Not only a creative genius, however, but also a creative age, may use the word ugly in this Dionysian sense. For a robust and rich people scorn to treasure and to hoard that which has gone before. And thus our museums, alone, are perhaps the greatest betrayal of our times.
When the Athenians returned to their ruined Acropolis in the first half of the fifth century before Christ, they did not even scratch the ground to recover the masterpieces that lay broken, though not completely destroyed, all around them. And, as Professor Gardner observes, it is fortunate for us that no mortar was required for the buildings which were being erected to take the place of those that had been destroyed; otherwise these fragments of marble sculpture and architecture, instead of being buried to help in filling up the terraced area of the Acropolis, would certainly have gone to the lime-kiln.[3]
The men of the Renaissance, in the same way, regarded the buildings of ancient Rome merely as so many quarries whence they might bear away the materials for their own constructions. And whether Paul II wished to build the Palazzo di Venezia, or Cardinal Riario the Cancellaria, the same principle obtained. At the same period we also find Raphael destroying the work of earlier painters by covering it with his own compositions,[4] and Michelangelo not hesitating to obliterate even Perugino's altar frescoes in the Sixtine Chapel in order to paint his "Judgment." While in comparatively recent times, at a moment when a great future seemed to be promised to modern Egypt, Mehemet Ali sent his architect to the sacred Pyramids of Gizeh, to rob them of the alabaster which he required for his magnificent mosque on the citadel of Cairo.[5]
From a purely archæological and scholastic point of view, therefore, it is possible to justify our museums—the British Museum, for instance. But from the creative or artistic standpoint, they are simply a confession of impotence, of poverty, and of fear; and, as such, are utterly contemptible. In any case, however, I think that, for the sake of public taste and sanity, some of the ugly fragments—such as two-thirds of the maimed and mutilated parts of bodies from the Eastern and Western pediments of the Parthenon—ought never to have been allowed to stand outside a students' room in a school of archæology or of art, and even in such institutions as these, I very much question the value of the pieces to which I have referred.
[1] W. P., Vol I, p. 333. See also B. T., pp. 27, 28.
[2] W. P., Vol. I, p. 333.
[3] A Handbook of Greek Sculpture, by E. A. Gardner, M.A., p. 212.
[4] Piero della Francesca's decorations in the Vatican, painted under the direction of Pope Nicholas V, were ultimately destroyed by Raphael. See W. S. Waters, M.A., Piero della Francesca, pp. 23, 24, 108.
[5] See also Fergusson, A History of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 48: "... If we had made the same progress in the higher that we have in the lower branches of the building art, we should see a Gothic Cathedral pulled down with the same indifference, content to know that we could easily replace it by one far nobler and more worthy of our age and intelligence. No architect during the Middle Ages ever hesitated to pull down any part of a cathedral that was old and going to decay; and to replace it with something in the style of the day, however incongruous that might be; and if we were progressing as they were, we should have as little compunction in following the same course."