Word: archaicism
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Dates: during 1887-1887
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None of the accessory causes mentioned in the second lecture are as important in the development of art from the early archaic conventionalities as the influence of athletic games. The canons of form they produced have fashioned the feeling for form and proportion ever since. The reason of its widespread influence is that Greek art was at the same realistic and identical. Before art can gain universal validity it must pass through nature and rise higher than the reality from which it is conceived, and this is what happened in Greece. The influence of the athletic games can hardly...
...whole complex body of phenomena that constitute the history of Greek sculpture we can trace a great underlying struggle to establish complete harmony between form and matter, between the subject and the language in which it is expressed, between the thought and the stone. In the remnants of the Archaic Period we are oppressed by a sense of the obtrusion of the material on our vision, to the detriment of the idea to be expressed. Again, in the Period of Decline, brilliant though this decline must be admitted to have been, we are oppressed by the presence of the material...
...first of the great problems now is, how a people so imbued with desire for active, plastic expression of their thoughts as the Greeks were, could have cultivated sculpture for so many centuries without raising it beyond what our few remnants of the Archaic Period show it to have been. The explanation of this remarkable fact most likely is that the hieratic iufluence was strong in sculpture, and the traditional temple statues were copied and held in high esteem. These forms became stereotyped and lasting, and counteracted any tendency to emanciation...
...most striking influence of Assyrian as well as Egyptian art can be traced in the archaic sculpture and bas-reliefs of Greece. Greek vases have been found, the figures on which are known to have been copied directly from Egyptian monuments, and the famous Doric Column is but a development of a form common in Assyrian architecture. It was not in the form alone that foreign influence is traced in Greek art; many of the ideas one derived from the Assyrian and Egyptian mythology...