Why should such artists have sought to create an abstract Beauty by the idealization of forms? These men of genius loved Nature too well to presume to correct her. They knew well that despite their genius, they still remained beneath her. Nothing can surpass the marvel of creation. The conception of an idealistic art comes from the Academy. Before the purity of the antique forms people used to believe that the beauty lay solely in the exterior profiles. It is really beautiful because of the interior modeling. And still we make this distinction between the profiles and the modeling, thanks to our mania for dividing things; but we know that the one is inseparable from the other; the surfaces are nothing but the extremities of volumes, the boundaries of the mass.
All the sculpture of the period of Louis-Philippe was imitated from the antique, but only by means of the exterior profiles. If it had been practised by true modelers, by geometrical minds, it would have been as beautiful as its original. What pleased people in that epoch, what pleases people in ours, is not at all the antique; it is the fashion in which we see it. It was the Renaissance that really understood the Greek. It created works exactly the same in feeling, though somewhat different in arrangement and general color. For color does not exist in painting alone. Its rôle is equally great in sculpture. To-day this color is bad; it fails to obtain the chiaroscuro which derives from ronde-bosse. Good sculpture owes to chiaroscuro clarity, unity, charm, even, I might say, the voluptuousness of breathing flesh. Shadow, at once luminous and mysterious, models the fulness of the body in the exuberance of health; it makes one understand abundance, solidity. In the art of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century shadow is always supple and warm as in Greek art; it has the tender coloring of the vegetation of our country, the sweetness of which our great artists have captured. The chiaroscuro of the antique consists of the density and depth of light falling over the entire modeling. Chiaroscuro penetrates to every plane and renders the reality of them; it is reality itself. This is because the antique and nature are part and parcel of the same mystery, the infinitely harmonious mystery of force in suspense. The great artists compose as nature itself operates.
Undoubtedly the Greeks possessed certain methods which they handed down from master to pupil, as has been the case in all artistic epochs. They had celebrated ateliers, schools, where they taught their principles. By the fifth century they had established a canon of the human body; but they never made use of it without consulting the model. As for us, we have imagined that we could use it like a magic formula. It is not the formula that makes the art; it is the experience of the artist that creates the formula. If we abandon nature for a rule, if we do not constantly vivify the one by means of the other, we soon speak a language that means nothing.
One cannot repeat this enough: the ancients are realists; they work in ronde-bosse. This explanation seems commonplace and even vulgar; it is the whole truth. It can be understood by the humblest artisan, provided only that he knows his trade. But it is as difficult to get it into the heads of people to-day as it is to restore faith in a man who has lost it.
ROME AND ROMAN ART
What I have said of Greek art applies equally well to Roman. Another opinion has been adopted by critics and the world in general: the Roman is less beautiful than the Greek. It is less beautiful perhaps, by a certain shade, a shade which those who speak of it are incapable of appreciating. It is a little less substantial, but it is superb. It is Greek, with a different character, a certain ruggedness, and more! The Maison Carrée at Nîmes, that little temple, the flower of austerity, the smile of the race as sweet as the smile of Greece; the Pont du Gard, that heroic masterpiece, that giant which bestrides the country, which imposes the power of Rome on the peaceful landscape, these are what they criticize!
Rome is magnificent. We say it, but we do not believe it; otherwise it would not be despoiled. No, in Rome itself, they have no idea of the beauty of Rome. Where are there artists great enough to appreciate you, severe genius, splendid city, daughter of the she-wolf? Your genius they pillage every day. They destroy its proportion, and that is to strike at the foundation of the master work. Proportion is the law of architecture. ... In the very midst of the ancient city they are setting up atrocious monuments, enormous or too petty.
In Rome, as in Athens, as in the France of Gothic art, the architect of old planned the monument in relation to the landscape; he harmonized it with the outline of the mountains, with the expanse of the surrounding country-side; he determined its proportions according to its environment.
The architect of to-day plans out his monument in his own study on a piece of paper and produces it ready-made. Whether this mass of stone obliterates the buildings that surround it or whether, on the other hand, it turns out a miserable little contrivance in the midst of great works of the past matters little to him: he does not see it.