WOMAN IN ART
scented air, the glowing sky, from being the glory of Greek art and culture, it has passed westward with the course of Empire and is imprisoned—preserved, shall we say, for its beauty and the one-time art that it glorified, and glorifies it still, in the gallery of the Louvre, and is an inspiration to the world.
Thus we see how form brings us to the ideal, how the ideal may be expressed in form.
The mind of an artist partakes of the thought, spirit, and status of his environment; hence, now and then, we need a sprinkling of history to obtain consecutive stages of development.
Barbarian Rome conquered and despoiled artistic Greece. Both were pagan as to religion. The Roman soldiery was iconoclastic in its attack upon art that was priceless and irreplaceable. When the head of the armies realized the destruction, and that what glorified Greece might be the conquerors' spoil and glorify Rome, the marbles, bronzes, and paintings were carried off to Italy to beautify the domain of the Cæsars. The ambition of Rome used this spoil to such a lavish extent that its palaces, streets, and piazzas were crowded with statues, and the cities of Italy had an over-dose of art inoculation—against art? So it seems. Greek artists and artisans were also impressed from Attica and its isles to the end that Rome be converted into the most magnificent city in the world. But prophecy had to be fulfilled, and after the fall of Rome and the dark ages that followed, nothing remained to attest a one-time glory of art but the imported remnants of Greek and a moiety of Greco-Roman art.
Greece had many sculptors, but only one Myron, one Phidias, one Praxiteles. The next great wave of sculpture came with the Renaissance of the Italian world. There were many sculptors in those days, but only one Michael Angelo—a robust thinker, a robust worker with chisel, brush and pen. The fine arts met together in his horoscope.
According to the tenets of the times and of the church, for whose glory he wrought most worthily with his art, he gave out but little of the nude. His Sibyls and Virtues were strong in face and pose; the power was in their repose, their strength and expression of features. His pagan Sibyls, placed alternately with the Hebrew Prophets in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, represent a remarkable type of woman. One has the feeling that they were evolved from the brain of the artist regardless of nationality, or of the supposed physical or mental differences that were said to accompany the power of supernatural vision.
Sibyls were of remote antiquity, useful or baneful as the case might be, to leaders who would interrogate the future; hence the great master recorded a
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