Letters from Italy/Chapter 12

There are people who stand in a certain relationship to the antique (many have definite relationship with the antique), and others who acquire such relationship. In the second class their superficial proceedings are as follows: when they first arrive at a great repository of the antique, such as the Vatican or Thermal or Neapolitan museums, they begin by lingering piously before every statue and whispering in raptures some classical tag, e.g. Cæsar pontem fieri jussit (Cæsar ordered a bridge to be built). After the first half hour they unobtrusively accelerate their step. After an hour they pass through the remoter halls at a brisk pace. And after the succeeding fifteen minutes they would like to have a velocipede.

The second stadium begins when the wanderer sees nine heads of Socrates in a row on a shelf like jars with preserves, seven Homers, thirteen Hadrians, and the twentieth Venus of the Praxiteles type; then he begins to understand that he must distinguish between masonry and sculpture. And when he has seen all, he at last acquires the conviction that there is no such thing as an antique; it is only a word which ​designates things so different as, say, Cimabue and the photographer Langhans. At least as great is the difference between the Metopes of Selinus at Palermo and some portrait or other of Caracalla.

Above all, the first notable difference is between Greek and Roman sculpture; and at the same time the word “Greek” means practically nothing, for it is simply impossible to designate by the same word an archaic Apollo and Pergamon Baroque. If any one says he adores the antique, tell him that he has seen stones and not statues. It does not do to embrace everything under the influence of a single taste: you must choose your own and for others at least preserve civility. If everything is in marble that does not mean that all is uniform.

And when the wanderer finds that there is no absolute antique at all, there is a compensating recognition of vast strength in other frightfully interesting phenomena. (1) First of all there is archaic domestic art, for instance Etruscan art, which is powerful and clumsy, and the Sicilian art, of which very pretty little naïve urns have survived, little clay houses with idyllic reliefs, and the genuine Doric art of the Sicilian colonists: perhaps I ought not to extol these. (2) Then there is the Greek importation, which with Italy proper has as much in common as with the South Kensington Museum; the Romans imported statues and sculptures; they ​preserved the statues in their original beauty, but the majority of the sculptures became spoilt. Then there is Attic, Argive, and Rhodian style, Pergamon and Hellenistic and others, and precious masterpieces, copies and fragments, for which I would give the whole Laocoōn, even with the Dying Gaul and the Farnese Bull, and still throw in all I have and what anyone might lend me. (3) Then domestic Greco-Roman huge masonry has made its way, which the Romans or some other people pursued, hewing until dust clouds were raised; huge pieces by the dozen, large scale production, mechanical impulse, industry, virtuosity, vigour, realism and Baroque, but also such little masterpieces—usually in lapidary work-from which are exhaled human freshness, simplicity, and rural life with its gardens, olives, sage, and wells. (4) Then there is the Roman sculpture proper, hard, naturalistic, portrait-like, and genuine: Cæsars, combatants, matrons, and animals, bronzes, coloured marbles, circuses, politics, and sober reality; material, imposing art, over-ripe, and dessicating. (5) And into all this falls here and there a kind of new inspiration, e.g. when the possibility offers to paint walls with coloured pictures, and when quite other hands from these with chisels, powerless hands, joyous and tender hands, paint light frescoes at Pompeii, dreamy and emaciated architecture, quivering hysterical landscapes and figures, butterflies of immateriality. But on the ​other hand—when I know not—some Thracian or barbarian has perpetrated the enormous crudity of the Caracalla mosaics, those repulsive sacks of muscles and tufted turnips representing the heavy-weights of the Roman circus, dull and brutal work, and yet in its difficult form of speech indicating the way for the future Christian mosaics. But the Roman sarcophaguses themselves, these elephantine tubs overladen with thick, heavily formed, boring relief show how little Hellenic juices have penetrated the hard Roman shell. Just look at the reliefs on the arches of Severus or Constantine; here is simply atavism of clumsiness, and the imported deposit of Hellenic culture entirely peels off. A step farther and we are in the Lateran museum: half-barbarian art invades Christian primitiveness.

So instead of the antique the wanderer finds all kinds of people, instead of universal beauty elemental and unknown racial powers; truly this recognition has its value, for indeed it furnishes evidence of enormous ethnical strength. However it may come about, the people creeps unwillingly and instinctively back to itself and experiences a regeneration.

Wonderful and powerful is art, indeed.