 
 near the culmination and close of the 
 archaic period of his particular epoch of 
 painting. One has only to look at the 
 linear forms for hair, drapery, features, 
 waves, flowers, and shore-line in the famous 
 Birth of Venus, to discover over again all 
 the schematic devices of late sixth century 
 Greece. 
 
 Gothic sculpture in the twelfth century 
 A. D. was passing through the same phase. 
 So similar are its schematic devices that 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 many an untrained observer will scarcely 
 be able to tell you, in the case of two photo- 
 graphs of sculptured heads, which is archaic 
 Greek and which is archaic Gothic. 
 
 In all these periods archaism dies the 
 same death . I ts final over-refinement forces 
 a realisation that it is flagrantly and funda- 
 mentally untrue to actual appearances. A 
 period of simplicity ensues. The repeti- 
 tions, the parallelisms, the minute scale 
 for surface-lines, are abandoned. A few 
 forms are used, but these are as like the 
 real thing as the sculptor's awakened sense 
 for realism can achieve. 
 
 The bronze charioteer of Delphi will 
 serve admirably for illustration. Its sim- 
 plicity is largely due to the preservation of 
 the schematic devices of the archaic period, 
 which are kept unchanged in their essential 
 shape. The long vertical flutings of the 
 drapery are unbroken in their career of 
 alternate light and shadow; yet their pro- 
 files depart subtly yet sensibly from the 
 set geometry of their implicit schema. There 
 is almost the formality of a fluted column; 
 yet, unlike such a column, the arris against 
 
 117 
 
 (3) transi- 
 tional 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
118 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 the sky flickers and wavers, and the outline 
 of the driver runs through a whole series of 
 c-hangino: contours as we move around the 
 statue. For the sleeves of the garment a 
 more finely wrinkled schema is set, every- 
 where repeated, and everywhere tempered 
 from strict parallelism and geometric repe- 
 tition by tiny irregularities and departures 
 from the norm. With the schematic forms 
 for the hair, with the set geometry of curves 
 for eye-brows and eye-lids, forehead and 
 cheek and chin, it is alwa^^s the same — 
 the uneven tremor of life shaking the un- 
 physical perfection of the mental constnic- 
 tions of an ideal geometry. 
 
 In all this, one point must be labored at 
 risk of over-emphasis. To each element of 
 the representation (free-hanging gown, 
 close-drawn drapery, hair, features) there is 
 allotted only one standard form, a schema 
 based on the geometric simplification of the 
 actual appearance, in conformity with its 
 visual memory-image. This single form 
 must be repeated as much as necessary in 
 order to cover and inform the surface to 
 which it applies. Thus the schema for 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 free-hanging drapery must be repeated over 
 all the drapery which hangs free. Tliere 
 results a clear division of the whole statue 
 into areas each characterised by some pecu- 
 liar line-form or pattern which everywhere 
 distinguishes it and which is inherently 
 appropriate to the representational inten- 
 tions at that point. That is why, in the art 
 of this period, critics find no ''irrelevant 
 lines" (how should there be; where would 
 they come from?) and are complimentary 
 toward ''structural simplicity" and clear 
 structural articulation. For the Greek these 
 high effects were no mystery. He was 
 merely keeping to his inheritance of sche- 
 matic forms and tempering them in the 
 direction of the confused diversity of the 
 real world. In consequence of his own 
 method, he could not fail to have his sensi- 
 bilities awakened so as to grasp the secret 
 of large construction through simple homo- 
 geneous areas and of simplicity of effect by 
 correlation of similar linear forms. The 
 accidents of primitive draughtsmanship 
 were beginning to go over into esthetic 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
120 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 (4) strong 
 
 devices amenable to the imaginative voli- 
 tion of artistic creation. 
 
 Certainly, the archaic schemata are 
 subjected to improvement so that their 
 fidelity to Nature is being constantly aug- 
 mented. And since the correct rendering 
 of living shapes is, after all, the supreme 
 technical objective, we should expect to 
 see a very uneven attainment and even in 
 the same piece of sculpture find the tradi- 
 tional renderings side by side with unex- 
 pected vivid and brilliant bits of natural- 
 ism. This is precisely the quality which 
 frequently occurs to puzzle the attentive 
 student of the period. The pedimental 
 sculpture of the Zeus temple at Olympia, 
 the Boston counterpart of the Ludovisi 
 throne, the Esquiline Venus (if she be 
 rightly classed as of this period) reveal just 
 this uneven command over tnie appear- 
 ances. But everywhere the framework of 
 the older tradition is apparent. 
 
 When the constant repetition of a set 
 linear schema over an entire plastic area 
 palls on the sculptor (just as the uncritical 
 decorative parallelism of the archaic period 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 had palled on his predecessors) the transi- 
 tion period gives place to the period of 
 strength, the age of the great masters of 
 the Periclean period, the Athenian Pheidias 
 and the Argive or Sikyonian Polykleitos. 
 Naturally no break with the preceding 
 generation is discernible. The schematic 
 tradition still lurks under the linear pre- 
 sentations, and the very same forces which 
 gave to the Delphic charioteer its harmony 
 and simple greatness are still operative. 
 
 It follows that the work of the Pheidian 
 period shows only an incomplete approxi- 
 mation to naturalism. In the preceding 
 period truth to Nature tempered the sche- 
 matic forms; now the schematic (and other 
 more purely artistic) forms temper truth 
 to Nature. Yet a complete truth to Nature 
 can be attained only by a far-reaching and 
 accurate grasp of detail, and this is too 
 difficult to be achieved immediately; only 
 the broader and more essential elements 
 are recorded. There results a style of great 
 breadth and power: the archaic has gone 
 over into the strong period. The sculptor's 
 attention is inevitably drawn to the larger 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
122 
 
 (5) fine 
 
 EvSTHETIC BASIS 
 
 formal effects of broad surfaces and con- 
 spicuous lines instead of to the multiplica- 
 tion of decorative detail. He learns what 
 effects come from the balanced masses of 
 unbroken surfaces and from the travel of an 
 uninterrupted line, and his work gains 
 immeasurably in power by the suppression 
 of "irrelevant detail" which is forced upon 
 him by his inability to fashion those details 
 and to include them. 
 
 Pheidias and Polykleitos are the great 
 masters of this period. The outstanding 
 elements of their style are precisely those 
 of the period in general. So, Michelangelo 
 is the "strong" sculptor of the Renaissance. 
 He could scarcely have been so had not his 
 lifetime happened to fall in the strong 
 period of his sculptural epoch. 
 
 Inevitably, in Greek sculpture as in cor- 
 responding other times, as the period 
 advances, greater and greater approxima- 
 tion to natural truth ensues, detail upon 
 detail is correctly apprehended and em- 
 bodied in the sculptural corpus. There 
 comes a time when the more purely formal 
 traditions of lines and masses, though they 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF G R E E K A R T 
 
 123 
 
 are still operative, are nearly obscured by 
 these formally irrelevant details which 
 stricter fidelity to Nature has introduced. 
 Just at this stage and because there is so 
 nice a balance between the illusion of 
 ol)jecti\'e appearance and the more geo- 
 metric and abstract beauty of sculptural 
 form, there arises a period of very great 
 distinction. To most later-day collectors 
 (and to all that period's contemporaries) 
 this will seem the period of finest flower. 
 It will, indeed, be the period not of strength 
 but of beauty. It is the period of Praxi- 
 teles, of full-blown Gothic, of Raffael and 
 Titian, of Benvenuto Cellini with his 
 Perseus and Medusa, and the youth of 
 Bernini when he did his group of Apollo 
 and Daphne. 
 
 But the same force which brought this 
 period on also brings its change and disap- 
 pearance. The realistic details increase 
 until fidelity to Nature makes most of the 
 earlier formalisations impossible. The 
 artists copy the human body as it is: so 
 much the worse if it has not the formal ele- 
 ments of power c'lnd beauty upon it. The 
 
 (6) free or 
 naturalistic 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
124 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 artist must find his expression through 
 things as they really are. The stone or 
 bronze is almost a replica now of the living 
 model. The model therefore, like an actor, 
 must itself embody the emotional expres- 
 siveness which the artist intends to com- 
 municate to his public. Statuary is almost 
 the craft of turning cleverly posed tahleaiix 
 vivants into marble or metal. Human 
 bodies are chosen as models for their own 
 natural beauty, as in the Syracuse Aphro- 
 dite or the Capitoline Venus (or even for 
 the stimulation from their ugliness or unus- 
 ual qualities, as in the Gauls of the Pcrga- 
 mene artists); poses are reproduced liter- 
 ally for their physical attraction or their 
 energy, strength and power displayed in 
 actual use. This last period is accordingly 
 complex and many-sided. It is not merely 
 the period of Naturalism and Expressive 
 Realism, but of Theatricalism and Sensa- 
 tionalism wherein (since everything must 
 proceed from true and faithful appearances) 
 the objects of the real world are tortured 
 into striking and emotionally moving poses 
 or combined in exciting situations. We 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 125 
 
 have the Drunken Woman, the Laokoon. 
 the Famese Bull, the Borghese Warrior, 
 and all the other familiar virtuosities of the 
 Hellenistic Age. 
 
 With the culmination of this period 
 comes the attainment of that goal which 
 glimmered above the crude beginners of 
 the art and led them to find geometrically 
 simplified equivalents for the bewildering 
 unseizable variety of seen appearances, 
 and thereby opened up the archaic period. 
 This same gUmmering and unreachable 
 objective destroyed the artificialities of the 
 archaic, produced the simple forms of the 
 strong period, gave the wealth of detail 
 which turned the strong into the fine, and 
 at last overwhelmed the period of beauty 
 with the abundance of naturalistic detail. 
 Throughout, the same power makes each 
 period and destroys it, and at the last so 
 dominates the sculptor's art as to leave no 
 room for the other elements from which 
 it drew most of its power and appeal. At 
 the end, when the goal is attained and no 
 further direction of progress is apparent, 
 the sculptors, aware of the aridity of their 
 
 (7; eclectic 
 
 and 
 
 imitativi 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
126 
 
 These 
 periods a 
 recurrent 
 cycle in the 
 epochs of 
 ;ivilisation 
 
 B S T H E T I C B A vS I S 
 
 success, turn mournful and wistful glances 
 back toward tlie earlier periods whose naive 
 delight and unsophisticated energy and 
 enthusiasm are denied to their accomplish- 
 ed and facile days. Most of all, the period 
 whose contrast with their own is mosl 
 flagrant, the period of ripe or even over- 
 full archaism, attracts them. There ensue 
 "revivals," precious enthusiasms of the 
 dilettanti — the fads of the Neo-atticists. 
 the enthusiasm of the Augustan Age for 
 Kanachos and Kalamis, in more modern 
 times the neo-Gothic, neo-Oreek, and all 
 the other resuscitations which ha\-c made 
 of modern architecture an eclectic thing of 
 copy-book and pastiche, the Pre-Raphael- 
 ites in painting, the present-day enthusiasm 
 for the archaic Greek and all unde^■elopcd 
 periods of artistic nascence the world over. 
 Sub specie acternitatis, artistic epochs are 
 cycles, each moving through identically the 
 same phases under the same forces to the 
 same ultimate result. What most aston- 
 ishes the student of these cycles is the 
 inevitable progress of each phase to its 
 own destruction, all because an artistically 
 
 B R Y N U A W R NOT E S 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 almost irrelevant objective (fidelity to seen 
 appearances) exerts a supreme control, 
 while the seemingly true and relevant 
 objective of the art (control of the esthetic 
 fomis which determine the sculptural 
 appeal) is never clearly set up as the true 
 one to be striven for. Rather than the 
 question — "What are the expressive forms 
 of my art, into obedience with which I 
 must mould my matter?" the sculptor 
 seems to put himself the query — "Have I 
 caught the true look and fashion of the 
 things which I portray?" Apparently, the 
 one criticism which artists have been least 
 able to endure or to meet, has been the 
 artisticall}^ rather gratuitous one — "You 
 have failed to copy Nature correctly I" 
 
 Removed by lapse of centuries from the 
 whole cycle of Greek sculpture, we can see 
 that the works of each period have artistic 
 value and that what seemed at the time to 
 be progress, rendering one's predecessor's 
 methods obsolete, was always realistic 
 advance but not necessarily greater artistic 
 achievement. How we are to rate these 
 various periods for this, their artistic 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
128 
 
 EvSTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 achievement, is a problem for the Canon 
 of Taste to decide. Some critics will see 
 the peak already attained in the late 
 archaic, and class all subsequent products 
 as decline; others prefer the period of 
 strength, others the period of beauty; few 
 will put their preference so late as the final 
 stage of Naturalism or Eclecticism. 
 
 The present study, being an inquiry into 
 artistic forms, must leave unraised the 
 questions which belong to the province of 
 Taste, and, without passing judgement on 
 relative merits, must try to discover how 
 the pure forms of sculpture were employed. 
 
 For the archaic period these "forms" 
 have been abundantly studied; but it is 
 essential to remember that they are in their 
 origin artistic accidentals, mere devices of 
 convenience by which the early artist helps 
 himself out of the difficulties of imitating 
 seen appearances, and that they only 
 acquire artistic significance in proportion 
 as the sculptors learn to turn them to 
 account for purely artistic rather than 
 merely representational ends. There is 
 here a very present danger of confusing 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 129 
 
 Origin with Validity (as the manuals of 
 logic sometimes term this fallacy) and of 
 imagining that because we have discovered 
 how the various conventions and devices 
 arose we have therefore fully explained and 
 understood them. 
 
 In order to throw light on the peculiar 
 conventions of archaic art, the behaviour 
 of savages and children has been much 
 interrogated. The purpose is by wide- 
 ranging comparisons to elicit the presence 
 of certain common conventions in all primi- 
 tive art and to explain these conventions 
 on general psychological or material 
 grounds. The results have justified the 
 attempt and have led to a wholly new un- 
 derstanding of artistic origins in Greece and 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Briefly, these comparative studies have 
 established the thesis that the primitive 
 draughtsman does not draw from life but 
 from memory. Those of us who have no 
 knack for drawing may perhaps appreciate 
 the unreasonableness in a demand that we 
 should "just draw things as they look; put 
 down what you see!" and realise that until 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPH S 
 
 I 
 
130 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 ;i race has begun to learn to draw, the actual 
 changeful appearances of things elude any 
 attempt to find their direct and faithful 
 linear equivalent. Primitive drawing is 
 not so much a crude and incomplete ren- 
 dering of the correct outline, as a sort of 
 visual embodiment of those notions for 
 which nouns and names are symbols. 
 
 We can perform the crucial experiment 
 ourselves. At each of the names, "hut," 
 "frog." "fly," a mental image is called up 
 with more or less distinctness. If we try 
 to transfer this mental picture to paper, we 
 shall discover that it possesses some very 
 surprising and yet perfectly reasonable 
 characteristics. Since it is only a general 
 image applicable to any of its species, it 
 will show only essentials, but it will include 
 all these. A quadruped must have four 
 legs, a bird must show two wings; a human 
 face will appear in full-front view or per- 
 haps in profile with full-front eyes. In 
 fact, a primitive drawing tends to be a 
 mental construction exhibiting just those 
 observations and analyses which the mind 
 has made for its own pragmatic interests. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Accordingly, we should not be surprised at 
 finding in a primitive picture or statue of a 
 human l)eing an almost logical rigour. The 
 right half of the body will have no reason 
 to differ in position or appearance from the 
 left half ; the head and eyes will turn neither 
 to this side nor to that; the arms and hands 
 will hang close to the sides or be raised 
 evenly or be folded symmetrically. One 
 lock of hair will look exactly like another, 
 unless the memory of the artist has record- 
 ed the different appearance of the short 
 hair on the forehead and crown and the 
 long back-hair, in which case there will be 
 two li air-forms in use. Inevitably, tlien. 
 certain set forms or schemata will l)e 
 employed for the various parts — for head 
 and face, with hair. eyes, nose, and mouth ; 
 for fingers, navel, chest, ribs, and so on. 
 
 How will primitive art advance, how will 
 it improve upon this initial stage? Not by 
 discarding these memor^^-images and sche- 
 matic forms, but by perfecting them so 
 that they are more faithful to actual 
 appearances, and by adding supplementary 
 schemata for details which have been over- 
 
 .\ X D M OX R A PH S 
 
132 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 looked and therefore omitted. At each 
 repetition of the standard theme of the 
 erect nude male in early Greek sculpture 
 you may notice some trivial improvement 
 of the old or addition of the hitherto unob- 
 served and new. But. however much this 
 progress is continued, there cannot be 
 more than a specious approximation to the 
 photographically true and exact. Between 
 the eye which sees and the hand which 
 gives back the seen, there intervenes a 
 something which never lies between the 
 camera lens and the photographic plate: 
 I mean the mind, to which the eye reports 
 and from which the hand takes its instruc- 
 tion. 
 
 It is the charm of archaic art that it 
 transmutes the vagaries of the external 
 shapes of our ordinary world into the 
 almost intellectual precision of these men- 
 tal constructions and. by lavishing a most 
 effective diligence on the perfect execution 
 of each part, makes only the more apparent 
 the mental conversion through which the 
 natural appearances have been made to 
 pass. The more it labors for perfection, 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 the more clearly it calls attention to its 
 departures from objective truth, because 
 archaic art can only repeat the generalised 
 form (however minutely and succinctly) 
 while Nature never shows this underlying 
 type, but only the thousand and one indi- 
 vidual variations of it. 
 
 Little by little this secret dawns upon the 
 generations of artists. They discover that 
 truth to Nature lies not in set repetition 
 but in indefinite variation. The great 
 problem (and the profound verity) of "the 
 One and the Many" lifts upon their hori- 
 zon. The fonn is one, but its manifested 
 appearances are many. There is one form 
 for the oak-leaf, another for the cypress; 
 but when Nature makes an oak-tree, she 
 does not hang it with a thousand identical 
 leaves. Every leaf is different; yet every 
 leaf exhibits the same form, which is the 
 form for oak-leaves. In sculpture, the 
 schematic designs for hair and for drapery- 
 folds are retained as the basic structure 
 from which every wisp of hair, every fold 
 of drapery, is allowed to depart by a slight 
 amount. 
 
 133 
 
 (2) transi- 
 tional 
 period 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
134 
 
 ESTHETIC BAvSIS 
 
 This is the period of transition from 
 archaism to freedom, and the sculpture 
 which it produces shows a restrained and 
 quietly severe beauty, as free from the 
 affectations of merely decorative ornament 
 as from the inconseqxient lines and inten- 
 tionless diversity of naturalistic imitation. 
 In Greece this phase ocaipied roughly the 
 first half of the fifth century B.C. 
 
 Because fifth century Greek sculpture 
 inherited all the schematic forms for repre- 
 senting objects, it could not be true to life. 
 At the time of Pheidias and Polykleitos, 
 the sculptured human body was put 
 together from a series of parts each of which 
 had a more or less intellectualised shape or 
 structure, and each of which had a conse- 
 quent bias toward geometric formalism 
 and geometric simplification. The idealism, 
 the ''classic restraint," the omission of non- 
 essentials, which are so generally acclaimed 
 to be an outstanding mark of Greek sculp- 
 ture, thus had their origin. Canova and 
 Thorwaldsen and other neo-classicists 
 worked by elimination, by deliberately try- 
 ing to suppress complete natural fidelity: 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Polykleitos was still adding detail upon 
 detail to his heritage and was striving to 
 give to his inherited forms that freshness 
 and vigour which only the desire to copy 
 Nature can impart. They were going in 
 opposite directions, the old Greeks and the 
 modern neo-Greeks; and since we must 
 judge them by their aims and ideals, we 
 must allow that they are poles asunder in 
 what they managed to accomplish. 
 
 The most lucid commentary on the art 
 of Polykleitos is to be found in the lyric 
 poetry of Bacchylides and the dramatic 
 poetry of Sophocles. Both these masters 
 worked with forms inherited out of the 
 archaic period of their art; and both found 
 their highest artistic opportunity in that 
 minute and subtle modulation of the un- 
 realities of formalism which would approxi- 
 mate more closely the real world about 
 which (after all) they were writing. This, 
 as far as I can understand it, is the typical 
 mid-fifth -century mentality. It is only 
 possible in a period where the public is 
 familiar with all the artistic forms and con- 
 ventions with which early art is trammeled, 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
136 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 and so can appreciate the minute temper- 
 ings of those forms by which the masters 
 get their effects. On this condition 
 depends the true Sophoclean "irony," And 
 only if we bear this condition in mind, can 
 we appreciate the full force of the saying 
 attributed to Polykleitos by Plutarch — 
 'Tolykleitos the sculptor said that the work 
 was most difficult when the clay was on the 
 nail."*^ However we may explain the 
 exact meaning of the phrase ^y ow^t (ad 
 unguinem) it is clear that Polykleitos was 
 referring to the unportance of minutiae 
 for the effect of the whole. Modern critics 
 have often sighed enviously at the mar- 
 vellous finesse of appreciation which they 
 ascribe to the ancient Athenian audiences 
 which sat in the Theatre of Dionysos. But 
 this audience was able to appreciate 
 Sophocles because they had grown up in a 
 knowledge of the forms and conventions 
 by minute deviation from which the 
 Sophoclean drama gets all its tang and 
 subtlety. It takes a similar training to 
 appreciate Polykleitos. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 137 
 
 We said that in the time of Polykleitos 
 the sculptured human body was put to- 
 gether from a series of parts each of which 
 had a more or less intellectualised or geo- 
 metricised shape and structure. Out of 
 these the sculptor put his figure together 
 somewhat as the architect built up his 
 Orders out of their component members. 
 Now in architecture it was patent that 
 the relative shapes and sizes of these mem- 
 bers determined the fitness and Tightness 
 of the whole Order. Since the parts of an 
 architectural Order are man-devised and 
 not copied to imitate living things, the 
 architect can determine their sizes to suit 
 himself or rather to suit those peculiar 
 demands of fitness and rightness. But if 
 fitness and rightness are a function of 
 relative shapes and sizes, they must be 
 produced by ratios, by number. Number, 
 at work in all the elements, engenders the 
 perfection which is their beauty. 
 
 There was, in the fifth century, an 
 obvious parallel between the architectural 
 Order and the sculptural Order of the 
 human statue. This, too, was put together 
 
 Intellectual 
 mysticism 
 peculiar to 
 this period 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
138 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 out of parts each of a standard shape. Here, 
 loo, the fitness and rightness of the whole 
 somehow depended on the relative sizes of 
 Lhese parts. What more natural than to 
 draw the same conclusion and believe that 
 Number here too was sovereign? Number 
 is certainly sovereign in Nature to a most 
 amazing extent (far more than we ordi- 
 narily dream, until we pick up a pamphlet 
 on phyllotaxis or shell-formation or pro- 
 portional growth), and the Greek may well 
 have known this, especially as the Pytha- 
 goreans seem to have taught specifically 
 such a doctrine. In any case there is little 
 doubt that Number was introduced into 
 sculpture as it had been into architecture 
 and, probably, into the vase shapes of 
 pottery." 
 
 The locus classic us is in Galen, where 
 t]ic following passage occurs: 
 
 Chrysippos holds beauty to consist 
 in the proportions not of the elements 
 l)ut of the parts, that is to say, of finger 
 to finger and of all the fingers to the palm 
 and wrist, and of these to the forearm. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
O F G R !■ !-: K A R T 
 
 139 
 
 and of the forearm to the upper arm, and 
 of all the parts to each other, as they are 
 set forth in the Canon of Polykleitos.^ 
 
 Here we ha\e a clear statement, from a 
 somewhat late and round-about source, but 
 expressed in just the language we should 
 have anticipated. Commensurability of 
 parts {(TvfXfX€TpLa) is the working of Number 
 in sculpture and the earnest of its perfec- 
 tion. There is an almost metaphysical 
 belief that beauty and the ide<al type for 
 sculptural representation are characterised 
 by an almost supersensual. because intel- 
 lectual and mathematical, structure. 
 
 This is not a unique or unusual turn for 
 the artistic mind to take. It is not uncom- 
 mon for artists to seek refuge in formulae 
 and to look for a sanction for sensuous artis- 
 tic beauty in canons and pseudo-scientific 
 abstractions. For example, in a period 
 when geometric science and art were both 
 in renascence, All^recht Diirer of Niirnberg 
 was obsessed to discover the underlying 
 geometric and numerical necessity in the 
 beauty of the human fonn, and he succeed- 
 
 
 A N D M N G R A P H S 
 
 I 
 
140 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 ed in producing a canon of perfection which 
 was very full of Number. But he came to 
 see that this canon was a standard from 
 which to deviate, not a standard toward 
 which to strive. This is just what we learn 
 when we study the role of Number in the 
 beauty of natural objects such as flowers, 
 leaf-forms, and shell-forms. The beauty 
 of livincj things seems to involve a host of 
 minute departures from an underlying 
 geometric uniformity. The Canon is this 
 underlying uniformity, the eidos of Greek 
 philosophic speculation. It is made up of 
 many numbers; but the mere literal incor- 
 poration of these numbers in an artistic 
 representation will fall short of beauty 
 l^ecause it will show only the mathematics 
 and not the living thing. This seems to be 
 the meaning which Polykleitos intended to 
 convey when he said that the work was most 
 difficult "when the clay was on the nail." 
 T venture the opinion that Polykleitos 
 meant that it was not hard to follow the 
 niherited schematic shapes and standard- 
 ised proportions, but that the real art lay 
 in the minute departures from the stand- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 141 
 
 anl norm, which converted the statue 
 from a geometric manikin into a sculptural 
 equivalent for living reality. It was in 
 making these little touches that the clay- 
 was "on the nail." 
 
 Accordingly, when we take actual 
 measurements of these fifth century canon- 
 ic statues or their replicas, we signally fail 
 to detect those simple arithmetical ratios 
 which we must imagine the sculptors to 
 have incorporated. This very much vexed 
 and discountenanced an earHer generation 
 of archaeologists. Yet the reason is not far 
 to seek. The forms of architecture, being 
 man-devised and conventional, owe no 
 resemblance to natural objects, so that 
 their proportions can be altered to suit 
 man's fancy and esthetic sensibility; but 
 only a slight alteration in the relative meas- 
 urements of the human organs will overstep 
 the limits imposed by sculpture's express 
 aim and intention of representing under 
 plastic form types of actually existent 
 objects. If simple numerical ratios were 
 not to be found at least approximated in 
 Nature, they could not be introduced into 
 
 
 A N D MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
142 
 
 ESTHETIC BASlvS 
 
 
 sculpture, because sculpture was shuwing 
 forth the general type implicit in individual 
 appearances. Just as in architecture many 
 of the simpler ratios were abandoned for 
 more complex ones which shoidd be more 
 appropriate, so in sculpture (but much more 
 rapidly) artists appreciated the necessity 
 of abandoning strict ratios of simple integ- 
 ral niunbers. But they seem still to have 
 kept them as an unseen but operative 
 frame-work of proportions. Nature and 
 beauty strove for these ratios, but they 
 were not attainable in earthly products; 
 therefore the artist could not show them; 
 but he must know them, and use them for 
 his underlying structure, being careful to 
 temper them in the interest of representa- 
 tional truth. The iempcraliirae, of wdiich 
 Vitruvius speaks as imposed on architec- 
 ture by the accidents of human vision, 
 occur also in sculpture where they are 
 imposed by the accidents of material truth . 
 This, I take it. is what Polykleitos was 
 talking about in that other often-quoted 
 and nearly always misinterpreted dictum'' — 
 "He said that the employment of a great 
 
 1 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 143 
 
 many numbers would almost engender cor- 
 rectness in sculpture'' to yap tv irapa 
 IJ.iKpov 8ia TToXXwv dpidfxwv ^<f)r] ytyvtcrOai. 
 
 The sling is in Tra^ja p.iKpov. 13y using 
 an elaborate series of simple ratios it is 
 possible to build up the coherent structure 
 of an ideal figure ;io but each one of these 
 measurements must then be tempered a 
 little lest the surfaces be not sufficiently 
 true to natural forms. It is in these little 
 shifts and changes that the secret of beauty 
 lies. Without them, by a trifle you will 
 fail of your object; you will ha\-e to €v — 
 napa fitKpov. That is why we cannot 
 rcco\er the exact ratios when we take 
 measurements of Polykleitan work; but 
 we ought to get those ratios irapa fxiKpov. 
 
 Ob\-iously the fifth century sculptor did 
 not hold that he was merely copying such 
 and such an individual human being, con- 
 verting him into bronze or marble. He was 
 constructing on the Ijasis of natural appear- 
 ances a series of surfaces and shapes and 
 Hnes which the eye could contemplate with 
 satisfaction and the mind consider with ap- 
 proval and which it would recognise as the 
 
 which 
 throws 
 light on the 
 true nature 
 of Greek 
 "idealism" 
 in sculpture 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 T 
 
144 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 
 appropriate perfection in fully developed 
 human kind. The natural appearances 
 of objects must, of course, be followed as 
 a corrective for all extreme departures and 
 as a starting-point for schematic or formal 
 deductions; but there was no thorough- 
 going insistence that concrete individual 
 objects must be reproduced just as they 
 looked and were. The statues of victors 
 in the games did not and could not resemble 
 those victors themselves. Later ages, 
 struck by the absence of portrait-like qual- 
 ities in these dedications, invented such 
 idle explanations as the story, which Pliny 
 gives us, that only an athlete who had won 
 a victory for the third time could dedicate 
 a statue with his actual form and features. 
 Just as Pythios embodied his idea of the 
 true form of an Ionic temple in the Athena 
 temple at Priene, so Polykleitos embodied 
 his idea of the true form of the nude male 
 in his canonic Doryphoros. Pliny quotes 
 Varro's complaint that the statues of Poly- 
 kleitos were too much alike, paene ad iinum 
 exemplum; but that is just what we should 
 expect of them, and the complaint is no 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 145 
 
 more apposite than it would be to complain 
 that all Doric temples are alike. 
 
 To summarize: the "idealism," the 
 "classic restraint," the "omission of non- 
 essentials," so characteristic of fifth century 
 Greek sculpture, are all traceable to the 
 attempt to put into material guise an 
 almost metaphysical abstraction, a type- 
 form which should satisfy the reason in its 
 quest of perfection and through the senses 
 lead it on to attain the supersensual. 
 This seemingly unsculptural and unreal 
 trend originated in and developed out of 
 the schematic forms of archaic art, which in 
 turn grew out of psychological accidents 
 wholly irrelevant to fifth century ideas. 
 Here, as in all genetic processes, origin and 
 validity must be kept distinct. To the 
 Polykleitan age the individual forms of 
 line and surface were not memory-images, 
 but the inherited alphabet of the sculptor's 
 art, with which he was to spell TO KAAON 
 or, better, 'O HAIS KAAO^. Although 
 Nature was always the check and the 
 corrective, the sculptor was not aiming at 
 reproducing her chance individual appear- 
 
 
 A N D MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
146 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 ances. He did not imitate ra rvxij, but 
 Ttt Kara <i>vaiv. His statues were not 
 intended for replicas of unusually beautiful 
 persons in unusually attractive attitudes. 
 He did not make men as they appeared, 
 but, in the deepest philosophical sense 
 which his race could attach to the words, 
 men as they were in their essence. 
 
 This is precisely the judgement which the 
 greatest of the later sculptors, Lysippos, 
 passed upon his predecessors, if we are to 
 trust PHny's report— '"Vulgoque dicchat ab 
 illis factos qualcs csscnt homines a sc qiialcs 
 vidcrcntiir cssc;^^ — "He often said that they 
 represented men as they really are, but he 
 as they appeared to be." This sentence 
 (like every other one touching ancient 
 artistic criticism) has been consistently 
 misunderstood. It has been imagined that 
 Lysippos was distinguishing between real- 
 ism and impressionism; but nothing could 
 be more wide of the mark. We have only 
 to look at fifth century sculpture to con- 
 vince ourselves that, whatever the artists 
 may have done, what they signally did not 
 do was to represent men as they really are 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 147 
 
 in Nature. Pliny's csseiil i.s Plato's to) ovtl 
 6v and Aristotle's to tl rjv tlvj.i, which is 
 not in the least like artistic realism or repre- 
 sentational fidelity to natural appearances; 
 and his vidcrcntw refers to to. <f>atv6fx€va, 
 which is the very thing which we nowadays 
 call reality. There is no question of im- 
 pressionism. ^^Ad veritatem Lyslppum ac 
 Praxilelcn access isse opiime adfirmant,^' 
 says Quintilian;^- and that ought to settle 
 it. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment what sculp- 
 tural impressionism means. In* painting, 
 the incentive to impressionism arises out of 
 the discrepancy between the hypothetical 
 distance at which the painted objects are 
 supposed to exist and the actual distance 
 from our eyes at which they occur on the 
 canvas, and out of the difficulty of suggest- 
 ing luminosity correctly. If we merely 
 paint on a reduced scale all the details 
 which an oljject shows on close inspection, 
 the modifications of jjerspective will not 
 suffice to gi\e us the illusion of seeing that 
 object in its proper setting of atmospheric 
 distance. We must paint, on the camas 
 
 
 A N D M O N G R A P H S 
 
 I 
 
148 
 
 E S T H E T 1 C BASIS 
 
 close to our eyes, the look of that object at 
 a distance, with all its blurred edges and 
 qualities of colour and light. We must 
 paint the retinal impression. This involves 
 a complicated problem of colour values 
 which will suggest these effects of light, 
 since painting cannot reproduce them 
 directly, but must evoke them by an 
 equivalent construction out of her own de- 
 vising. Aiming at greater fidelity to seen 
 appearances, painting thus ceases to fol- 
 low the materially "correct" outline and 
 colovuing of objects; and the opposition 
 between realism and impressionism can 
 thus arise. But in sculpture, where the 
 true distances are accurately given and 
 fidelity to colour and light is greatly subor- 
 dinated to questions of surface-forms and 
 outlines, impressionism in the sense just 
 now indicated has no obvious place or 
 meaning. There is, however, a secondary 
 sense in which the term is sometimes used 
 for sculpture. To show an object as it 
 appears is in sculpture to vshow it as it 
 actually is; but we might undertake to 
 represent the object as it seems to someone 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
O F G R E E K A R T 
 
 149 
 
 who is looking hastily or casually or under 
 emotional stress or under some bias of 
 interest or judgement. Thus impressionism 
 in sculpture comes to stand for something 
 \'ery much like emotional expressionism. 
 It is not a normal "impression" such as the 
 laws of optics and physiology would 
 impose upon the normal seeing-eye; it is 
 somebody else's impression, in the sense of 
 a mental and emotional constniction such 
 as under proper stimulation we might be 
 able to recreate in ourselves. Of all this, 
 wliat is there in the work of Lysippos? 
 A free use of massed shadow in the hair is 
 the only impressionism that I can find ever 
 ascribed to him; and the testimony of 
 ancient writers and of extant works of his 
 school and period point wholly the other 
 way. When Lysippos said that he made 
 men as they seemed to be, he was saying 
 that he made them just as they actually 
 looked. It was Lysippos who was the 
 realist. 
 
 "Ad veriialem Lysippum ac Praxitelen 
 
 " Can this be true of Praxiteles? 
 
 Critics have felt themselves at a loss be- 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
l.SO 
 
 (4) free 
 
 period 
 
 (5) fine 
 period, pre- 
 ceding the 
 free yieriod 
 
 EST li E TIC BASIS 
 
 cause third century Alexandrian art, carr^--- 
 ing on Athenian traditions, produced ultra- 
 Praxitelcan work and, at the same time. 
 ultra-naturaHstic genre. But there is no 
 discrepancy or contradiction here. Instead 
 of relying on the emotional power of ab- 
 stract pure form, the Alexandrian school 
 turned to direct pictorial presentation. In 
 order to represent ugly, uncouth, bizarre, 
 or ludicrous subjects, it copied these 
 faithfully, down to every wrinkle and 
 deformity: in order to represent beautiful 
 subjects, it went equally far in the literal 
 imitation of soft-textured skin, smooth and 
 yielding surface forms, without edges and 
 with veiled lines. It is simply a difference 
 of subject-matter; the literal intent and the 
 artistic method are in either case the same. 
 For all his seeming idealisation of beauty, 
 Praxiteles is the immediate precursor of the 
 Alexandrian realists. 
 
 When the schematic form disappears as 
 the ideal norm of reference, intelligibly 
 present and definable in every instance to 
 which that form applies, when instead the 
 artist copies the actual appearances of 
 
 B R Y N J\I A W R NOTES 
 
O F G R E }l K 
 
 objects without deferring to a mental con- 
 stntction or generic prototype, art enters 
 upon its highest career of technical achieve- 
 ment. But its formal content is inevitably 
 diminished and obscured; and at precisely 
 this point in its career spiritual decadence 
 sets in. In Greece this turning falls in the 
 lifetime of Praxiteles (as in the sister art of 
 dramatic literature it falls in the lifetimiC 
 of Euripides). Lysippos is already of the 
 decadence. For did he not admit that his 
 predecessors imaged men as they were in 
 their essence, but he himself merely as they 
 appeared (very much as Sophocles was said 
 to have shown men as they had to be; 
 but Euripides, as they were). 
 
 The reason why the decadence begins at 
 the very moment of seemingly greatest 
 achievement needs no elaboration for those 
 who have followed our previous discussions. 
 The true artistic aim of sculpture has prov- 
 ed itself not to be this ignis fatuus of imita- 
 tive dexterity and representational fidelity. 
 To the sole, innermost, yet so frequently 
 obscured, intention of the art as an art, we 
 have already directed a detailed attention. 
 
 151 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 This ends 
 our inquiry 
 into the 
 relation 
 between 
 form and 
 content 
 
152 
 
 and our 
 discussion 
 of Greek 
 scvilpture 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 If the argument for the true nature of the 
 esthetic appeal and artistic purpose of 
 sculpture be recalled, it will be obvious 
 why, as estheticians, w^e must agree with 
 the frequent opinion that the Hellenistic 
 Age, however much it may mark technical 
 advance, artistically is on the downward 
 ^lope. ''Cessavit deinde arsy says Pliny 
 for the period after 296 B.C., and, except 
 that we might be inclined to set the year a 
 little earHer, we can hardly fail to agree with 
 liis pronouncement. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 153 
 
 IV 
 
 THE ESTHETICS OF GREEK 
 ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I MUST presuppose that the history and 
 achievements of Greek architecture are 
 sufficiently familiar to the reader. He will 
 Imow, for example, that the dominant form 
 or theme is the colonnaded temple; that 
 this is built with wall, colunm, and 
 horizontal beam; and that the structural 
 elements are the square-hewn, close-fitting, 
 mortarless ashlar block, and the various 
 members of two distinct and characteristic 
 "Orders," the Doric and the Ionic, to the 
 latter of which is allied a sub-Order, the 
 Corinthian, scarcely differing from the Ionic 
 save in the form of its capital. He will 
 know, further, that there are temple remains 
 dating from the sixth century B.C. and 
 remarkable for their vigour and simplic- 
 ity; that in the fifth century were achieved 
 the refined and powerful buildings on the 
 Athenian acropolis, in whichjthe Doric 
 
 Some 
 general 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
154 
 
 and popular 
 QOtions 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 Order reached its formal perfection and the 
 Ionic its first flowering on Attic soil; and 
 that in the two succeeding centuries the 
 Ionic style was perfected by Pythios and 
 Hermogenes and their respective schools, 
 on the west shores of Asia Minor in such 
 notable exemplars as the Mausoleum, the 
 Athena temple at Priene, the Artemis 
 temples at Ephesos and at Magnesia on 
 the Meander, and the long-travailled but 
 never-completed giant temple of Didymean 
 Apollo. 
 
 1 1 must also assume that most of the tech- 
 nical vocabulary of the architect will con- 
 vey its legitimate meaning to the reader, 
 and that he has already noticed the obvious 
 and salient virtues or limitations of the 
 Greek style. 
 
 Thus he will know that it is a current pre- 
 cept that Greek buildings always express 
 their purpose and the mechanics of their 
 construction. A temple-plan is self-explan- 
 atory; its elevation never misleads us with 
 any pretence or disguise. The entablature 
 is not carved or moulded to produce a 
 merely decorative fagade: the epistyle has 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 155 
 
 horizontal stressings to show its function; 
 we may guess that ceiling beams bed behind 
 the frieze; the cornice is unashamedly a 
 water-shed ; the pediment occurs of neces- 
 sity because a sloping roof can end in no 
 simpler or more obvious manner. The 
 akroteria are the only structiu-al non- 
 essentials — and I am not altogether sure 
 that these may not have been survivals of 
 weights to hold down the roof, like the 
 stones on Swiss chalets, or the interlacing 
 of rafters. 
 
 We can scarcely acquit the Greek archi 
 tects of having followed a third popular 
 modern precept by making their architec- 
 ture express its material, since they not 
 merely painted their marble, but in the 
 members of the two Orders carved forms 
 (such as triglyphs, dentils, guttae, regulae) 
 which were clearly survivals of some tim- 
 ber construction. Yet they exploited the 
 good quahties of their building material, 
 by giving their marble walls that lustrous 
 finish which still endures upon them, and 
 by carving designs whose sharpness of line 
 and shadow-free shallows emphasised those 
 
 AND ^MONOGRAPHS 
 
 concerning 
 Greek 
 architec- 
 ture 
 
156 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 beauties which reside more in fine marble 
 than in any other stone. On the other 
 hand, they could not tolerate rustication or 
 ruggedness (except for fortification walls 
 and similar uses) but covered their coarser 
 materials with a stucco of powdered marble 
 which effectively gave the lie to its native 
 qualities. That they sheathed exposed 
 timber with terracotta or bronze cannot be 
 instanced against them, since it was done 
 not so much to disguise the material as to 
 protect and preserve the wood. 
 
 There is a fourth precept to which good 
 architecture is generally supposed to con- 
 form. It must express (it is said) the men- 
 tality and civilisation of its builders — as 
 though whatever man consciously makes 
 could fail to be eloquent of himself! Even 
 a Moorish tower upon a Renaissance palace 
 built for the servants' hall of an American 
 millionaire's country-place is eloquent of 
 its age and culture. Eclecticism is as much 
 a style as any other— and as significant of 
 its attendant civilisation. The sky-line 
 of Fifth Avenue is very eloquent of the per- 
 turbed and composite culture that made it 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 157 
 
 and enjoys it. But it is intended to assert 
 by this particular precept, that the spirit- 
 ual qualities of an age should somehow* be 
 deducible from the buildings which it pro- 
 duces; and it is clearly true of Greek archi- 
 tecture that it is ordered and logical, that 
 it harmonises part with part, and parts 
 with whole, and that, to a most remarkable 
 degree, it is unfantastic and, in all its ele- 
 ments and proportions, always implies a 
 human use or service, and a mortal eye 
 and a rational mind to observe and approve 
 it. 
 
 There are no structural irrelevancies in 
 Greek building, such as columns which are 
 not the true supports of their superstruc- 
 tures, or fayades which merely mask the 
 disparate structure behind them. But 
 though there are no stnictural irrelevan- 
 cies, neither is there much structural inven- 
 tiveness or ambition. The Greek temple is, 
 in its intent, a one-story afTair. The super- 
 posed colonnades in its interior were forced 
 on the builder by the physical necessity of 
 supporting the roofbeams and the esthetic 
 impossibility of doing so by means of a 
 
 Lim.itatioii? 
 of Greek 
 architec- 
 tural 
 achieve- 
 ment 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
158 
 
 esthp:tic basis 
 
 
 single story of columns (since these would 
 have to be taller and so more massive than 
 those of the exterior order). The two- 
 story colonnade with ground-floor and gal- 
 lery, thus produced, was often employed 
 to line market-places and open squares, 
 but seems not to have incited builders 
 to attempt a third or a fourth stage of 
 columns. The tower-like superposition 
 of the orders was reserved for Roman 
 fayades and the restless Renaissance to 
 achieve. The stoa, thus limited by cus- 
 tom to two stages, was further restrained 
 in its height by the characteristically 
 Greek consideration that a column more 
 than 12 feet high would seem out of pro- 
 portion to the human beings for whose 
 service and convenience it was intended. 
 Here, as so often in things Greek, it seemed 
 iravT avSpa TrdvTo)v )(pr)/xd.TU)v fxixfiov emu. 
 The temples, being houses of gods or 
 at least of their images, were not cribbed 
 and cabined by these demands of human 
 proportion: their single story of columns 
 (you would imagine) could swell to any 
 height. But here another proportion 
 
 r 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 stepped in to check their rise toward 
 the colossal: the distance from column to 
 column always bore some sort of estab- 
 lished relation to the height of the shafts, 
 and coliimns could not be too widely 
 spaced lest they could no longer be safely 
 bridged with horizontal beams of stone. 
 The Greeks were timid engineers:^ a 15- 
 foot air-span gave them pause, and the 
 lintel of Diana's temple at Ephesos was a 
 gigantic achievement. And so when they 
 strove toward the colossal in height, their 
 columns were allowed but barely sixty feet.- 
 Except for such exceptional forms as the 
 hghthouse of Alexandria and the Mauso- 
 leum of Halicamassos, how many Greek 
 buildings (like the Zeus temple at Girgenti) 
 overpassed a height of one hundred feet? 
 The theatres, to be sure, stretched up till 
 their tppmost rows might be more than this 
 distance above the dancers' circle; but the 
 seats were all bedded safely on the sloping 
 hillside. For the Greeks before the Roman 
 era, no hillside — no theatre. Nothing is 
 more surprising than to sketch the eleva- 
 tion of one of the great French Gothic 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
160 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 cathedrals and to the same scale superpose 
 upon it the facade of any of the greater 
 Greek temples. Where the two buildings 
 chance to agree in width, as do the Parthe- 
 non and the cathedral of Chartres, it is all 
 the more astonishing to see the Gothic 
 pushing its nave to twice the Greek 
 temple's height before ever it begins to 
 stretch its towers and spires toward the 
 sky. 
 
 Nor were plans varied or complex or 
 ambitious/'' The temple was the god's 
 house and the depository for his posses- 
 sions. What then should a god do with 
 more than two rooms? When the cult- 
 statue was housed and the dedications and 
 sacred treasures were safely sheltered, noth- 
 ing remained to do. A surrounding colon- 
 nade to accommodate the god's worship- 
 pers, perhaps; but nothing more. The 
 altar, if only because of its smoke and fire, 
 was in the open air and escaped housing. 
 A peribolos wall, marking out the god's 
 acreage, often shut in indiscriminately 
 temple, altar, and ex voio dedications. The 
 Greek architect had no idea of the myster- 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 161 
 
 ious in setting or approacli : a few chthon- 
 ian shrines in caverns is all that can be 
 cited. Nor did it occur to him that his 
 god might house, dark and inaccessible, 
 beyond great walls and many rooms, 
 approached through courtyard and hall- 
 way and stair, as the gods of the Pharaohs 
 lived in the penetralia of Kamak or Luqsor. 
 Nor were there kings to dwell in magnifi- 
 cent palaces. Even a sixth century tyrant 
 was a man among men. Peisitratos might 
 take the Acropolis for his house, and Diony- 
 sios might have his dwelling on Ortygia; 
 but these were fortresses, not palaces. 
 Even the princes of Hellenistic Pcrgamon 
 have only a paltry bit of the great liillslopc 
 for their private places. The "palace" of 
 Pericles? There was none. And the great 
 fifth century Athens, which was responsi- 
 ble for the masterpieces of the Acropolis, 
 was only a ttoAis KaKws eppvfioTOfxrjixivri 
 of small mud-brick liouscs and crooked 
 narrow streets. The greatness of Greek 
 architecture is certainly not domestic, but 
 lies in temples and public buildings of the 
 polis. Yet how monotonous are the plans 
 
 
 AND IM N G R A P H S 
 
 1 
 
162 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 of the Greek temples! and although their 
 settings are often wonderful — on the windy 
 sunrise cape of Sunium, among the waste 
 grey folds of Arcadian Bassae, under the 
 shining frown of the Delphic cliffs — how 
 much reliance is placed on Nature and how- 
 little does Art contribute! Delphi is as 
 idly and irrelevantly marshalled as the 
 accretions of a cemetery; Delos is an archi- 
 tectural pepperpot; Olympia is unconsid- 
 ered and fortuitous; the Athenian acro- 
 polis, a crown of splendour upon a head 
 of tangled hair— owes much of its 
 effectiveness to the lofty, clear-shining 
 aloofness of its site. Neither in the 
 planning of the individual building nor in 
 its relation to other buildings does the 
 Greek architect show invention or artis- 
 tic imagination. I do not feel confident 
 that he even considered this latter 
 relation until the fourth century: the 
 symmetry a pen pres in the arrangement of 
 the buildings on the Acropolis may be very 
 subtle — or very haphazard. 
 
 Mnesicles' unfulfilled design for the Pro- 
 pylaea, the town-plan of Halicarnassos and 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 perhaps Rhodes, the carven giants against 
 the gigantic masses of the Zeus temple of 
 Akragas, the Erechtheum plan with its 
 imperfect reaching-out toward a freer 
 form^ — a list of six or seven such items seems 
 to exhaust the instances of original and 
 powerful departures from the lucid but 
 easy perfection of an established tradition. 
 Two "Orders" and a variant— only that to 
 show for the activity of centuries! Two 
 entablatures and three kinds of capital — is 
 that fecundity? is that inspiration? Is it 
 then so hard for the human brain to invent, 
 so impossible for it to create, that one of the 
 most intelligent and esthetically most sen- 
 sitive of races should have only this to 
 show? They are very fine of their kind, 
 these Orders and these temple-, colonnade-, 
 tholos-, and theatre-forms; but under what 
 limitations and abnegation of originality 
 was their perfection wrought I And how 
 could so many generations of active archi- 
 tects remain content to copy and re-copy 
 from the same meagre repertory, as though 
 there were no other way to build, no other 
 plans or forms, nor even any other mould- 
 
 AND MONOGRAPH vS 
 
 163 
 
 An archi- 
 tecture of 
 fixed and 
 conven- 
 tionally 
 established 
 forms. 
 Why? 
 
164 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 ings to be imagined, and as though to aUer 
 a proportion or to refine a subsidiary out- 
 Hne were achievement enough for any 
 master? 
 
 How can we explain such absence of 
 individual invention and artistic variety? 
 Only by referring it to a deep-seated prej- 
 udice of the Greek mind. To explain this, 
 there will be need of a short digression. 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Under the perspective of time, the dis- 
 putes of philosophic schools are apt to 
 take on an appearance of fundamental 
 irrelevancy. The real issues are usually 
 taken for granted because they house so 
 deep in the general prejudices and presup- 
 positions of the times. Aristotle pulled the 
 Platonic Theory of Ideas to pieces, only to 
 assert a very similar doctrine of forms in 
 its place. From this it is fair to conclude 
 that the assumption of visual prototypes 
 for the various kinds or species of existent 
 objects — to believe, for example, that the 
 abstract concept ''mouse" implies an actual 
 mouse-form iniivcrsally inherent in all 
 mice and controlling their shape and ap- 
 pearance — came naturally and as it were 
 necessarily to the Greek mind. Modern 
 scholars tend to assume that the Greek 
 philosophers derived these 'Torms" out 
 of the logical concept and out of the lin- 
 guistic necessity of using a single word to 
 name all the objects of a given class (as 
 when we call all mice by the same word 
 
 A N D M O N G R A P H S 
 
 165 
 
 The Theory 
 of "Ideas" 
 or Canonic 
 Forms 
 
166 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 ''mouse''). They look on them as a direct 
 outcome of the behaviour of human thought 
 and the analysis of human speech. But in 
 addition to all this, the Greek philosophy 
 unplies a trick of visualising, of appre- 
 hending the characteristic vshape and line 
 by virtue of which all mice, for example, 
 look sufficiently alike to be recognisable 
 instances of their species. For the Greek 
 mind there was always a concrete visual 
 image somehow attached to the abstract 
 universal concept. We ourselves use such 
 words as "concept," "abstract term," and 
 similar expressions which do not have any 
 very clear metaphorical content; but Plato 
 talked of IhiaL (things iSetv to see) or of etSr/, 
 which again are things seen; even the 
 ordinary Greek word for "knowing" (oiSa) 
 had in it this same root of "looking" or 
 "seeing." And most of the logical pitfalls 
 by which the Platonic Theory of Ideas was 
 beset are due to the concrete hard-and-fast 
 visible quality (and therefore existence) of 
 which the etSr] could not divest themselves. 
 Reference has often been made to the 
 peculiar qualities of light and atmosphere 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 167 
 
 in Greek lands, to that clearness which 
 robs distance of its atmospheric mantle and 
 that luminosity which deprives shadows of 
 their power of plastic illusion, so that the 
 eye sees in terms of contours bounding flat 
 surfaces, and the brain remembers in terms 
 of simple visual forms, of areas with sharp 
 outlines and consequently very definite 
 shapes. If we remember, too, that the 
 Greek intellectuality (partly because of 
 this extreme atmospheric lucidity under 
 which the world of sense was presented to 
 it?) was not ''cloudy-minded" and ''un- 
 earthly," but markedly observant of the 
 external world and analytic of its phenom- 
 ena, it will seem natural that such a race, 
 highly intellectualised in the direction of 
 observation and analysis, and immersed in 
 a sense-world of highly accentuated out- 
 lines but rather diminished tactile and 
 plastic values, should imagine its concepts 
 as visual linear forms. Not the mass, not 
 the material constitution, not the physical 
 behaviour, but the seen appearance, was for 
 them the essential. To know what a thing 
 is, they must know the look of it. The 
 
 its in- 
 fluence 
 in art 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
168 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 material might be comparatively irrelevant, 
 since objects can be of different substance 
 and yet have the same look; and matter 
 changes so illusively (as when food turns 
 into flesh and blood), while the form is 
 abiding and amenable to the understanding. 
 The matter of a man may suffer all manner 
 of metabolism, but the form undergoes no 
 such change; if annihilated in one indi- 
 vidual by death or altered l^y mutilation, 
 it reappears unchanged and undiminished 
 in others of the species. Surely, if the 
 Greek mind had not, instinctively as well 
 as consciously, thus regarded the world of 
 objects as a series of typical forms dis- 
 played and embodied in individual in- 
 stances, Plato could never have imagined 
 his theory of visual-forms or found an 
 audience to which to expound it. 
 
 The objects which man makes — his im- 
 plements, his places of shelter, his fur- 
 niture — these too come ranged in species, 
 and each species has its characteristic 
 form whose specific shape and appearance 
 depend largely on the ])urpo.se or use of the 
 object in question. The shape of a mirror 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 is not arbitrary: its purpose implies that 
 it should be the shape of the human face, 
 its use suggests that it vshould have a 
 handle ])y which it can be grasped and 
 which will also serve it as a stand, for 
 which purpose the handle should have a 
 stable base. Thus defined, the necessary^ 
 shape and appearance of a mirror lie within 
 rather narrow limits; but among the vari- 
 ous shapes which would satisfy the fore- 
 going requirements, are not some more 
 "necessary" than others? Is not the 
 circle the necessary prototype of all face- 
 shapes? For the handle and stand, will not 
 certain relationships in the measurements 
 and outline recommend themselves by the 
 simplicity or coherence of their mathe- 
 matical and logical properties, so that they 
 will seem more nearly ''right"? And do 
 we not end with a conviction that even to 
 such a man-devised thing as a hand- 
 mirror there is a single fitting and perfect 
 form which man can discover by exper 
 ment and thought? There is something of 
 the eternal and supermortal about a form 
 which is thus attained; it seems as though 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
170 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 (like the truths of mathematias or logic) it 
 must all the while have been in existence, 
 implicit but unidentified. Almost it would 
 appear as though the artist himself invents 
 nothing: he merely sees more clearly than 
 other men how things should be. The 
 more he approximates perfect rightness in 
 the forms of the things which he makes, the 
 more nearly he has learned to materialise 
 what the Divine Necessity has already 
 constructed. . . . ''The craftsman, look- 
 ing toward the true form, so fashions^' 
 (6 87}fXLOvpyb<; 7rpo9 rrjv iSmv ySAeVcov ovto) 
 TTouP) said Plato of such man-contrived 
 things as couches and tables. 
 
 How then does the artist's activity differ 
 from that of the philosopher, except that 
 one gives material w^hile the other gives 
 verbal expression to the concepts which he 
 discovers? It is the good craftsman's 
 business to seek out the right form, which 
 is the true and perfect species-type for the 
 kind of object which he is making. (And 
 perhaps beauty and intellectual fitness will 
 attend his discovery, because the true and 
 primal types are god-made.) 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN xMAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK xART 
 
 In Greek pottery, species appear and 
 maintain themselves with the most start- 
 Hng definiteness of shape. Lekythos, 
 pyxis, aryballos. hydria, krater, psykter, 
 slcyphos, ampliora, IcylLx, kantharos — how 
 distinct and distinctive they all are, each 
 form rigorously determined by a consid- 
 eration of its purpose and usefulness, with 
 its own secret of grace of line and harmony 
 of part! One comes to believe in their 
 real objective existence as firmly as though 
 they were genera and species of the animal 
 world evolved by Nature. One can detect 
 this same spirit in all the creations of the 
 Greek genius: clothes, household furni- 
 ture, tableware, all fall into type-forms 
 characterised by an almost logical co- 
 herence and exactness. 
 
 The work of the architect will reveal a 
 similar trait. If he plans a temple, his 
 most conspicuous artistic duty will be to 
 consider afresh the adequacy and rightness 
 of the temple-form as his predecessors have 
 sought it out and embodied it. What 
 criteria can he use for scmtinising their 
 success or failure? (Jnlv those of that 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 171 
 
 in vase- 
 making 
 
 in archi- 
 tecture 
 
172 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 inner necessity by which a form is recog- 
 nised as right and true. Whatever is un- 
 essential, whatever is not necessary to the 
 temple for its purpose or stability or dura- 
 bility, is irrelevant to the form; it is not a 
 part of the form, it is not a part of the 
 temple. The expense and labor and time 
 incident to the processes of building con- 
 spire to encourage the architect in elim- 
 inating the superfluous. How then could 
 there logically be different temple-plans, 
 when there is only one purpose for which 
 temples are used, one identical force of 
 gravitation to combat and master, one rain 
 and sun to oppose? There should only be 
 variety insomuch as there might be inade- 
 quacy in expressing, or incompleteness in 
 discovering, the true and right form. The 
 Parthenon is not a different building from 
 the temple of Poseidon at Paestum: it is 
 the same building grown closer and truer 
 to its proper and perfect semblance. 
 Iktinos invented nothing: he merely saw 
 more clearly how things should be. 
 
 But surely individual taste must enter 
 in? the architect must arrange and vary 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 details to siiit himself or the preference of 
 his patron? That might be the case, did 
 perfection depend on artist or pubhc; but 
 neither of these can create right relations, 
 they can only seek to embody them. One 
 can tune the strings of a lyre to yield any 
 pitch whatever; but the concords and dis- 
 sonances do not depend on the musician or 
 his public, but on the mathematics of the 
 musical scale. Individual preference is but 
 a chance guide to help the sensitive crafts- 
 man to the apprehension of those necessary 
 and inlierent harmonies which mark out 
 the true form from all more or less imper- 
 fect approximations. 
 
 The rivalry between Pythios and Her- 
 mogenes, who lived about a century apart, 
 was a contest to discover the same thing — 
 the most just proportions for a series of 
 architectural parts of established shape in 
 predetermined sequence of arrangement, in 
 fact the perfect norm for the century-old 
 Ionic Order as applied to the century-old 
 plan of the peripteral temple. And these 
 were great architects, the greatest perhaps 
 among the Greeks of their age, not because 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
174 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 they had done something new, but because 
 they had done something very old a little 
 better than anyone else had ever managed 
 to do it. The Athena temple at Priene and 
 the Artemis temple at Magnesia were 
 claimants for one and the same title, that 
 of the Ionic temple par excellence; their 
 size, their use, their location, their cost 
 were all minor considerations to this great 
 distinction of being canonic, the perfection 
 of their tribe and kind. In comparison 
 with the differences which are apparent in 
 any two Gothic cathedrals built within the 
 same century A. D., these two Ionic 
 temples would be indistinguishable one 
 from the other. In this Ionic architecture 
 of the Asia Minor coast we can obtain a 
 very admirable notion of the extent to 
 which individual preference and invention 
 were encouraged or allowed to assert 
 themselves. 
 
 The impression that the Greek architects 
 were merely seeking the right form, not 
 striving to be original or emotionally ex- 
 pressive, occurs insistently. The propor- 
 tions of the Doric Order change rapidly 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 175 
 
 but consistently during the sixth and fifth 
 centuries B.C. With the attainment of the 
 right fonn in the Athenian Propylaea the 
 process of development is almost entirely 
 arrested. Later, the decidence of the 
 Order from favour for temple-construction 
 and the obvious need of a lightened en- 
 tablature in the use of this Order for 
 colonnades, entirely altered the ratios: the 
 form was no longer right, an altered use 
 had modified it. The profile of the Doric 
 capital changes greatly during the sixth and 
 fifth centuries; but after the time of the 
 Propylaea the only important change is 
 the slight straightening of the toj) of the 
 echinus which makes the capital so much 
 easier to cut — and entirely robs it of beauty. 
 When the architects no longer appreciate 
 rightness of form, the Practical and the 
 Labor-saving are allowed to announce their 
 wishes. 
 
 Until Hellenistic times there was only 
 one important innovation among archi- 
 tectural forms — the Corinthian capital — 
 and that was jDroduced under logical pres- 
 sure because of the inadequacy of the exist- 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
176 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 ing forms. The Ionic capital posed an in- 
 soluble problem at the point where a 
 colonnade changed direction (as at the 
 corner of a temple), while the Doric cap- 
 ital could not be extricated from its use with 
 the Doric entablature whose triglyph was 
 a tyrannous nuisance with its interference 
 in the free spacing of columns. Moreover 
 neither the Doric nor the Ionic capital 
 strictly satisfied the logical requirements 
 for the right form. The capital's function 
 is to take the entablature weight and trans- 
 mit it to the column-shaft. As an inter- 
 mediary its shape should be consonant 
 with those which it serves: it should be 
 rectangular above and circular below in its 
 cross-section, and in the intervening part 
 it must perfonn without effort the transi- 
 tion from rectangle to circle. The Ionic 
 capital does not meet these requirements; 
 the Doric lacks the transition; but the 
 Corinthian will withstand the most rigor- 
 ous criticism. It is a marvellous meta- 
 morphosis of a circle into a rectangle by a 
 conventional device of leaves tied around 
 a shaft. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
F G R E E K A R T 
 
 177 
 
 The development of tlie Ionic column- 
 base from the crude and unfelt forms of the 
 Samian Heraion to the Attic or the fourth- 
 century Asia Minor types is a coherent and 
 gradual process. Contemplating it. we 
 have the impression of beholding in opera- 
 tion that which the metaphysicians call a 
 Final Cause, as though it were not each 
 term in the series which occasioned the 
 next, but the ultimate and perfect form 
 like a magnet exerting its attraction 
 through all the attempts of all the earlier 
 builders. Compare, in particular, the 
 Ionic bases of the Propylaea, of the east 
 porch of the Erechtheum, and the north 
 porch of the same building: the last form 
 lies in the first, and progress is as un- 
 hesitant as though the path were known 
 and the goal sighted in advance. Equally 
 impressive is the abrupt cessation of ex- 
 periments and changes as soon as the 
 right form has been attained. The pro- 
 file of the north porch bases recurs some 
 eighty years later on the monument of 
 Lysicrates, almost unmodified, and the 
 form seems to have imposed itself upon 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
178 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 the ancient builders almost as authorita- 
 tively as upon their modern imitators. 
 The Corinthian capital has much the same 
 history; its form, once reached, undergoes 
 little further change until late Hellenistic 
 times. 
 
 This explanation for the extraordinary 
 tyranny of the canonic form is manifestly 
 inapplicable to all the elements of the 
 Orders. The shape of a triglyph or mutule 
 could not be deduced from the necessities 
 of a roofed two-room shrine in trabeated 
 stone or from any other intellectual for- 
 mula or requirement. One could derive 
 the column logically, but not its diminu- 
 tion; the capital, but not its profile; the 
 architrave and perhaps the frieze, but not 
 their scheme of decoration; the cornice, 
 but not its profile. With the substitution 
 of stone for timber in very early times (for 
 however much one may differ as to the 
 precise structure of this timber prototype, 
 it is impossible to refuse credence to it in 
 some form or other) the stmctural reasons 
 for the appearance and pattern of regtila, 
 guttae, triglyph, mutule, fasciae, and 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 179 
 
 dentils disappeared; but the things them- 
 selves remained. By immemorial tradition 
 they survived, and just because strict logic 
 made no demand for their existence, it 
 made no demands about them at all. They 
 had come into existence and now persisted 
 in their own right as established species — 
 much as there might be no discoverable in- 
 herent necessity for owls or weasels, but 
 there they were, and each had its distinc- 
 tive and estabhshed form. That is why 
 throughout the classic period these ele- 
 ments of the Orders found no rivals. The 
 mind of man might create all manner of 
 designs and decorative details; but these 
 would have no inner necessity, no reason 
 for being thus rather than otherwise. 
 Dentils and mutules and triglyphs might 
 be equally arbitrary; but there they were. 
 They existed. As detail of some sort was 
 clearly needed to enliven and lighten the 
 superstructure, these decorative forms in- 
 herited from the old timber construction 
 were retained. So it was that Greek archi- 
 tecture had only two Orders. 
 * * * 
 
 
 A N D M ON OGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
180 
 
 Another 
 explanation 
 for the 
 tenacity ol 
 architec- 
 tural forms 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIvS 
 
 Sudi an explanation, howex'cr, is not 
 wholly satisfactory. In otlier arts, decora- 
 tive ornaments usually have a very well 
 marked career and run through a history 
 with recognisably similar stages. The 
 ornament begins as a more or less skillful 
 and accurate imitation of some actually 
 existing object of the animal or vegetable 
 or even inanimate world. By chnt of 
 repetition it loses its fidelity and freshness, 
 becomes stereotyped and conventionalised, 
 and after a time may drift so far from its 
 original appearance that its representa- 
 tional intent may be lost to the craftsman, 
 who blindly reproduces a meaningless pat- 
 tern. (The flower and marine motives of 
 Cretan, Mycenean, and sub-Mycenean art 
 may show the phases of such a develop- 
 ment.) But in Greek architecture (though 
 we find such naturalistic and living imi- 
 tations as those of the Corinthian capital 
 or some of the rinceaux of the simas, as 
 well as such ultra-conventionalised orna- 
 ments as those of the leaf -patterns on the 
 various cymatia), both naturalistic and 
 conventionalised ornament, once they have 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
O F G REEK A R T 
 
 been accepted for architectural use, undergo 
 remarkably little further change. A prac- 
 tised eye can distinguish between a Lesbian 
 cymation carved in the sLxth and one 
 carved in the third century B. C; but as 
 far as representational value or general 
 pattern is concerned, the difference is 
 slight. Only a specialist can tell in what 
 century a given triglyph was carved or de- 
 tect the difference between Ionic column- 
 bases of the fourth century B. C. and those 
 of the subsequent centuries. Why did the 
 ancient architects cling so closely to forms 
 and patterns that were neither necessary 
 nor especially logical, but merely tradi- 
 tional and accepted fashions of the school? 
 Perhaps it would be pertinent to ask a 
 closely similar ([uestion of the architects of 
 our own day. Why are the old Greek 
 Orders still retained to-day and why are no 
 new Orders invented to supplement or sup- 
 plant such hackneyed forms and formulae? 
 When so much might be created, why only 
 an uninventive repetition of a fashion that 
 every e3''e must have seen a thousand 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
182 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 times? In a word, why does architecture 
 persist in having ''Orders" at all? 
 
 Why, after so many hundred or even 
 thousand years, has architecture so few de- 
 vices in her copy-book? Is it really so 
 hard to invent an Order, that we have only 
 five or six for common service? And what, 
 fundamentally, is this fetish, this jargon of 
 the initiate, about "styles" — a Gothic 
 ''style," a Romanesque, a Greco-Roman, a 
 pure Hellenic "style"? Who or what 
 commanded that architects must keep to 
 style, must copy and imitate and adapt, 
 but not invent wholly new things for them- 
 selves? In literature plagiarism is held to 
 be anything but a virtue and a pastiche is 
 accounted worse than a "potboiler." Yet 
 a wholly original, inventive, and unplagiar- 
 ising architect would never get a commis- 
 sion. How came such a deplorable con- 
 dition? 
 
 It is perfectly true that examination of 
 the historical process in which architec- 
 tural styles and orders have come into 
 being should warn us that the attainment of 
 perfection is a tedious thing requiring the 
 
 I 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 183 
 
 combined and successive energies of many 
 men and outlasting the span of a single 
 human life, so that it is the part of caution 
 and sound sense to take from the past 
 what the past has found good; but I think 
 there is no other great art in which such a 
 plea can be advanced or entertained. No 
 doubt it is hard to write a good new piece 
 of music; but the modem composer can- 
 not therefore plead for privilege to take all 
 his themes from Haydn and Mozart and 
 his melodic developments from similar 
 treatments by earlier masters. 
 
 Of course it is immensely convenient to 
 trace off a good bit of detail from the Arch 
 of Titus or the temple of Castor and Pollux; 
 or to put the doorway of the Erechtheum 
 in toto for the main portal of a modern 
 bank; but if convenience is the only excuse 
 for such a practice, it is high time for a new 
 generation of practitioners to arise. Clearly 
 there is some fundamental principle which 
 is operative in architecture, however out 
 of place it may be in the other arts. 
 
 Contemporary critics often bewail what 
 they term the impasse of eclecticism and 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
184 
 
 Architec- 
 ture a 
 representa- 
 tional art 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 pretend to see no hope for an art which 
 makes past achievement its sole guide, 
 counsellor, and friend. They have failed 
 to observe that the tenacity of architec- 
 tur:d tradition is due to an instinctive 
 clutching for something permanent, fa- 
 miliar, and universal, on which to base 
 diversity and artistic interest. The paucity 
 of invention, the seemingly suicidal re- 
 straint of variety, are necessary because 
 architecture is seeking to establish for itself 
 a real world of recognised and recognisable 
 objects. Painting has the seen world to 
 draw upon: it does not have to create and 
 establish its trees, rocks, streams, mead- 
 ows, and animals, or waste any effort in 
 persuading us that they are things which 
 we already know. But architecture has to 
 invent its world of objects first, before it 
 can use them. And so, by the preference 
 of generations of men, it settles upon those 
 types and patterns which most commend 
 themselves for their grace or expressi\c- 
 ness or utility or simplicity, and these be- 
 come its world of real objects which it 
 imitates and represents amid those formal 
 
 B R Y N U A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 relations which physics will permit and 
 good taste commend. The fundamental 
 in such a theory is the assertion that, in 
 spite of appearances to the contrary, archi- 
 tecture tends to become a representational 
 art, and that it imitates or represents a 
 conventional world of its own creation. 
 It is precisely because a Doric entablature 
 is already famihar that it is artistically 
 useful. The architect does not invent new 
 orders for much the same reason that a 
 writer does not invent new words, but uses 
 the ones which are already known to his 
 public, or that the painter does not invent 
 botanical, zoological, and geological worlds 
 of his own, but imitates the familiar real- 
 ities of the ordinary world of sense. It 
 should follow, as a logical consequent, that 
 the artistic intention of the architect will 
 be uninteUigible to anyone who is not al- 
 ready conversant with the traditional and 
 conventional forms which he reproduces; 
 and this is actually the case in direct pro- 
 portion to the fixity with which the con- 
 ventional forms are established. To the 
 uneducated public the language of the 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
186 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 and there- 
 fore in need 
 of conven 
 tional forms 
 for its rep 
 resentata 
 
 classical orders is wholly lost, precisely be- 
 cause they are unaware of its alphabet and 
 phraseolog>^ 
 
 Greek architecture, indeed, is the out- 
 standing instance of this practice of estab- 
 lishing an artificial language by convention, 
 in order to communicate architectural emo- 
 tion. Gothic seems here (as in so much 
 else) to have been of the other school and 
 persuasion; yet for all its inventive free- 
 dom in profiles and shadows for the mould- 
 ings of piers and doorways, and its fertility 
 of intricate decoration, Gothic seems to 
 have been well aware that its freedom lay 
 within very definite bounds and to have 
 been scrupulously careful of the appropri- 
 ateness of form to function. Gothic was 
 a rich, picturesque language: the Greek 
 Orders were as concise as the Greek philo- 
 sophical vocabulary and consequently 
 equally capable of subtle " distinctions. 
 Only he who knows the Greek Orders very 
 intimately can really appreciate a master- 
 piece of Greek architecture. Though in- 
 tellectually we may understand the in- 
 tricate minutiae which occupied the build- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 187 
 
 ers' attention, perhaps very few to-day can 
 really feel the emotions which these min- 
 utiae are intended to impart. They are 
 like the subtleties of language which make 
 the magic of great poetry: we must know 
 the language amazingly well or we shall 
 wholly miss this magic. 
 
 In discussing the ideal trend of archi- 
 tectural form, I have argued as though the 
 eidos or right form were a changeless 
 thing. But this is of course no more true 
 of man-made forms than of the forms of 
 the natural world with their constant 
 though inappreciably gradual evolution. 
 Just as in the realm of plants and animals 
 the species-type changes, so in architecture 
 (but much more rapidly) the various stand- 
 ards change and evolve under the influence 
 of taste. So definite and so rational is 
 this transformation of the Greek Orders, 
 that it is almost possible to date any given 
 building merely by assigning its place in 
 this evolutionary process."* 
 
 But if the form is dependent upon con- 
 
 What 
 sanction 
 is there 
 for these 
 canonic 
 forms? 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
188 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 temporary taste and subject to constant, 
 if gradual, change, what assurance could an 
 ancient architect have that he had indeed 
 found the right and true form? Since all 
 the elements of his work were ultimately 
 man-devised and man-perfected, what pos- 
 sible guarantee of their objective fitness 
 could there be, or what sanction for their 
 claims to be the best type? That is a ques- 
 tion which the Greek must have asked him- 
 self. He found the answer just where we 
 to-day might wish to find it — in science, 
 though of course it was the science of his 
 day and generation and consisted mainly 
 of geometric theory. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 189 
 
 It is an impressive discovery when the 
 human mind first catches glimpse of the 
 eternal supersensuous laws ruling the 
 seemingly casual appearances of the world 
 of sense. This moment came to the Greeks 
 early in their career in the course of 
 Pythagorean and other geometric inves- 
 tigations. In musical theory its appear- 
 ance was most striking. Sounds — those 
 intangible and invisible occurrences, seem 
 ingly unruled by anything but a fortuitous 
 concordance among themselves — suddenly 
 admitted their allegiance to the tyranny 
 of geometry and number. The consonance 
 of two notes was shown to depend on the 
 presence of a simple integral numerical 
 ratio between the lengths of the strings 
 which produced them. Beauty and ugli- 
 ness of sound were but functions of Num- 
 ber and ratio, and therefore founded on 
 something measurable, something intel- 
 ligible. Everywhere, order showed its con- 
 trol within the tmiverse — in the paths of 
 the stars, in the structure of material 
 
 An intel- 
 lectual 
 sanction 
 from the 
 super- 
 sensual 
 world of 
 Number 
 (Cf. fifth- 
 century 
 sculpture, 
 ch. III.) 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
190 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 things — and everywhere, order seemed to 
 be traceable to the influence of Number. 
 If the right and wrong in something seem- 
 ingly so elusive and unmeasurable as mu- 
 sical tone was based on Number, was it 
 not even more probable that a similar geo- 
 metric or arithmetic basis should deter- 
 mine right and wrong in the appearance of 
 seen objects, which were material things, 
 measurable and directly amenable to geo- 
 metric notions? Nature is orderly. The 
 forms for which she strives are strikingly 
 symmetrical and numerically rational. 
 The accidents of matter obscure and con- 
 fuse the simple geometry of her intentions; 
 but if we compare enough specimens of any 
 species, we can eliminate the individual ac- 
 cidents and construct the true form. Here 
 then is a cardinal assumption of Greek 
 esthetic practice — that there is a true form 
 for every class of objects and that such a 
 true form is characterised by its geometric 
 simplicity, by the commensurability of its 
 component members. For if its parts be 
 not simply commensurable, then complex 
 and therefore less perfect numbers will 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 enter and take the place of the more per- 
 fect ones which might have been employed. 
 Commensiirability of parts, o-v/x/Acrpta, is 
 consequently a test of rightness of form, 
 and it behooves the architect to work by 
 the aid of its precepts. 
 
 The generative ratio of the Doric Order 
 was fixed as 2 to 1 in the earliest times of 
 which we have knowledge. In the round 
 building whose architrave was discovered 
 in the foundations of the Sikyonian treas- 
 ury at Delphi this ratio was apparently not 
 followed: in Hellenistic times the entab- 
 lature (because so diminished in height) 
 is frequently poly-triglyphal. But be- 
 tween these limits of time, the ratio of 2 to 
 1 served for what may be termed the gen- 
 erative formula of the Order! in its hori- 
 zontal extension. To every normal column 
 span we find (enumerating the elements as 
 they lie one above the other) 
 
 1 column, 
 
 2 regulae, 
 
 2 triglyphs -f 2 metopes. 
 
 4 mutules, 
 
 4 lions '-heads, 
 
 (8 rows of cover-tiles?) 
 
 AND IMONOGRAPHS 
 
192 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 so that an ordinary Doric colonnade beats 
 out a rhythm of full-notes in the columns, 
 half and quarter notes in the entablature, 
 and (frequently) eighth notes on the sloping 
 roof, and even sixteenth notes in the floral 
 ornamentation of the sima between the 
 lion's-head water-spouts. In the Zeus 
 temple at Olympia the measurements in 
 ancient feet show how thoroughly and co- 
 herently the ratio was applied: the width 
 of the roof-tile is taken as two feet, twice 
 this measure gives us the width of a mutule 
 with its via as well as the distance from 
 lion's-head to lion's-head on the roof gutter, 
 twice this latter measure gives the w4dth 
 of a triglyph with its metope, as well as 
 the length of an abacus block, twice this 
 measure gives the width from column 
 center to column center, which is also the 
 length of an epistyle block, and twice this 
 last measure gives the height of a column. 
 Finally, if the central akroterion of Nike 
 was life-size, the total height from stylo- 
 bate to peak of gable-figure may very prob- 
 ably have equalled twice this last measure- 
 ment. And so with 2X2X2X2X2 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 193 
 
 (X 2?) the exterior of the temple is built 
 up, and the tacit assumption seems to be 
 that the eye, contemplating these forms, 
 will be rhythmically affected by the simple 
 numerical ratios inherent in them. 
 
 The giant columns of Pcrsepolis clearly 
 betray Greek influence, and not least in 
 their careful obser^^ation of numerical sym- 
 metry. The two fore-parts of bulls which 
 carry the rafters are supported by a four- 
 sided theme, each side of which has four 
 scrolls or volutes (each decorated with 
 sixteen-petalled rosettes) into which a four- 
 filleted band has been wound; this in turn 
 is supported by a capital whose upper por- 
 tion shows eight, while its lower portion 
 shows sixteen, floral divisions; below, a 
 shaft with forty-eight flutings is supported 
 on a base whose petal forms number 
 twenty-four. 
 
 There can of course be no doubt of the 
 conscious use of this simplest of all nu- 
 merical ratios as a generative fomiula in 
 the Doric Order, but it should not be im- 
 agined that all the measurements therefore 
 will be found to be mathematically exact — 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
194 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 all equal or double or quadruple — in the 
 ancient Doric temples. In the Sicilian 
 temples' especially there occur the greatest 
 irregularities in the spacing of the columns 
 and the sizes of the various members. 
 Much of this may be attributed to indif- 
 ferent workmanship, since the eye really 
 exacts only very general approximations to 
 the mathematically correct in architectural 
 ratios. But in the classic instance of the 
 Parthenon it is a very difficult thesis to 
 maintain that the irregularities are at- 
 tributable to mason's errors or the archi- 
 tect's indifference to exactness. Rather it 
 appears that the builders deliberately 
 sought to temper the mathematically cor- 
 rect by slight departures from the "true" 
 measurements, even carrying this ideal so 
 far that they left no straight line straight 
 nor any equal spacing equal. ^ We cannot 
 fail to recall the practice of the sculptors 
 contemporary to the Periclean architects, 
 and particularly that reputedly Poly- 
 kleitan saying concerning the ''many num- 
 bers" which ''almost'' give perfection. 
 The so-called ''refinements" of Periclean 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 195 
 
 architecture, the slight deviations from per- 
 fect regularity and symmetry, are not 
 optical corrections for untrue illusions,* but 
 are added in order to give life to the purely 
 mathematical correctness of the £t8r/; 
 they are the departures from the ttoXAwv 
 cLfiiOixoiv the -rrapa fxtKpov out of which 
 arises to cv. Certainly it is a very sur- 
 prising thing that the Parthenon measure- 
 ments cannot be reduced to feet and dactyls 
 according to any common scale. A foot of 
 .2957 meters will do fairly well; a foot of 
 .3362 meters will apply with nearly equal 
 success; but neither these nor any other 
 unitary lengths will fit all the measure- 
 ments, because they are integrally incom- 
 mensurable. We can only conclude that 
 the builders of the Parthenon (whether by 
 intelligent imitation or by intuitive artistic 
 taste) had applied to architecture the same 
 secret of beauty which governs natural 
 forms — the tempering of geometric accu- 
 racy by minute deviations in the interest 
 of irregularity. I need only refer to the 
 extraordinary mathematical precision 
 which underlies natural forms in the vege- 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
196 
 
 "Eidos" 
 and "hylc 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 table and animal worlds' o and to the patent 
 observation that in any given individual 
 of the species the precision of the under- 
 lying form is always tempered by the ir- 
 regularities attendant upon the chance ele- 
 ments of environment and growth, and add 
 that we are apt to find the actual slightly 
 irregularised flower or shell more real, more 
 "living," and more artistically moving than 
 the cold geometrical perfection of the un- 
 derlying form. The form only lives when 
 it is irregularised in matter. In architec- 
 ture the forms are man-devised; but if they 
 are harmonised with mathematical pre- 
 cision and then irregularised in their ma- 
 terial presentation, they will acquire a 
 status analogous to that of a living thing in 
 nature. 
 
 The esthetic value of using convention- 
 ally established architectural forms, or 
 ''Orders," is again proven. For only if the 
 forms are already established as species, 
 can there be any chance of success for this 
 device of tempered irregularity which will 
 impart individual existence to each em- 
 bodiment of the species-form. The em- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 ployment of the Greek "refinements" 
 would be neither useful nor explicable if 
 these did not constitute appreciable de- 
 partures from clearly recognisable and al- 
 ready familiar norms. As Greek philos- 
 ophy might have stated it, the eidos is 
 characterised by mathematical perfection; 
 this perfection is somewhat obscured when 
 the eidos is imprinted in matter; but it is 
 precisely from its minute deviations and 
 irregularities away from the standard form 
 that the individual instance derives its in- 
 di^'iduality and its right to a place in the 
 phenomenal world of sense. 
 
 There is a considerable body of testi 
 mony all tending to ascribe a sense of the 
 unliving ("rigid," "cold," "uninteresting," 
 are typical words) to buildings which dis 
 play complete precisit)n in their measure- 
 ments, and a contrary impression of life 
 ("alive," "warm," "elastic," "appealing," 
 are frequent epithets) to the irregularised 
 perfection of such buildings as the Parthe- 
 non. 
 
 It is not apparent that this principle of 
 tempered precision was largely used after 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
198 
 
 Number 
 still at 
 work 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 the fifth century. I believe that the frag- 
 ments of later Ionic architecture show a 
 very small margin of error, small enough 
 to be unintentional on the part of the 
 builders. The curvature of horizontal lines 
 was largely abandoned, and the ideal of 
 accurate perfection seems to have main- 
 tained itself thereafter in most of the 
 Greco-Roman as in the Renaissance and 
 modern classical schools; but these state- 
 ments are subject to confirmation or cor- 
 rection. 
 
 * * * 
 
 In the Ionic entablature there was no 
 obvious opportunity of setting up rhythmic 
 accord with the columns by a simple ratio, 
 as in the Doric Order. The Ionic archi- 
 trave carries no \'%rtical ornament, the 
 figured frieze is horizontally continuous, 
 the crowning mouldings of the members are 
 too minute to be serviceable. There re- 
 main only the dentils and the sima. Of 
 these, the dentils furnish a very clear ver- 
 tical motive repeated in horizontal exten- 
 sion; but they are rather small, and the 
 
 B R Y N M A W R NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 199 
 
 consequent accord of ten to fifteen dactyls 
 for each intercolumniation is not a relation 
 which the eye would easily detect or from 
 which it would derive any particular satis- 
 faction. The sima, however, with its 
 lions '-heads, could be utilised and — though 
 the matter has not been thoroughly inves- 
 tigated — it would appear that the architect 
 Pythios employed these lions' -heads to es 
 tablish a 3 to 1 ratio with the colonnade. 
 Thus, on his great work the Mausoleum^^ 
 and his master work the little Athena 
 temple at Priene, the lions'-heads space 
 three to the colimin interval, and are so 
 placed that two out of every triad are ex- 
 actly over the eyes of the volutes of cap- 
 itals as well as over the edges of the column 
 shafts at their mean height. ^^ By this de- 
 vice the eye is led to single out at three 
 levels (at mean column-height, at the 
 capital, and at the roof -gutter) a horizontal 
 measurement which recurs continuously, 
 while every third recurrence of it is ac- 
 cented by a column. With this tri-partite 
 division the dentils are not brought into 
 accord on the Mausoleum; but in P\i:hios' 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
200 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 later work, the Athena temple at Priene, 
 there are five dentils to each lion-spacing. 
 A century later, in the Artemis temple at 
 Magnesia on the Meander, Hennogenes 
 seems to have adhered to this same 3 to 1 
 rhythm. 
 
 The same ratio also obtained vertically 
 in the Ionic Order; for the entablature was 
 rather evenly divided into the three ele- 
 ments of epistyle, frieze, and cornice, while 
 the epistyle was subdivided into three 
 horizontal fasciae and the cornice into three 
 elements, dentils, geison, and sima,^^ 
 though these usually were of tmequal 
 height. 
 
 Plans and facades were also laid out to 
 exhibit simple ratios. The length and 
 breadth of the Parthenon stylobate are as 
 4 to 9. At Peiraeus in the arsenal which 
 Philon built in the latter fourth century, 
 the front, beneath the cornice, was a per- 
 fect rectangle, twice as wide as it was high; 
 on the long sides the ratio of length to 
 height was exactly 15 to 1. The interior 
 floor space was a rectangle whose sides were 
 related as 8 to 1 . 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Finally, attention might be called to the 
 predilection for ''round" or perfect num- 
 bers. Athena's old temple on the Acro- 
 polis was known as the " Hundredf oot " and 
 the sanctuary room of the Parthenon may 
 perhaps have kept this measurement for 
 its length. The cella of the Athena temple 
 at Priene measm-ed 100 feet in length from 
 wall-face to wall-face. 
 
 The use of Number penetrated into ar- 
 chitectura Ipractice much farther than the 
 mere horizontal rh5rthm or the simple com- 
 mensiurability of the larger elements. In 
 the fully established canons of the fourth 
 and third centuries, in the work of the 
 Ionic architects Pythios and Hermogenes, 
 it would appear that every smallest ele- 
 ment was dominated and determined in its 
 measurements by numerical relations. In 
 trying to unravel their skein of nimibers, 
 the student will discover that much of the 
 commensurability may be ascribed to the 
 architect's use of a foot-rule, and will be 
 tempted to believe that this simple ex 
 planation is sufficient. Where stones were 
 laid off to a measure of feet and dactyls 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
202 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 they could not well fail to be commensur- 
 able. But since there were 16 dactyls to 
 the ancient foot, divisions and subdivisions 
 would have to partake of the nature of 
 continued bisection: division by 3, 5, or 
 7 would seldom yield lengths measurable 
 in dactyls. Yet if Dinsmoor's measure- 
 ments of the Mausoleum fragments in the 
 British Museum are correct, such com- 
 mensurable but not measurable^'' relations 
 were employed, and Vitruvius refers fre- 
 quently to division into 7, 9, 11, 13, etc. 
 It would seem therefore that the com- 
 mensurability of parts is not an accidental 
 corollary of the employment of a measured 
 foot-rule, but an intentional artistic prac- 
 tice. 
 
 A further objection can be raised. Vi- 
 truvius, who must have had access to the 
 traditional canons of some of these Greek 
 architects (Hermogenes in particular) is 
 full of rules of perfection. He instils com- 
 mensurability {modulatio or commodulatio) 
 by determining a modulus or unit with 
 which to measure off diameters and heights 
 and widths. Out of any measurement so 
 
 T 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 established a new modulus may be derived 
 for fixing details and lesser elements in a 
 design. 
 
 Thus, for example, the heights of 
 mouldings are stated as fractions of the 
 members to which they belong; the mid- 
 dle fascia of an Ionic epistyle is taken as 
 a modulus for the geison; the diameter 
 of the oculus of an Ionic capital gives 
 the amount of projection for the echinus, 
 and so on. This method of passing from 
 one modulus to another is nowhere more 
 clearly expressed by Vitruvius than in 
 his description of the Ionic doorw^ay. 
 . . . From this example we see that 
 though each member of the doorway is 
 regarded as a modulus or measure of its 
 immediate neighbour, nevertheless all 
 are connected with each other and with 
 the large dimension of the whole by a 
 common measure. This illustrates the 
 \^itruvian conception of proportion and 
 there is every reason to believe that the 
 standpoint of the Greek authors from 
 whom he derived his inspiration was noi 
 essentiallv different.''' 
 
 A N D MONOGRAPHS 
 
204 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 It is a frequent impression among modem 
 readers and commentators of Vitruvius 
 that these rules for the minutest details of 
 the elements of the Orders are intended to 
 be purely practical devices to save time and 
 trouble with simple rules-of -thumb; and 
 so they may 'have been in Vitruvius' own 
 time — and since then. But all our discus- 
 sion has tended to show that this is not the 
 whole explanation, but that we have in 
 these canons the echo of that old faith in 
 the efficacy of Number to establish the per- 
 fection of the foim. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 I have dwelt a good deal on this nu- 
 merical aspect of Greek architecture not 
 only because it is philosophically interest- 
 ing in its own right, but also because of 
 certain remarkable implications which it 
 involves. Out of Number come com- 
 mensurability of lengths and siuf aces and, 
 by repetition, architectural beat and 
 rhythm. But all these in Greek archi- 
 tecture are only effective upon the spec- 
 tator if the matter in which they are em- 
 bodied is seen as in one and the same plane. 
 
 The rhythm of a Doric colonnade with 
 its measured recurrence of columns moving 
 past, while the triglyphs double and the 
 cornice and roof quadruple the same steady 
 beat — all this is effective, indeed exists for 
 the beholder, only if all these elements are 
 felt to be on a single surface or area or 
 plane. Theirs is an art of related lines and 
 surfaces, not of solids. 
 
 Now it is perfectly true that "inequality 
 is the normal fact of optical appearance "" 
 and that none of the equal surfaces of suc- 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 205 
 
 Spatial pre- 
 sentation 
 once more. 
 (Cf. chap- 
 ter II.) 
 Nvimbcr a 
 function of 
 two-dimen- 
 sional pre- 
 sentation 
 
206 
 
 Greek 
 architec- 
 ture 
 
 ace ordingly 
 an art of 
 two dimen- 
 sions 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 cessive metopes or the equal spacings of 
 triglyphs or regulae or lions '-heads will 
 really be equal in our field of vision be- 
 cause of the perspective in which they are 
 seen. But the mind has learned to cor- 
 rect the appearances which the eye en- 
 counters and to read off the true state be- 
 hind the changes of perspective vision. 
 But it does this, in Greek architecture, by 
 the assumption of a plane in which all the 
 unequal appearances actually lie with all 
 their appropriate lengths and areas equal. 
 It is by referring them to a single plane that 
 the mind reconstitutes that recurrence of 
 equal intervals on which the sense of 
 rhythm depends. 
 
 It should follow that Greek architecture, 
 in order to make its use of number effective, 
 must have been an architecture of planes 
 rather than of solids. This was precisely 
 the case. 
 
 Instead of true depth, Greek architec- 
 ture gives us successive and usually parallel 
 planes. The stoa or colonnade presents the 
 front plane of the exterior order, the middle 
 plane of the columns which support the 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 207 
 
 roof-beam, and the rear plane of the wall 
 at the back. There is no sense of depth or 
 enclosed space. Rather, the true depth 
 has been converted into a succession of 
 nearly flat and wholly disconnected sur- 
 faces — precisely as in Greek relief sculpture. 
 Even the roof, thanks to the straight 
 mounting lines of the cover-tiles, joins in 
 the vertical planes. The human beings 
 moving in this colonnade appear to the ex- 
 terior spectator like bas reliefs on the rear 
 plane. 
 
 With the temple it is, of course, the 
 same. On the long sides there are two par- 
 allel planes, that of the colonnade and that 
 of the naos wall; on the short sides there 
 are three planes, that of the exterior colon- 
 nade, that of the vestibule colonnade and 
 that of the rear wall of the vestibule (with 
 or without its doorway with door or hang- 
 ing). More complicated vistas in agora or 
 temcnos only add other planes. In 
 glimpses across angles of colonnaded 
 squares, or through comers of dipteral 
 temples, the masses are all presented at in- 
 tervals so that the eye sees a series of 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 1 
 
208 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 superimposed surfaces sharply divided by 
 an intervening break of perfectly indeter- 
 minate extent. It should be added that 
 the Greek atmosphere encourages this im- 
 pression by eating up the air's appearance 
 of solidity, so that space loses its density 
 and stirfaces seem directly superimposed. 
 
 Not all these planes are parallel since 
 the colonnades surround the temple on the 
 exterior and frequently the agora or te- 
 menos on its inner face . But only one angle 
 is permitted, the right angle of 90 degrees. 
 Just as the mind interprets the perspective 
 of the stoa by its knowledge that it lies in 
 a single plane, so it can proceed to the more 
 difficult perspective of a comer if the angle 
 is known and constant. The rectangular- 
 ity of Greek plans is theu* most remarkable 
 characteristic. Temples, temple enclos- 
 ures, market-places, houses, and (after the 
 fifth century) towns and cities are rect- 
 angular without break or pity, as the 
 architecture of planes demanded that they 
 must be. 
 
 And so there follows the most remarkable 
 property of all in Greek architecture. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Since its appearances all lie in parallel or 
 perpendicular planes, it can only defiiie or 
 bound solid space, and cannot enclose it. 
 
 Just as there is no true depth to a Greek 
 colonnade, but only the specious depth of 
 Greek sculptured relief, so there is no sense 
 of space shut in and contained in anything 
 that the Greek builders made. Even the 
 temple-interiors offered only more colon- 
 nades and walls in parallel planes, topped 
 by a flat ceihng which was only another 
 plane at right angles. Such a procedure 
 bounds space, defines it; but though me- 
 chanically it contains space because it 
 shuts it off, it is powerless to impart any 
 such feeling to the human mind. Whereas 
 a vault closes down upon space and makes 
 space sensible, a panel ceiling merely ties 
 the walls. In the terms of relief -carving 
 it acts like the straight edge or step be- 
 tween successive planes. 
 
 That these temple interiors were but 
 half-lighted is perhaps an indication that 
 artistically they were but half-felt or half- 
 considered. They were but the space en- 
 closed by the inner faces of the walls ; they 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
210 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 were the inside of the treasure-chest, serv- 
 ing to shut in the gold and the sacred heir- 
 looms; and just as the outside of a chest 
 has the craftsman's favor and gets the 
 carving and gilding, so it was the exterior 
 aspect of these enclosing walls which ap- 
 pealed to the ancient builder. 
 
 No doubt this is somewhat fanciful, and 
 there exists a better reason for the opinion 
 that interiors were the least successful 
 aspect of Greek architectiue. For it is of 
 the utmost importance to note that Greek 
 architecture had almost no need (of a di- 
 rect practical kind) for trying to shut space 
 in. Greek life was out of doors. The 
 houses were mere sleeping-cells about a 
 central patio, the theatres were unroofed 
 gathering-places of the people upon the 
 hill-side; the market-places were open; 
 even the shops were mere store-houses from 
 which goods for the day's trade could be 
 brought out to be spread in the open 
 bazaar; the colonnades were but casual 
 out-of-door shelters from wind and rain 
 and sun; the schools were out-of-door 
 palaestrae; the hospitals were colonnades 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 211 
 
 in the sacred precinct of Aesclepios. Only 
 the temples and the council-rooms so much 
 as put the problem of enclosing air-space 
 with encompassing masonry. Before the 
 late Hellenistic age, domestic architecture 
 hardly existed. It is not remarkable, 
 therefore, that the architects devoted 
 themselves wholly to external appearances 
 or that, given the Greek conditions of at- 
 mosphere and light, they learned, as no 
 other race has done, the secret of surface 
 and line, but got no farther in the esthetics 
 of their art than the expression of support 
 in vertical parallel planes. 
 
 We may assert, therefore, that the Greek 
 architects had no comprehension of the 
 artistic handling of space in interiors. 
 That vast preoccupation of Gothic and 
 modern designers was to them a book un- 
 opened. If a paradox is permissible, their 
 only interior compositions were out-of- 
 doors, where the roof was the blue sky. 
 In town-square and temple -precinct they 
 composed spatial complexes; but the pic- 
 ture is always made of overlapping sur- 
 faces moving across one another as the 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
212 
 
 More 
 general 
 considera- 
 tions of 
 two-dimen- 
 sional 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 spectator moves. The intervening depths 
 are lost, just as they were lost for the 
 ridges and gulleys and forests of their own 
 beloved mountains which still to-day show 
 like flat bas-reliefs against the Grecian sky. 
 
 Architecture makes its esthetic appeal 
 visually, utilising both two-dimensional 
 and three-dimensional presentations of 
 itself to its beholder. For two-dimensional 
 presentations it depends upon its appear- 
 ance in the flat, as though it aimed at plane 
 composition, with a design in areas whose 
 mutually related shapes and sizes, colors 
 and positions were the object of esthetic 
 contemplation and the source of esthetic 
 delight. Almost any fagade is a composi- 
 tion of this kind. The ItaHan Renaissance 
 carried to a high refinement and subtlety 
 the art of such planilinear presentation. 
 The fronts of the Municipio at Verona and 
 the Grimani palace in Venice are instances 
 of compositions for whose appreciation we 
 shall need some feeling for the alternating 
 rhythm with which wall-space and window- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 213 
 
 space, light and shadow, column and col- 
 umn, are held against each other for con- 
 trast of recurrent agreement. 
 
 Three-dimensional presentation may be 
 most intelligibly explained as the effort of 
 architecture to suggest the enclosing of 
 space. In sculpture we saw art striving to 
 impart a sense of space solidly occupied. 
 In architectvu-e we have a striving to out- 
 line, define, and limit space within an en- 
 closing shell or boundary. It is not enough 
 that walls and roof do actually enclose 
 space; it is the artist's part to make them 
 seem to do so, that the spectator may by 
 direct visual apprehension be aware of this 
 power and property of the builded thing. 
 St. Sophia, seen from without— for all its 
 clumsy contours— most patently succeeds 
 in imparting this sense of space enclosed. 
 To do so is indeed one of the original and 
 distinctive qualities of the Byzantine style 
 which differentiates it from the preceding 
 Greek as thoroughly in the esthetic domain 
 as the use of domes on pendentives marks 
 it off in the mechanical domain. It is ob- 
 vious that since architecture, unlike sculp- 
 
 and three- 
 dimensional 
 presenta- 
 tion 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
214 
 
 ESTHETIC BAvSIS 
 
 
 ture, is intended to be seen from within as 
 well as from without, the artistic problem 
 occurs not merely for the visual presenta- 
 tion of the exterior but recurs even more 
 insistently for the interior. And here, 
 since the spectator is himself physically 
 within the enclosed space, the three-dimen- 
 sional presentation is of the utmost impor- 
 tance and carries with it an extraordinary 
 range of emotional affection. The spec- 
 tator is peculiarly at the mercy of every 
 spatial suggestion, so that an almost mag- 
 ical power accrues to the intelligent master 
 of this art. The apprehended space may 
 bear almost no similarity to the actual 
 physical space of such-and-such cubic 
 volume which is determinable by measure- 
 ment. One has but to recall the nave of a 
 large Roman basilica and that of a major 
 Gothic cathedral to understand how little 
 a propos are the actual dimensions of 
 height and width. 
 
 It is just this power of three-dimensional 
 presentation (so marvellous an achieve- 
 ment of the Gothic style) which I feel to be 
 almost entirely absent in ancient Greek 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 architecture. It confines itself to a two- 
 dimensional presentation. 
 
 Indeed, I am tempted to hazard the 
 seeming absurdity that the East Mediter- 
 ranean people live in a much less three 
 dimensional world than the North Euro 
 peans. A visual space in which all distant 
 objects tend to be projected upon a single 
 plane would not present so much depth, so 
 much three-dimensional solidity, as a vis- 
 ual space in which the correct distance of 
 objects was more clearly defined. A race 
 living in a spatial environment of the first 
 type would incline in its art to silhouette 
 drawing and flat "decorative" design. It 
 is not accidental that Egyptian drawing 
 never succeeded in indicating aerial depth 
 and distance, or that a great power for 
 enveloping painted scenery in atmospheric 
 shadow arose in the school of the Nether- 
 lands. In Egypt and Arabia the shadow 
 of a modelled projection tends to look like 
 a dark surface in the same plane as its back- 
 ground and it is therefore disturbing to the 
 beauty of the design unless its superficial 
 area and outline agree with the rest of the 
 
 215 
 
 (but not in 
 Greece) 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 Climate 
 and space 
 
216 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 pattern. How much of the quality of 
 pierced black-and-white ornament of 
 Alschatta, Syrian Byzantine, and Coptic 
 decoration is not explained by this at- 
 mospheric^ accident? And how much is 
 not the Perso-Mesopotamian genius for 
 decorative pattern in rugs and hangings 
 and fayence a function of an atmospheric 
 compulsion toward flat design and toward 
 polychromy as a substitute for the chia- 
 roscuro of varying projections and model- 
 ling? Conversely, in the rainy and foggy 
 lands, third-dimensional depth is directly 
 given in visual perception, since projec- 
 tions and shadows keep to their own plane 
 and hold their distance. The repeated 
 mouldings of Gothic portals and piers de- 
 pend greatly upon this possibility of real 
 spatial extension of objects in light and 
 shadow. Is it any wonder that the deep 
 portals and the great Gothic interiors never 
 grew in Italian but flourished in Northern 
 European air? And is it not a futility to 
 take Greek architecture, calculated for 
 \nsual projection upon parallel planes 
 which the climate of Greece enforces, and 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 to transplant it to Liverpool or Berlin where 
 it will be riddled with depth, like a curtain 
 shot through with holes? 
 
 Upon this two-dimensional character of 
 its visual presentation Greek architecture 
 based its artistic effects. Since support in 
 the immediate vertical plane was all that 
 such an art could present to the eye, all 
 expression of weight sustained and held 
 aloft must appear in the arrangement of 
 lines and surfaces in the frontal plane of 
 the Order. The entablature presses fiat 
 upon the columns and therefore can toler- 
 ate only horizontal or vertical lines in its 
 decoration, since in this way the heavy un- 
 comprising mass can be made directly in- 
 telligible. Our eyes follow the horizontal 
 lines and our emotions instinctively in- 
 terpret such lines in terms of mass in a state 
 of rest. We have experienced just such a 
 sweep of line in looking at the horizon of 
 plains or of the ocean : it is the line of things 
 outspread, heavy and immovable and en- 
 during, held by gravity, but in no danger 
 of falling. The coliunns express in their 
 contour successful but not effortless re- 
 
 217 
 
 Greatness 
 of Greek 
 architec- 
 ture in its 
 own 
 
 restricted 
 domain 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
218 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 sistance to this downward pressure, which 
 weighs squarely and heavily upon them 
 until they bulge with the pressure. Here 
 presumably is the psychology of entasis: 
 it is the visible yielding to compression 
 until a stable condition of resistance is 
 reached. It establishes an analogy with 
 hirnian muscular effort and presents it 
 directly to our emotional sensibiUty. 
 
 Obviously the Doric Order with its heav- 
 ier and simpler entablature, more massive 
 columns, and more pronounced entasis 
 carries this appeal much farther than does 
 the Ionic, which has comparatively a light 
 and variegated load which it carries easily 
 and with elegance. It is because of this 
 direct visual presentation of the vertical 
 support of a great weight, not without ef- 
 fort, that the Doric temples are so "vigor- 
 ous," so "powerful," so "enduring" and 
 "eternal." The nearby rocks against 
 which the sheep rub their flanks have lasted 
 in their places longer than these ruined 
 temples; but it is the temples which cry 
 aloud that they are everlasting. 
 
 As long as the mere problem of overcom- 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 219 
 
 ing mechanical difficulties besets and trou- 
 bles the builder, he will take delight in 
 visuahsing through architectural means the 
 weight of stones and the effort of holding 
 them aloft. This is why so much early 
 work of the hirnian races is megaHthic or 
 massive or (where the race is artistically 
 more sensitive and more gifted) more im- 
 posing and more able to impart a sense of 
 great weight nobly borne. But when the 
 mere mechanical obstacles cease to be 
 obstacles, the builder loses his feehng for 
 the sheer oppression of weight and tends 
 more and more to deHght in imparting the 
 very opposite sensation of stone poised 
 aloft as though it weighed nothing, and 
 using it for a free fantasy of imaginative 
 constructions. The analogy between Ro- 
 manesque with the successive three periods 
 of Gothic and the progress of Greek archi- 
 tecture is therefore not casual but neces- 
 sary. The Doric Order is gradually robbed 
 of its sense of size and weight and the Ionic 
 Order grows more and more universally 
 popular only to yield to a Corinthian Style 
 
 A sugges- 
 tion 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
220 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 which grows (before its final decadence) 
 extremely ornate. 
 
 The need for fluting the cokimn is easily- 
 explained. Seen in its out-of-door setting 
 in the vertical plane of its Order, the Greek 
 coliunn would appear as a thin, fiat surface 
 without sufficient solidity to perform its 
 fimction of support, were it not for the 
 flutes, the peculiar spacing of whose ver- 
 tical shadow-lines forces the eye to inter- 
 pret the column as a rounded solid, how- 
 ever invisible the curvature may otherwise 
 be. 
 
 As in Greek relief, the third dimension 
 is not suppressed, but abbreviated. It 
 exists to give substantiality to the content 
 of each of the various planes. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 221 
 
 It is often said of Greek architecture that 
 it has no method of suggesting size because 
 the members of the Orders maintain such 
 accurate relative proportion that there is 
 no fixing of "scale." So far was this accu- 
 racy of proportion carried that correction 
 was made for the apparent diminution of 
 size of distant objects by making them cor- 
 respondingly larger than strict ratio de- 
 manded, as when entablatures topping high 
 columns were given more than their strict 
 proportional height. (Cf. Vitruvius III, 
 3, 13.) Consequently, by eliminating even 
 that clue to actual size which the diminu- 
 tion due to actual distance from the eye 
 might have furnished, the possibility of 
 judging scale was wholly removed. This 
 is certainly true; but it is also true that if 
 any absolute unit of measurement could 
 be introduced, an apprehension of the size 
 of every part would follow, precisely be- 
 cause of this constant accuracy of relations 
 between the elements. If it is recalled that 
 Greek architecture was intended for public 
 
 "Scale" 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
222 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 "Contour" 
 
 places, it will be evident that the Greek 
 colonnade was usually seen with human 
 beings standing or moving among its col- 
 umns. The seen relation of column-spac- 
 ing to the width of men's bodies, and of 
 columns' height to the height of men, sup- 
 plies just that absolute unit of measurement 
 on which scale depends. We may under- 
 stand from this why Greek taste tolerated 
 the fixing of statues between the columns 
 on the top step of a temple platform (as at 
 Olympia) or the amassing of statuary in 
 open agora and temenos. Just because of 
 the orderliness of Greek ratios a human 
 being or a life-sized statue could furnish 
 scale to a degree wholly impossible in other 
 periods and styles. 
 
 Greek relief, we have seen, was an art 
 mainly of contours. If the insistence on 
 the two-dimensional quality of Greek archi- 
 tectural composition is justified, it should 
 follow that the Greek architects should 
 have been extremely sensitive to outline; 
 and this is notoriously the case. The cor- 
 ner of a Grecian temple seen against a 
 luminous sky should be a revelation to 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 every modem student. The broken line 
 from step to akroterion is amazingly clari- 
 fying, in that it so clearly distinguishes 
 and emphasises every member of the Order. 
 More than that, it helps to set the mass of 
 the temple in equilibrium and stabilizes the 
 whole structure. But again it is essentially 
 as the boimding-line of a plane surface that 
 this comer contour works on us — as one 
 can see from the extraordinary way in 
 which its effect is heightened at night or 
 against a sunset sky, when the temple loses 
 its projection and solidity and flattens to a 
 surface in silhouette. 
 
 Since its effects are calculated for pres- 
 entation in a plane, what should have been 
 the fate of the classic Orders in later times 
 when the great discovery of architectiu-e as 
 an art of three-dimensional presentation 
 had been made? They should have sunk 
 to an ornamental accessory for articulating 
 facades and other vertical planes. Actu- 
 ally, as early as imperial Roman times, they 
 began to be used as attached orders with- 
 out structural importance; and though 
 purely Hellenic structures have continued 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
224 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 An un- 
 favorable 
 estimate 
 
 to be built, it is largely as decorative 
 motives that the forms of Greek architec- 
 ture persist to-day. Their fate was thor- 
 oughly appropriate and deserved. 
 
 Like Greek painting and Greek music/' 
 Greek architecture marks a stage of in- 
 complete development in the evolution of 
 its art and, like them, it exhibits the most 
 enviable and amazing perfection of certain 
 cardinal esthetic elements, combined with 
 a complete ignorance of others no less im- 
 portant to the art in its fuller evolution. 
 
 * ♦ + 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 Where mistakes are costly and produc- 
 tion tedious, patrons and artists alike step 
 warily. Printer's ink and paper, canvas 
 and oils can be lavished, their cost is small 
 restraint; but the hewn stones, the scaf- 
 folds, and the vast array of masons make 
 architectural follies too prodigal for repeti- 
 tion. For this reason, though we may write 
 for amusement and paint for pleasure, we 
 seldom build except for use. Finally, 
 though poetry can turn the hills upside 
 down, live in the moon, and walk on thin 
 crusts of water, though painting can re- 
 make the world to suit itself, architecture 
 must rest a stone on a stone, even to span 
 a void, and desist when the formula of 
 gravitation says No. 
 
 Here, then, are three considerations 
 which keep architecture within conven- 
 tional rounds: cost and difficulty of pro- 
 duction, practical aim, physical limita- 
 tions. Because the claims of these three 
 must first be satisfied, they have made 
 tyrants of themselves and have even gone 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 225 
 
 Architec- 
 ture as an 
 art of visual 
 presenta- 
 tion 
 
 Three 
 
 tyrants 
 
226 
 
 EvSTHETIC BASIS 
 
 who must 
 be over- 
 thrown 
 
 so far as to elevate their demands into a 
 canon of architectural beauty. 
 
 Cost has declared: "A building is 
 beautiful when no element of it is super- 
 fluous." Practical Aim has asserted: "A 
 building is beautiful when it expresses the 
 use for which it was made." Physical 
 Limitation has maintained: "A building 
 is beautiful when it expresses its construc- 
 tion." 
 
 But all these are mere tyramiy of mate- 
 rialism and have little or nothing to do 
 with artistic values. At most, their truth 
 is purely negative, for it may be that if a 
 building does not express its use and pur- 
 pose, the offense against our practical sense 
 produces an esthetic reaction, and if a 
 building looks as if it were supported by 
 columns and beams, while really it rests on 
 concealed vaulting, our like of straightfor- 
 ward dealing and our displeasure at decep- 
 tion may influence our esthetic judgment. 
 
 For years I have tried to persuade my- 
 self that my pleasure in a Gothic cathedral 
 was derived from an appreciation of the 
 marvellous balance of thrusts and strains, 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 that I approved of Roman aqueducts be- 
 cause they were nothing but arches reaching 
 up to a level at which they could make 
 water flow across plain and valley to a 
 far-off town, and that the plan of a Greek 
 temple was a perfect thing because it 
 showed a room for the god's image, a room 
 for the adorant, a preparatory vestibule, 
 and a surrounding portico with shelter 
 from sim and rain — ^just the things that 
 were needful, and nothing more. And all 
 the while secretly I knew that I was per- 
 suading myself with an intellectual theory 
 and that the whole thing was simple self- 
 deception, that I was taking a contributory 
 element for sole cause and criterion, and 
 that I liked Gothic cathedrals and Roman 
 aqueducts and Greek temples for much 
 more simple and less round-about reasons, 
 that I liked them not because they ex- 
 pressed this or that, but because their 
 looks appealed directly to me. I liked them 
 not merely for their intentions, but for 
 what they were — so much stone in such and 
 such shapes. In fact, just as I Hked music 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
228 
 
 before we 
 can pass on 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 for what I heard, I liked architecture for 
 what I saw. 
 
 I suspect that most of us must pass 
 through some similar experience before we 
 are prepared to accept any of the theories 
 now to be developed. As long as we are 
 persuaded that the esthetic of architecture 
 is based on materialistic tyrannies such as 
 utility and economy, we relegate archi- 
 tecture to a different category from that of 
 the other arts. No doubt, an architect 
 who does not practise economy or empha- 
 sise utility will run the risk of being 
 rightly refused employment. But this is 
 merely to say that an architect should be 
 a good engineer, and is not at all the same 
 thing as to maintain that engineering and 
 architecture are one and identical. I 
 should like to see engineering defined as the 
 science, and architecture as the art, of con- 
 struction; because, if once we can dismiss 
 the science by fully allowing its necessity 
 and importance, we shall have an oppor- 
 tunity to discover what the art is. 
 
 Engineering was a vital matter to the 
 builders of the pyramids, who seem to have 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 229 
 
 mastered its elements so well that their 
 mechanical adroitness has rather puzzled 
 succeeding generations. But does that 
 fact give us any hint of the real reason 
 why the pyramids impress us as they do? 
 Surely the primary reason is because a 
 simple and elementar}^ shape is presented 
 in a gigantic size. And that is all there is 
 to it. The rest — the difficulties of con- 
 struction, the nearly 5000 years through 
 which they have endured, the desert sand 
 on which they rise, our imaginative and 
 historical impressions of Pharaoh-ruled 
 ancient Egypt, our literary enthusiasm for 
 Cleopatra who had nothing whatever to 
 do with the pyramids— all contribute, 
 joining and fusing themselves to a complex 
 emotional reaction; but they are not the 
 fundamental of the architectural emotion, 
 to which, indeed, they are in one sense 
 thoroughly irrelevant. 
 
 In late Gothic fan-vaulting, the visible 
 elements express a structiure which is not 
 merely physically absent, but is physically 
 impossible. The ceiling in its periphery 
 rests upon the ribs, the ribs rest upon the 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
230 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 central ornament, and this in turn rests 
 upon — ^nothing! Were the forms clumsy, 
 the lines oppressive, or disconnected, the 
 spectator's emotion, I imagine, would be 
 one of terror and fear; but because the 
 lines are stable and buoyant and strive up- 
 ward, our emotion is one of delight. Mass 
 has lost its oppression; it floats upward like 
 the Walhalla architecture of the thunder- 
 cloud. We know it cannot be, yet we see 
 that it is. Is it not captious and pedantic 
 to complain that Henry VII 's Chapel is 
 not good architecture because it violates 
 a fundamental principle of the art ? Rather 
 we should reconsider the validity of our 
 assumed principle in the face of such a re- 
 futation of its authority. Again, what of 
 the dome of St. Sophia that does not seem 
 to come down with any weight upon its 
 four pendentives? Let us not insist that 
 good architecture must express its construc- 
 tion. Let us say that to express structure 
 is one of architecture's sources of appeal, 
 and that good architecture accordingly ex- 
 presses structure vividly, immediately, 
 appeahngly, stimulatingly, what you will, 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 231 
 
 if only you will leave the art free rein to do 
 what it chooses with its own esthetic de- 
 vices ! 
 
 What of the fagade of St. Mark's in 
 Venice? If we removed everything that 
 did not contribute to constructional neces- 
 sity or practical use, I have a very shrewd 
 idea of the result; for the structure is 
 based on pre-Gothic methods of building 
 while the ornamentation is Gothic. Is 
 there not something of bUnd obstinacy in 
 persisting that the Gothic ornamentation 
 is therefore an impleasant accretion, be 
 cause it is structurally irrelevant? 
 
 Or of what use in architecture is colour, 
 except when it helps to emphasise struc- 
 ture and utility? None; therefore it is 
 really irrelevant? Architecture calls in the 
 arts of design to make her finished work 
 more pleasing? They are accessory, not 
 an integral part of architecture? Blind 
 obstinacy again. Because a building will 
 stand as well, in whatever way its walls be 
 ''decorated"; because a green arch will 
 last as long as a red one; because a mosaic 
 is in the surface, and not in the mechanics 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
232 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 A definition 
 
 rather 
 obvious 
 
 of support; because colour can be put on 
 after the work of building is ended; be- 
 cause of a host of reasons such as these, 
 colour is dubbed irrelevant to architecture. 
 True, since colour and construction are in 
 different categories, colour may be wholly 
 irrelevant to engineering; but why irrele- 
 vant to architecture? why accessory just 
 because, in the making, it is usually sub- 
 sequent? 
 
 May there not be a more purely esthetic 
 aspect of architecture, in which it appears 
 to us as an emotional art in three dimen- 
 sions which employs pure forms in a visual 
 appeal, working on our susceptibilities of 
 mass, outline, colour, and pattern, our mus- 
 cular sense of balance, of strain, of freedom 
 of motion and confinement, of size and 
 weight and power, and embodying all these 
 in a construction whose right to existence, 
 because of its human utility and structural 
 sanity, our reason approves? 
 
 By such a definition I refer to nothing 
 abstruse or over-sophisticated. A high, 
 black wall projecting above us in a narrow 
 street with squat overhanging masses is 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 terrifying even when our reason assures us 
 that it cannot fall. A colonnaded street 
 like that of Palmyra, with its perspective 
 narrowing toward a vanishing point, gives 
 us a sense of reach and distance for which 
 the actual linear extension seems no ade- 
 quate warrant. The vertical lines of rib- 
 bing and grooving in a Gothic pier give an 
 immediate reaHsation of height which a 
 smooth shaft would not impart. A great 
 space easily crowned, like St. Sophia with 
 its dome on pendentives, gives us a sense 
 of freedom to move; while the hall of a 
 thousand and one columns underground, 
 the Ben-bir-direk, makes a nightmare of 
 the thought of bodily movement through 
 space. It is with a pleasurable confusion 
 that the eye loses itself in the weltered 
 glory of Gothic rose-windows filled with 
 stained glass, and an unconfused self- 
 certainty with which we greet the picture- 
 less sharp outlines of a Greek temple 
 against the sky. These are simple, almost 
 grossly simple, examples of emotions to 
 which we all yield, because they are not 
 supplied by us. but to us, being inherent in 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
234 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 yet little- 
 heeded 
 
 the very lines, surfaces, bulk, and colour of 
 the things at which we are looking. Here, 
 as in other arts, pure form is at work, giv- 
 ing us the primar}^ emotions to which all 
 OUT sophications of historical, mathemat- 
 ical, cultural, and critical appreciations or 
 associations are accessory. 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 What then are these pure fonns of archi- 
 tecture? 
 
 All the fornis for painting and sculpture 
 seem to belong to architecture as well; but 
 because they are not so obviously made to 
 fuse with a represented object, they cannot 
 appeal to us so strongly. They remain 
 more nearly in a state of pure form — con- 
 crete enough, since they are exemplified in 
 stone or wood or plaster, but not merged 
 in something other than themselves. In 
 Ueu of imitations and illusions of real ob- 
 jects on which these forms are overlaid, 
 architecture shows us only certain con- 
 ventional entities — ^simple elements such as 
 columns, capitals, triglyphs, piers, groins, 
 dosserets, or composite elements such as 
 porticoes and blind-stories. Perhaps — as 
 was suggested previously — ^we can here dis- 
 cern a reason why architectural tradition 
 clings so tenaciously to its own artificial 
 creations, such as its five classic Orders with 
 all their rigid specifications of proportion 
 and detail. For if columns and capitals 
 
 235 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 An analysis 
 such as we 
 have 
 
 Applied to 
 the other 
 arts is the 
 right 
 method 
 here also. 
 It is at- 
 tempted in 
 the follow- 
 ing pages 
 and there- 
 with brings 
 to an end 
 our study 
 of the 
 various 
 Greek arts 
 
236 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 mtist be shaped just so, and not otherwise, 
 they acquire something of the definite in- 
 dividual reaUty of a product of nature. 
 A cohinin seems to be a column, almost as 
 a dog is a dog or a tree is a tree. The archi- 
 tectural elements become part of the world 
 of our ordinary experience, There may 
 therefore be a closer parallel than we should 
 have thought between a painted pattern 
 expressing itself on a landscape and an 
 architectural pattern expressing itself on a 
 classic structure. Both landscape and 
 classic Orders are repeated from the famil- 
 iar forms of our visual experience. And 
 the parallel with sculpture is even closer. 
 Where the sculptor imitates living objects, 
 the architect imitates the objects of a tra- 
 ditional world of recognised shapes. Both 
 sculpture and architecture are representing 
 something other than what (materially 
 considered) they actually are. 
 
 In saying that architecture employs the 
 pure forms of painting and sculpture, I of 
 course am not referring to the familiar fact 
 that architecture uses these arts for dec- 
 oration. I mean that a building's fagade 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 237 
 
 may exhibit pattern, balance of masses, 
 visual guiding lines, just as a painting 
 might do, and employ flow or break of 
 outline, suggestion of weight and resistance 
 and balanced strain, just as a piece of 
 sculpture might. 
 
 But in addition to these now familiar 
 forms, architecture has her specific oppor- 
 tunities to work upon our emotions. We 
 are always external to sculpture, but the 
 works of architecture enclose us spatially, 
 hem us in and ring us roimd with vast 
 masses of stone many times our height and 
 weight. Not only do we crane our heads, 
 focus our eyes for distance, perform actual 
 physical exertion in moving from point to 
 point; but we are at the mercy of sugges- 
 tions of confinement, freedom of movement, 
 oppression, physical danger. Our eyes 
 travel up with us easily to vast heights, or 
 struggle hopelessly over the horizontal 
 barriers which keep us down. We have 
 vast cisterns of air to breathe, or our lungs 
 gasp under the illusion that we are closely 
 shut in. There is, indeed, an entire range 
 of bodily experiences, for the most part not 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
238 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 very proininent in our consciousness, to 
 which the formal suggestions of architec- 
 ture may appeal. Such are our sense of 
 poise and bodily balance, of muscular self- 
 control, accuracy of movement, lightness 
 and agility, feelings of strength and self- 
 assurance, freedom of breath, even such 
 vague bodily states as accompany security 
 of footing, indifference to external forces, 
 determination and endurance, boldness and 
 fatigue. 
 
 Thus analysed and put into words, the 
 sensations of which I have been spealdng 
 as aroused in us by architectural forms 
 seem artificial and unreal. Actually they 
 lie so lightly on us that qua physiological 
 conditions in us we are seldom even con- 
 scious of their existence, but tend to ascribe 
 them as actual qualities to the architec- 
 tural object. But I do not wish to insist 
 on the psychological or physiological mech- 
 anism of artistic emotion. The essential 
 thing for my purpose is the recognition 
 that what I have called artistic form ap- 
 peals directly to certain sensibilities in us, 
 and leads us to ascribe to the work of art 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 239 
 
 emotional values with which we should 
 otherwise have no acquaintance. That 
 these emotions or qualities are in the build- 
 ing is precisely the opposite of my meaning. 
 These things are in us, and it is to our 
 sense of them that architectural form can 
 appeal. When we exclaim at the lightness 
 of crocket and finiial, there is no gravita- 
 tional lightness in the carven stone. We 
 are apt to speak as though tracery were 
 done in pumice and wall-bases in soHd 
 ore. A chisel may remove only a few 
 ounces from the actual weight of a stone, 
 yet the stone may thereby become so light 
 that it almost floats in air from its own 
 buoyancy; for the sense of its lightness is 
 in ourselves. The common sense behind 
 traditional ways of speech bears testimony 
 that these are familiar human experiences 
 and not mere sophistications. 
 
 But we ascribe the lightness to the stone. 
 The appeal is to our own sense of equiUb- 
 rium or freedom of movement or whatso- 
 ever it may be; but what we feel in our- 
 selves we read into the objects which we 
 are contemplating. Just as, in painting, 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
240 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 our trivial actions are fathered upon an 
 imaginary spatial world and thereby ac- 
 quire importance and magnitude, so in 
 architectiire our reactions, of no moment 
 in themselves, when they serve to vitalise 
 a towering mass of stable stone, arouse 
 emotions that can overwhelm us by their 
 scale and power. 
 
 How intentionally do architects employ 
 these emotional forms? That must depend 
 on the architect and the period. The 
 great masters of the Renaissance and, most 
 of all, of the succeeding *' decadence" or 
 Baroque period, made a far-reaching study 
 of these forms (though they did not so 
 call them, or so philosophise about them). 
 The restlessness, the turgid pomp, the 
 straining after greatness which charac- 
 terised the Baroque are not accidents or in- 
 cidents of stylistic evolution, but inten- 
 tional emotional qualities. Nineteenth 
 century criticism, with its materialistic 
 and "scientific" penchant, saw in the 
 volutes and scrolls and urns and super- 
 imposed pediments and the "clumsy" 
 masses of many an Italian Baroque fagade 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 only an unnecessary waste of material with 
 irrelevant ornaments run wild and obscur- 
 ing structural design. But that is to judge 
 from parti pris, to beg the question; for it 
 assumes that the aim of good architecture 
 is to express structure and purpose with 
 economy, whereas the Baroque architects 
 were trying to express something quite dif- 
 ferent. They were not trying to call atten- 
 tion to questions of construction and engi- 
 neering, but to work upon the human emo- 
 tion of the passers-by. 
 
 There are other critics who complain 
 that these emotional effects are melo- 
 dramatic, that Baroque greatness is mere 
 bombast and pretentiousness, that the in- 
 sistence on effect is tedious and out of place 
 in a monumental art. This is a very dif- 
 ferent angle of attack. It appeals to the 
 canon of taste and with this I have no in- 
 tention of taking issue; for I do not wish to 
 ask what emotions architecture ought to 
 evoke, but merely to consider what emo- 
 tions architecture does and can evoke and 
 how this is done. For that purpose the 
 Baroque is a very good period to study,^^ 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
242 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 because it is not interested in monumental 
 calm but in the excitation of emotions 
 whose presence and character are easy to 
 detect. 
 
 We are awed by the contemplation of 
 mere bulk and size; for we make the com- 
 parison with ourselves and realise our own 
 ineffectiveness. The contrast with our 
 own size and weight is essential to this re- 
 sult. Hence it is architecture's business, 
 if she washes to produce the emotion, to see 
 to it that we shall make the comparison. 
 She must give us "scale," must furnish us 
 with a unit whose size relative to otirselves 
 we know and can appreciate, and make this 
 unit operative as a unit of measurement 
 which we are induced to lay off and repeat 
 until we become aware how many times it 
 is contained in the architectural surround- 
 ings. If that repetition appear intermin- 
 able or confusedly great, the impression of 
 size will be all the stronger. 
 
 Artaxei'xes IMnemon built himself a 
 colossal throne-room in his palace at Susa. 
 Its appearance of size was not derived 
 solely from the great linear dimensions of 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 the floor and walls, but from the persistent 
 repetition of great coluinns whose verti- 
 cality was emphasized by the grooves which 
 ran unbroken from the bases to the great 
 bull-headed capitals bearing the ceiUng- 
 beams. Wherever one stood, one of these 
 columns rose beside him and stretched 
 away above him, so that a direct com- 
 parison between human stature and the 
 loftiness of the room was inevitable. 
 Round about on all sides were these same 
 columns, like the trees of a forest shutting 
 in the view, endless vertical lines, all the 
 same, and all enormous. Here was great 
 height immediately to be apprehended, 
 and endlessly and bewilderingly repeated. 
 Truly, great would have seemed the king 
 who throned in such a room and com- 
 manded its architects and builders. 
 
 The interior of the nave of St. Peter's 
 in Rome gives no such sense of vastness. 
 The classic Order there shows the same 
 elements, and the same relations between 
 those elements, that we might see in many 
 other buildings. Standing in the open 
 floor-space, we have httle from which to 
 
 AND MONOGRAPH vS 
 
ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 measure size in relation to ourselves. What 
 unit we may derive, is repeated in a quiet 
 and ordered way for a certain number of 
 times. With no immediate apprehension of 
 size, and no uncounted repetition of great- 
 ness, we have little but our reason to tell 
 us that we are in a hall of vast extent and 
 height. 
 
 I have taken sense of size as an example, 
 because it is easy to see that it depends not 
 wholly on actual dimensions but on some- 
 thing in the arrangement and distribution 
 of the architectural elements. It is the 
 readiest and most persuasive instance of 
 the effect which a purely formal principle 
 may have upon our attitude toward a 
 building. But it is easy to convince our- 
 selves that formal laws play a very ex- 
 tensive role in our most every-day impres- 
 sions of architecture. Buildings are "top- 
 heavy," "crooked," "forbidding," "at- 
 tractive," "sombre," "full of energy," 
 "magnificent," "stiff" (to use only a lay- 
 man's vocabulary and a layman's range of 
 emotions). Why do they give us these 
 feelings, and why are most of these epi- 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 thets derived from analogies with our own 
 bodily conditions? If we ask ourselves 
 these questions, we shall little by little 
 come to think of architecture not as mere 
 ornamented engineering but as embodied 
 emotion of a very peculiar sort, a new 
 language speaking to us very directly and 
 very intimately. 
 
 If we ask whether these forms reside in 
 any special part (as in the mechanics or 
 the linear relations or the chiaroscuro), we 
 shall find that it is not possible to assign 
 one formal role to the structural elements 
 and a different role to the "accessory" ele- 
 ments of ornamentation and decoration. 
 Effects of line may be due both to structure 
 and to carving or colouring; surfaces may 
 be structural units or merely coloured areas 
 or both at once; ornament which could 
 ha\e been dispensed with from the point 
 of \'iew of the mechanical structure, may 
 be of the utmost importance for the de- 
 sign — like the great S-shaped scrolls of 
 Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, whose 
 shape is not essential to their function. 
 The form of the muUions in the window- 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
246 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 tracery may be the most telling source of 
 emotional effect which a stylistic period 
 may have produced. Architectural his- 
 torians sometimes resent a division of Eng- 
 lish Gothic into geometric, flowing, and 
 perpendicular periods on the basis of win- 
 dow-tracery forms; but is it really so super- 
 ficial and amateurish as they would make 
 out? We can date just as accurately from 
 hood-mouldings and drips or technique of 
 buttressing or vaulting bosses or an3rthing 
 else; but it is not a question of identifying 
 the period or analysing the style, but of 
 naming these according to their most ef- 
 fective characteristic. And this is well 
 epitomized in the tracery. 
 
 Ornament or detail can be considered 
 iiTclevant only when it has no function to 
 perform, and inappropriate only when its 
 effect is inappropriate in the whole effect of 
 the building. It may be structurally su- 
 perfluous and yet formally essential. Even 
 a false fagade may be pardoned when it 
 does not aim to deceive. If the Tuscan 
 builders intended to fool the passer-by into 
 thinking that there was a greater and 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 higher church behind the facade than they 
 had really built there, they must have been 
 simple-minded in crediting the public 
 neither with curiosity nor with legs. But 
 if they meant merely to make a fine front 
 to their church, as one might use gold and 
 leather and make a fine cover to a book, 
 their fault was wholly pardonable; for 
 they missed merely the refinement of taste 
 which makes a fagadal design appropriate 
 by deriving it out of the exigencies of the 
 nave and aisles which are there terminated. 
 Again, St. Peter's has a "false" dome for 
 appearance's sake ! But what Is that save 
 an admission that the outside and inside 
 surfaces of the same curvilinear form were 
 felt not to be appropriate to both exterior 
 and interior at once? If one shape suited 
 within and a different one suited without 
 so build it ! There is no deception intended ; 
 and the structural waste and additional 
 cost are part of the price of the intended 
 effect. Only if an equivalent effect could 
 have been produced without resorting to 
 such a device, would exchequer and good 
 sense be right in protesting. 
 
 247 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
248 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 So considered, ornament will be seen to 
 be not an accessory or separable element, 
 but an integral part of the builder's art. 
 For this reason it will often tend away from 
 pictorial representation in order that it 
 may be accepted in a more intimate union 
 with the other elements. 
 
 Greek architectural ornament was largely 
 drawn from forms of leaf and flower. In 
 the cymatia, these leaf-forms are so con- 
 ventionalised as to make their botanical 
 prototypes unrecognisable. This is partly 
 due to the fact that they were inheritances, 
 with a long history that leads to the Orient 
 and Egypt. No ordinary eye can see a 
 flower in the volutes of the Ionic capital 
 or a calyx in the egg-and-dart on its 
 echinus; yet these are very probably the 
 ultimate ancestors. But Greek architec- 
 ture itself contributed to conventionalising 
 its decorative forms. Though the acanthus 
 leaves of the Corinthian capital are often 
 carved with very considerable fidelity to 
 botanical prototypes, their whole arrange- 
 ment and profile prohibit any representa- 
 tional illusion. And Greek architecture 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 was quite content to keep its traditional 
 conventionalisations rather than to dis- 
 card them for new and more imitative 
 versions. 
 
 At times, more representational ele- 
 ments threatened to intrude. The Doric 
 columns, it will be remembered, hold up 
 their oppressive load and with an ahnost 
 human analogy give, in their entasis, a 
 visual suggestion that the inanimate stone 
 felt the strain of bearing up architrave, 
 frieze, and cornice. They are like Atlas 
 holding the broad sky on his shoulders. 
 The suggestion to carve these supports into 
 the likeness of human figures lay therefore 
 palpably close at hand. Now the basic 
 impulse may have been a tendency to 
 ascribe human characteristics to inanimate 
 objects, to look on a column as though it 
 were a living being; but the formal pur- 
 pose is sUghtly different, for on being shown 
 a fictitious strain-under-pressure in the 
 column, by analogy with our own feelings 
 at supporting a heavy burden, we experi- 
 ence an emotional, and not merely a rea- 
 soned or intellectual appreciation of the 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
250 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 piirpose and structural function of the col- 
 umn. And when the Greeks actually 
 carved giants bowed under the superin- 
 cumbent load or maidens standing strong- 
 hipped and stiffly straight with the burden 
 on their heads they may have diminished 
 rather than heightened the effect. If a 
 more or less abstract form can suggest 
 physical strain, we lose instead of gaining 
 when we substitute for that abstract form 
 a concrete symbol borrowed from the actual 
 world. Probably this is so because a sym- 
 bol works through the intellectual under- 
 standing, while pure form works through 
 immediate sensuous apprehension. ^^ I 
 take it to be an astonishing instance of the 
 power of artistic instinct that, without ever 
 very thoroughly reasoning the matter, 
 architectural taste has steadily contested 
 the repetition of this experiment and has 
 tended to eliminate representational shapes 
 from every important structural position. 
 
 Of a similar sort is the insistence' that 
 vegetable fonns should be conventional- 
 ised, and that actual picturing of the seen 
 world must be confined to structurally 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 251 
 
 minor surfaces. But it will be objected 
 that the Greeks carved and painted pic- 
 tures for their metopes; that the Panath- 
 enaic frieze of the Parthenon is one of the 
 great achievements of sculpture; that 
 Byzantine architecture revelled in mosaics; 
 that Romanesque and Gothic architecture 
 are full of carven beasts and statuary. 
 Clearly the prejudice against mixing the 
 representational with the unrepresenta- 
 tional is not very thorough or far-reaching. 
 The real objection, I think, is not against 
 combining representational with unrepre- 
 sentational art, but against allowing rep- 
 resentation to obscure or destroy formal 
 values. Variegations of colour (apart from 
 what they depict) have an important formal 
 fimction. Colour is not an accessory or a 
 luxury to architecture. How much does 
 not the little Place des Vosges in Paris owe 
 merely to the red of its bricks, which charms 
 us so simply and cheerily after the arid 
 grey-whites of Champs-Elysian preten- 
 tiousness in stone? And are we not carried 
 deep into the very emotional core and 
 spirit of mediaevalism merely by the colours 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
252 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 of a Byzantine interior or by that lavish 
 use of reds and blues and purples and greens 
 and golds which so often covered the entire 
 front of Gothic churches, but whose original 
 presence we of to-day are always forgetting 
 because we see only the "architecture," the 
 building without the colour? But colour 
 can even affect the structural aspect. Find 
 a blank wall and cover the upper third with 
 patches of brilliant colour if you would see 
 its mere physical weight lessened. Or 
 consider the arrangement of horizontal 
 bands of ever-Hghtening colour on the Pal- 
 ace of the Doges. Or look again at the 
 Panathenaic frieze to notice how the 
 sculptural lines lead the eye along and bind 
 the Parthenon about, as a ribbon holds a 
 bundle together. Again, colour is a magnet 
 to the eye and can bend back our heads 
 and take our vision aloft quite as quickly 
 and well as the guiding lines of a moulded 
 pier or the branching ribs of a vaulting. 
 
 Thus the mere occurrence of carving and 
 colour need not obscure or destroy the for- 
 mal values, but may itself perform a formal 
 office. There remains the difficulty that this 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 253 
 
 colour or carving is not mere colour and 
 line, but makes pictures of things irrelevant 
 to the architectural structure of the build- 
 ing. In mediaeval times, these pictures 
 were part of an attempt to wed understand- 
 ing with architectural emotion. When the 
 eye had imparted directly the emotions in- 
 herent in the wonderfully lined and bal- 
 anced, shadowed and coloured structure, 
 and aroused through architectural form 
 something emotionally comparable to a 
 sense of striving and attainment, patience 
 and perseverance, wealth and rejoicing, 
 gloom and terror and triumph, it was the 
 turn of the intellect to read the illustrated 
 book of saints and martyrs, angels and 
 devils, with their recollection of trials and 
 virtuous deeds, and to wed these emotions 
 of the intellect with those simpler, more 
 primitive ones of the unreasoning appre- 
 hension. In Greece, too, the contempla- 
 tion of heroic adventures and divine legends 
 was intended to satisfy the reasoning curi- 
 osity and to offer its more sophisticated 
 appeal as a supplement to the direct work- 
 ing of architectural form. For, in both 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
254 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 cases, architecture was toiling in the in- 
 terest of reUgion; and the ultimate channel 
 of its emotions lay beyond its own domain. 
 We have seen that the initial barrier to 
 an understanding of architectural esthetics 
 lies in our own insistent assumption that 
 the art is governed by practical utility, 
 whereas insofar as architecture is an art 
 it has almost nothing at all to do with 
 practical utility. This dogma will alwaj^s 
 be hotly contested. "Is not architecture 
 the art of building, and are not buildings 
 primarily dwelling-places with walls to 
 give shelter, roofs to exclude rain, windows 
 to let in light, and plans arranged for 
 specific human needs? and do these not 
 depend absolutely on the practical laws of 
 engineering and gravitational mechanics? 
 How then can you say that it has nothing 
 to do with utility?" But this is merely 
 to say that architecture is a practical activ- 
 ity first and an art only secondarily. In- 
 sofar as it is an art, it has almost nothing 
 to do with these practical demands. As 
 an art, it is a spatial presentation of solid 
 forms, aiming at no imitative pictorial 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 255 
 
 illusion, but appealing primarily to our 
 gravitational sensibilities and our powers 
 of spatial apprehension and secondarily to 
 certain activities of visual comparison and 
 construction which we call geometric 
 when they are viewed by our intellect, but 
 for which we have no good name (unless it 
 be Artistic Pure-Forms) when they are ap- 
 prehended through oiu: esthetic sensibility. 
 
 ''But," I hear some one say, "you must 
 be a good engineer to be a good architect," 
 or again, "this so-called esthetic architec- 
 ture is all very well on paper; but wait till 
 you try building it," or, "when a city orders 
 a municipal court-house, does it want 
 spatial presentations and appeals to the 
 gravitational sensibilities of the tax-pay- 
 ers, or does it want a good serviceable 
 court-house?" 
 
 Most of the arts were originally slaves 
 to practical ends. Poetry had to chronicle 
 or instruct or placate; sculpture had to 
 serve religion or superstition or human-self- 
 glorification ; similar tasks were assigned to 
 painting; but all these, even from the 
 earliest time, seem also to have existed in 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
256 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 their own right, because what they did was 
 directly pleasing to men. Even in the pop- 
 ular mind, poetry has emancipated herself 
 of any ulterior end or service; sculpture 
 and painting are for the delight of what 
 they show; but architecture for the most 
 part still stays in bondage. Her works 
 are too costly and too unwieldy to be pro- 
 duced for mere contemplation; and since 
 they are unrepresentational, men have sel- 
 dom seen what such works might be in- 
 tended for, if not just to house men and 
 their chattels with perhaps a fine external 
 show of wealth. Perhaps because of this 
 popular bHndness, though we may have 
 laid a thousand stones to antiquity's one, 
 we make no greater art of our architecture 
 than did the ancient builders. Indeed, if 
 subtlety, refinement, perfection of propor- 
 tion, clarity of form, sensitiveness to out- 
 line and surface and the visual appearances 
 of weight in equilibrium, if all these are 
 criteria of artistic accomplishment, twen- 
 tieth century America has not even re- 
 motely rivalled the builders of ancient 
 Greece. 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 257 
 
 NOTES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 1 1 could wish that writers on esthetics 
 would be more mindful that this is so, and that 
 with all artistic illusion (if it be truly artistic) 
 there is fused to some degree the sensibility 
 that illusion is different from reality. This 
 appHes to all the imitative and presentational 
 arts, whether of the theatre or the atelier; 
 and it needs no very great attention to dis- 
 cover that every art protects its title to 
 artistry by clinging to certain conventions 
 which will' obviate complete and full illusion. 
 The theatre has its curtain and footlights and 
 a host of conventions of acting; sculpture 
 eliminates colour, or rather chromatic fideHty ; 
 painting must make (and particularly delights 
 in making) its own world of light and air, and 
 so need seldom trouble itself with the fear 
 of too illusionary a content; the minor arts 
 are ever conscious of the gold or silver or 
 bronze or ivory or precious stone in which they 
 work, and at their best are least ashamed of 
 the peculiar and native qualities of their 
 media. 
 
 2 Perhaps the landscapes of Chinese paint- 
 ing will best suggest the direction which Greek 
 art might have taken in a less luminous and 
 more misty climate. There is the same scru- 
 tiny of individual forms, the same indifference 
 to the merely optically correct, the same 
 intellectuahsation and artistic rethinking of 
 objective appearance, the same extreme 
 fidelity to the ideal content. 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
258 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 1 There is a possible confusion here which 
 ought to be avoided. The particular run of a 
 line may suggest that the thing which it helps 
 to represent is in motion. Lines of an appro- 
 priate contour vjiW make us see a dog nmning, 
 a bird flying. Such lines present motion, i. e., 
 motion in the represented object. But the 
 motion which is a formal function is not in the 
 picture so much as in ourselves. There might 
 be a greater use of formal motion in a still- 
 life picture than in a representation of objects 
 supposedly in very rapid motion, e. g., a photo- 
 graph of a galloping horse. 
 
 2 Tliis is quite in accord with later Greek 
 estimates of the early painters. Compare, 
 for example, the following passage from 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus {de Isaeojudic. 4) : 
 "In ancient painting the scheme of colouring 
 was simple and presented no variety in the 
 tones; but the Hne was rendered with 
 exquisite perfection, thus lending to these 
 early works a singular grace. This purity 
 of draughtsmanship was gradually lost; its 
 place was taken by a learned technique, by 
 the differentiation of light and shade, by the 
 full resources of the rich colouring to which tlie 
 works of the later artists owe their strength." 
 (Trans. Jex-Blake.) 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 1. . . the mere contours will make them intelli- 
 gible. Cf. Phny (iV. H., xxxv, 67-8): "... 
 rendering of outline. This is the highest 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEKART 
 
 259 
 
 subtlety attainable in painting. Merely to 
 paint a figure in relief is no doubt a great 
 achievement, yet many have succeeded thus 
 far. But where an artist is rarely successful 
 is in finding an outline which shall express the 
 contours of the figure. For the contour 
 should appear to fold back, and so enclose 
 the object as to give assurance of the parts 
 behind, thus clearly suggesting even what it 
 conceals." (Trans. Jex-Blake.) 
 
 ^ Polykleitan statues are too ^'square.'' Cf. 
 Pliny (lY. H., xxxiv, 56): ''Quadrata tamen 
 esse ea ait Varro." 
 
 3 iV. H., xxxiv, 65. 
 
 *In addition to this rotation of the axes 
 in a horizontal plane, a vertical displacement 
 of these axes occurs in more complicated poses 
 such as those of sitting or crouching or 
 recumbent figures. It will be found that this, 
 too, is an ordered and regular process con- 
 tributing in a similar manner to the same 
 end. Cf. the Sleeping Satyr in Naples. 
 
 5 There is a possible quibble here which I 
 mention, if only to show that I have not over- 
 looked it. The third dimension in normal 
 geometric space stretches aw^ay in parallel 
 planes. In visual space its planes all inter- 
 sect in the eye and therefore cannot be 
 parallel but must be radiate like the lines 
 from a vanishing point in perspective draw- 
 ing. The invisible third dimension of which 
 I have been speaking in connection with the 
 spatial extension of sculpture refers to this 
 third or radiative dimension in visual space, 
 and should be so understood. 
 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 I 
 
260 
 
 ESTHETIC BASIS 
 
 6 Plutarch, Qiiaest. Conn., ii, 3, 2: IIoXv- 
 kX€lto<; 6 7rXd(TTr)<5 elire ;(aX€7r<0TaTav elvai to 
 tpyov oTav iv ovv^l o ttt/Ao? yLvrjTUL. 
 
 ' Though not in the form nor to the extent 
 postulated by Mr. Jay Hambidge in his 
 ' ' Dynamic Sym metrv. ' ' 
 
 * Galen, d'e Plac. Hipp, ct Plat., 5. 
 
 « irepl /3e\o7rouK(i)Vy iv, 2. 
 
 1" By using an elaborate system of simple 
 ratios. . . . Similarly Albrecht Diirer: "I 
 make the rule always one-sixth of the length 
 of the figure . . . then I divide the rule into 
 ten equal parts and each part I call a zall, 
 each zall I divide into ten and call each tenth 
 a teil, each teil into three and call each third 
 a trummlein." Here are indeed "many 
 numbers." The smallest unit of division is 
 one 1800th part of the total height of the 
 figure! 
 
 " Pliny, N. H., xxxiv, 65. 
 
 12 Quint., xii, 10, 7. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 1 The Greeks were timid engineers. Consider 
 the elaborate precautions taken with the 
 central span of the Propylaea (W. B. Dins- 
 moor in American Journal of Archaeology, 
 1910, pp. 145 ff). By applying the rnodem 
 engineering formulae given in Kidder's 
 Architect's and Builder s Pocketbook, I find 
 that these precautions were superfluous. 
 
 2 Their columns were . . , but barely sixty 
 feet. Cf. Athens, Olympieum; Miletos, 
 Didymeum; Ephesos, "fifth" or Hellenistic 
 temple of Artemis. 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 261 
 
 • Contrast the rich inventions of plan in 
 late Roman times (Montane, Scielti di varii 
 tempietti antichi, and RaccoUa di tempii^ etc.). 
 
 « I do not accept Dorpfeld's suggestion of 
 an original symmetrical plan doubled on a 
 north-south axis. 
 
 6 Plato, Republic. 
 
 8 Cf. for example Dinsmoor's plate showing 
 the evolution of the Ionic Order in Asia 
 Minor (A.J.A., 1908, p. 4); but cf. also 
 Marquand, Greek Architecture, p. 131 infra, 
 ". . . the Greek love of variety, which 
 makes it impossible to apply the rule me- 
 chanically so as to establish an exact chrono- 
 logical series." 
 
 ^ Cf. Koldewey and Puchstein, die griech- 
 ischen Tempel in Unteritalien und Sicilien. 
 
 >. . . they left no straight line straight. The 
 material for the study of this question is to be 
 found in Penrose, Principles of Athenian 
 Architecture and Goodyear, Greek Refine- 
 ments. 
 
 » . . . not optical corrections. Goodyear has 
 abundantly proved this point in the book 
 referred to in the previous note. 
 
 10 Cf. T. A. Cook, The Curves of Life; 
 d'Arcy Thompson, Growth and Form-, A. H. 
 Church, Relation of Phyllo taxis to Mechanical 
 Laws; and the two (very popularly written) 
 books by S. Colman and C. A. Coan, 
 Nature's Harmonic Unity and Proportional 
 Form. 
 
 " Mausoleum. 1 am here following the 
 measurements and calculations of W. B. 
 Dinsmoor (A.J.A., 1908, pp. 1-29) rather 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHvS 
 
262 
 
 ESTHETIC BAvSIvS 
 
 
 than those of Lethaby {Builder, Feb. 6, 1920, 
 p. 168; Sept. 3, 1920, p. 256). 
 
 1- The lions' heads . . . are so placed. 
 This arrangement is certain for the Athena 
 temple at Priene and quite possible for the 
 Mausoleum. 
 
 " It is difficult to be fully persuaded of the 
 absence of a frieze in the Priene temple and 
 the Mausoleum. The evidence against their 
 presence is not in any sense conclusive. 
 
 !■* Commensurable but not measurable rela- 
 tions, i. e., commensurable in terms of simple 
 integral numbers and ratios, but not measur- 
 able in feet, palms, and dactyls without 
 fractional parts. 
 
 i^Marquand, Greek Architecture, pp. 144-5. 
 
 " Goodyear, Greek Refinements. 
 
 ^^ In Mr. Donald Tovey's article Music 
 in the Enc. Britt. (Xlth Ed.) by a curious 
 coincidence a metaphorical comijarison is 
 made between Greek music and an art of two 
 dimensions. The analogy is of course 
 intended only in a figurative sense, but 
 deserves at least a passing reference here: 
 "Non-harmonic music is a world of two 
 dimensions, and we must now inquire how 
 man came to rise from this 'fiatland' to the 
 solid world of sound in which Palestrina, 
 Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner Uve." 
 
 18 The Baroque is a very good period to study. 
 I wish to acknowledge very great indebted- 
 ness to Geoffrey Scott's Architecture of 
 Humanism for my general position on the 
 esthetics of architecture. 
 
 i» This seems to be inconsistent with what 
 
 I 
 
 BRYN MAWR NOTES 
 
OF GREEK ART 
 
 was said in the chapter on Sculpture. The 
 point of the argument is the contention that 
 in the case of a Caryatid we may appreciate 
 strain and weight in terms of a human bodily 
 experience within ourselves (precisely as in 
 any other statue) but we are unable to 
 ascribe them to the building. The empathy 
 is sculptural, not architectural. 
 
 AND MONOGRAPHS 
 
 263 
 
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