The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

VII

With this is connected an important principle of composition. In a picture it is possible to set the things inorganically above one another or side by side or behind one another without any emphasis of perspective or interrelation, i.e., without insisting upon the dependence of their actuality upon the structure of space which does not necessarily mean that this dependence is denied. Primitive men and children draw thus, before their depth-experience has brought the sense-impressions of their world more or less into fundamental order. But this order differs in the different Cultures according to the prime symbols of these Cultures. The sort of perspective composition that is so self-evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of representation. Polygnotus’s frescoes in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi are a celebrated instance of this. There is no background to connect the individual scenes—for such a background would have been a challenge to the principle that things alone are actual and space non-existent. The pediment of the Ægina temple, the procession of gods on the François Vase and the Frieze of the Giants of Pergamum are all composed as meander-syntheses of separate and interchangeable motives, without organic character. It is only with the Hellenistic age (the Telephus Frieze of the altar of Pergamum is the earliest example that has been preserved) that the un-Classical motive of the consistent series comes into existence. In this respect, as in others, the feeling of the Renaissance was truly Gothic. It did indeed carry group-composition to such a pitch of perfection that its work remains the pattern for all following ages. But the order of it all proceeded out of space. In the last analysis, it was a silent music of colour-illumined extension that created within itself light-resistances, which the understanding eye could grasp as things and as existence, and could set marching with an invisible swing and rhythm out into the distance. And with this spatial ordering, with its unremarked substitution of air-and light-perspective for line-perspective, the Renaissance was already, in essence, defeated.

And now from the end of the Renaissance in Orlando Lasso and Palestrina right up to Wagner, from Titian right up to Manet and Marées and Leibl, great musicians and great painters followed close upon one another while the plastic art sank into entire insignificance. Oil-painting and instrumental music evolve organically towards aims that were comprehended in the Gothic and achieved in the Baroque. Both arts—Faustian in the highest sense—are within those limits prime phenomena. They have a soul, a physiognomy and therefore a history. And in this they are alone. All that sculpture could thenceforward achieve was a few beautiful incidental pieces in the shadow of painting, garden-art, or architecture. The art of the West had no real need of them. There was no longer a style of plastic in the sense that there were styles of painting or music. No consistent tradition or necessary unity links the works of Maderna, Goujon, Puget and Schlüter. Even Leonardo begins to despise the chisel outright: at most he will admit the bronze cast, and that on account of its pictorial advantages. Therein he differs from Michelangelo, for whom the marble block was still the true element. And yet even Michelangelo in his old age could no longer succeed with the plastic, and none of the later sculptors are great in the sense that Rembrandt and Bach are great. There were clever and tasteful performances no doubt, but not one single work of the same order as the “Night Watch” or the “Matthew Passion,” nothing that expresses, as these express, the whole depth of a whole mankind. This art had fallen out of the destiny of the Culture. Its speech meant nothing now. What there is in a Rembrandt portrait simply cannot be rendered in a bust. Now and then a sculptor of power arises, like Bernini or the masters of the contemporary Spanish school, or Pigalle or Rodin (none of whom, naturally, transcended the decorative and attained the level of grand symbolism), but such an artist is always visibly either a belated imitator of the Renaissance like Thorwaldsen, a disguised painter like Houdon or Rodin, an architect like Bernini and Schlüter or a decorator like Coysevox. And his very appearance on the scene only shows the more clearly that this art, incapable of carrying the Faustian burden, has no longer a mission—and therefore no longer a soul or a life-history of specific style-development—in the Faustian world. In the Classical world, correspondingly, music was the art that failed. Beginning with probably quite important advances in the earliest Doric, it had to give way in the ripe centuries of Ionic (650-350) to the two truly Apollinian arts, sculpture and fresco; renouncing harmony and polyphony, it had to renounce therewith any pretensions to organic development as a higher art.