Chapter XXXVI.[20] Isolated Remarks On The Æsthetics Of The Plastic And Pictorial Arts.
In sculpture beauty and grace are the principal things; but in painting expression, passion, and character predominate; therefore just so much of the claims of beauty must be neglected. For a perfect beauty of all forms, such as sculpture demands, would detract from the characteristic and weary by monotony. Accordingly painting may also present ugly faces and emaciated figures; sculpture, on the other hand, demands beauty, although not always perfect, but, throughout, strength and fulness of the figures. Consequently a thin Christ upon the Cross, a dying St. Jerome, wasted by age and disease, like the masterpiece of Domenichino, is a proper subject for painting; while, on the contrary, the marble figure by Donatello, in the gallery at Florence, of John the Baptist, reduced to skin and bone by fasting, has, in spite of the masterly execution, a repulsive effect. From this point of view sculpture seems suitable for the affirmation, painting for the negation, of the will to live, and from this it may be explained why sculpture was the art of the ancients, while painting has been the art of the Christian era.
In connection with the exposition given in § 45 of the first volume, that the discovery, recognition, and retention of the type of human beauty depends to a certain extent upon an anticipation of it, and therefore in [pg 194] part has an a priori foundation, I find that I have yet to bring out clearly the fact that this anticipation nevertheless requires experience, by which it may be stirred up; analogous to the instinct of the brutes, which, although guiding the action a priori, yet requires determination by motives in the details of it. Experience and reality present to the intellect of the artist human forms, which, in one part or another, are more or less true to nature, as if it were asking for his judgment concerning them, and thus, after the Socratic method, call forth from that obscure anticipation the distinct and definite knowledge of the ideal. Therefore it assisted the Greek sculptors very much that the climate and customs of their country gave them opportunity the whole day of seeing half-naked forms, and in the gymnasium entirely naked forms. In this way every limb presented its plastic significance to criticism, and to comparison with the ideal which lay undeveloped in their consciousness. Thus they constantly exercised their judgment with regard to all forms and limbs, down to their finest shades of difference; and thus, little by little, their originally dull anticipation of the ideal of human beauty was raised to such distinct consciousness that they became capable of objectifying it in works of art. In an entirely analogous manner some experience is useful and necessary to the poet for the representation of characters. For although he does not work according to experience and empirical data, but in accordance with the clear consciousness of the nature of humanity, as he finds it within himself, yet experience serves this consciousness as a pattern, incites it and gives it practice. Accordingly his knowledge of human nature and its varieties, although in the main it proceeds a priori and by anticipation, yet first receives life, definiteness, and compass through experience. But, supporting ourselves upon the preceding book and chapter 44 in the following book, we can go still deeper into the ground of that marvellous sense of beauty of the Greeks which made them [pg 195] alone of all nations upon earth capable of discovering the true normal type of the human form, and accordingly of setting up the pattern of beauty and grace for the imitation of all ages, and we can say: The same thing which, if it remains unseparated from the will, gives sexual instinct with its discriminating selection, i.e., sexual love (which it is well known was subject among the Greeks to great aberrations), becomes, if, by the presence of an abnormally preponderating intellect, it separates itself from the will and yet remains active, the objective sense of beauty of the human form, which now shows itself primarily as a critical artistic sense, but can rise to the discovery and representation of the norm of all parts and proportions; as was the case in Phidias, Praxiteles, Scopas, &c. Then is fulfilled what Goethe makes the artist say—
“That I with mind divine
And human hand
May be able to form
What with my wife,
As animal, I can and must.”