Word: archaicism
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...solemn reasoning has led many critics to assume that the smiles which characteristically wreathe the best of ancient sculpture were put there by artists who did not know how to carve a straight face. This assumption was being thoroughly discredited last week at the Birmingham Museum of Art. "The Archaic Smile," a show assembled by Museum Director Richard Howard, features dozens of works as controlled and haunting as the examples opposite...
Early Greek sculpture (before 500 B.C.) is distinguished by small, firm smiles of slowly awakening tenderness. So is the archaic art of every great civilization, from ancient Egypt and Chaldea through India and China. The smile reoccurs most poignantly in the great Gothic sculptures at Rheims and Chartres cathedrals. It has a sophisticated echo, more sweetly mysterious than ever, in Leonardo's Mona Lisa. The quiet intensity of the smile-secretive and yet loving, serene and yet troubling-can be mimicked by such moderns as Picasso but never successfully counterfeited; it seems to have fled from modern...
...variations over thousands of years and places, what single thing, if any, did the archaic smile stand for? Museum Director Howard says it "gives a definite impression of an otherworldly quality." Worcester Museum Director Francis Henry Taylor, who will lecture on the mystery at Birmingham next week, points out that the "smile appears on the faces of most archaic figures, a happiness of expression seeming to transcend that of human beings...
Perhaps the main reason why the archaic smile hints at otherworldly happiness is that most archaic figures represented either gods or their worshipers in the performance of their devotions. The artists, therefore, had the problem of expressing spiritual illumination in the faces they carved. They found that a little smile, very like the first smiles of a baby, could do just that...
...fundamental reason for such a thing as the Emmett Till episode ... rests upon the archaic ideology of the southern people as a majority. I interpret ideology here in the Webster sense as the "aggregate of ideas, beliefs, doctrines of a large group of persons". This ideology has lead the Southerners to spew forth such statements as the following: "If Roy and J. W. (referring to Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the defendants in the Till case) are convicted of murder...where under the shining sun is the land of the free and the home of the brave?" Or more...