Word: malraux
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...book is crammed with enough handsome illustrations and recondite art allusions to supply the Uffizi plus the Louvre. It is also argued with cool logic as Malraux delves into the epochs without museums, when art glorified religion. The metamorphosis of the gods, as Malraux describes it, was a little like the story of the Ten Little Indians. First they were sacred, then divine, then human, and then they were gone. This all took place between the creation of the Sphinx and the birth of Botticelli's Venus. The Egyptians could not know Aristotle, but he knew the secret...
...absolute, they set up "the prestige of the imaginary"-man's loftiest ideals fashioned in art. "The sacred was replaced by the sublime, the supernatural by the wondrous, and Fate itself by tragedy." Critics who believe that Greek sculptors were trying to achieve representational realism earn Malraux's ire. "Humanized but not human," a figure like the Winged Victory of Samothrace is no mere woman to Malraux, but an evocation of that "spark of the divine immanent in every form of life...
Among the Romans, where power was frequently the only truth, superficial appearance was reality. Christianity restored the art of transcendent hidden meanings. With impressive erudition, Malraux traces the sacerdotal role of cathedral, mosaic and icon and the evolution of Christian art from the austere, stylized Byzantine Pantocrators to the benign, handsome "Beau Dieu" in the central portal of Amiens Cathedral. Despite the growing intrusion of realistic detail, Giotto, as late as the 14th century, "did not copy the sky men see, but transmuted it into a sky charged with Christ's presence." But a century later Botticelli plunged into...
Apples & Pictures. Malraux is both irritating and sentimental when he tries to give art for art's sake a religious mystique. Art to him is an "anti-destiny," man's only means of asserting himself in a meaningless universe. He equates sacred and profane works of art by arguing that both aim at "defeating the tyranny of Time": though Vermeer "had no intention of imparting to his Maidservant that morsel of eternity which the Egyptian sculptor imparted to his Zoser, he may well have wished his picture of this girl to enter into a world akin to that...
...this metamorphosis, the gods presumably share Olympus with The World's 100 Great Paintings. To satisfy this lofty status, Malraux exalts the secular painter's function to a kind of priestly vocation. Sacred art deified its subject; profane art deifies the calling of the artist. "Cezanne," Malraux argues, "did not wish to represent apples, he wished to paint pictures...