[268]. The Ghassanid Kingdom flourished in the extreme North-west of Arabia during the sixth century of our reckoning. Its people were essentially Arab, and probably came from the south; and an outlying cousinry inhabited Medina in the time of the Prophet.—Tr.
[269]. Dehio, Gesch. der deutschen Kunst, I, pp. 16 et seq.
[270]. Wulff, Altchristl.-byzant. Kunst, pp. 153 et seq.
[271]. See Vol. II, p. 315, Geffcken, Der Ausgang des griech-röm. Heidentums (1920), p. 113.
[272]. Die bildenden Künste. The expression is a standard one in German, but unfamiliar in English. Ordinarily, however, “die bildenden Künste” (shaping arts, arts of form) are contrasted with “die redenden Künste” (speaking arts)—music, as giving utterance rather than spatial form to things, being counted among the latter.—Tr.
[273]. As soon as the word, which is a transmission-agent of the understanding, comes to be used as the expression-agent of an art, the waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing integrally. Not to mention the read word of higher Cultures—the medium of literature proper—even the spoken word, when used in any artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding, for the ordinary meaning of the word also takes a hand in the process and, as this art grows in power, the wordless arts themselves arrive at expression-methods in which the motives are joined to word-meanings. Thus arises the Allegory, or motive that signifies a word, as in Baroque sculpture after Bernini. So, too, painting very often develops into a sort of painting-writing, as in Byzantium after the second Nicene Council (787) which took from the artist his freedom of choice and arrangement. This also is what distinguishes the arias of Gluck, in which the melody grew up out of the meaning of the libretto, from those of Alessandro Scarlatti, in which the texts are in themselves of no significance and mostly serve to carry the voices. The high-Gothic counterpoint of the 13th Century is entirely free from any connexion with words: it is a pure architecture of human voices in which several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung together.
[274]. Our pedantic method has given us an art-history that excludes music-history; and while the one has become a normal element of higher education, the other has remained an affair solely for the expert. It is just as though one tried to write a history of Greece without taking Sparta into account. The result is a theory of “Art” that is a pious fraud.
[275]. This sentence is not in the original. It has been inserted, and the following sentence modified, for the sake of clarity.—Tr.
[276]. See Vol. II, p. 110. The aspect of the streets of Old Egypt may have been very similar to this, if we can draw conclusions from tesseræ discovered in Cnossus (see H. Bossert, Alt Kreta (1921), T. 14). And the Pylon is an undoubted and genuine façade. (Such tesseræ, bearing pictures of windowed houses, are illustrated in Art. “Ægean Civilization,” Ency. Brit., XI Edition, Vol. I, p. 251, plate IV, fig. 1.—Tr.).
[277]. Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.