Consider mosaic. In Hellenic times it was made up of pieces of marble, it was opaque and corporeal-Euclidean (e.g., the famous Battle of Issus at Naples), and it adorned the floor. But with the awakening of the Arabian soul it came to be built up of pieces of glass and set in fused gold, and it simply covered the walls and roofs of the domed basilica. This Early-Arabian Mosaic-picturing corresponds exactly, as to phase, with the glass-picturing of Gothic cathedrals, both being “early” arts ancillary to religious architectures. The one by letting in the light enlarges the church-space into world-space, while the other transforms it into the magic, gold-shimmering sphere which bears men away from earthly actuality into the visions of Plotinus, Origen, the Manichæans, the Gnostics and the Fathers, and the Apocalyptic poems.
Consider, again, the beautiful notion of uniting the round arch and the column; this again is a Syrian, if not a North-Arabian, creation of the third (or “high Gothic”) century.[[266]] The revolutionary importance of this motive, which is specifically Magian, has never in the least degree been recognized; on the contrary, it has always been assumed to be Classical, and for most of us indeed it is even representatively Classical. The Egyptians ignored any deep relation between the roof and the column; the latter was for them a plant-column, and represented not stoutness but growth. Classical man, in his turn, for whom the monolithic column was the mightiest symbol of Euclidean existence—all body, all unity, all steadiness—connected it, in the strictest proportions of vertical and horizontal, of strength and load, with his architrave. But here, in this union of arch and column which the Renaissance in its tragicomic deludedness admired as expressly Classical (though it was a notion that the Classical neither possessed nor could possess), the bodily principle of load and inertia is rejected and the arch is made to spring clear and open out of the slender column. The idea actualized here is at once a liberation from all earth-gravity and a capture of space, and between this element and that of the dome which soars free but yet encloses the great “cavern,” there is the deep relation of like meaning. The one and the other are eminently and powerfully Magian, and they come to their logical fulfilment in the “Rococo” stage of Moorish mosques and castles, wherein ethereally delicate columns—often growing out of, rather than based on, the ground—seem to be empowered by some secret magic to carry a whole world of innumerable notched arcs, gleaming ornaments, stalactites, and vaultings saturated with colours. The full importance of this basic form of Arabian architecture may be expressed by saying that the combination of column and architrave is the Classical, that of column and round arch the Arabian, and that of pillar and pointed arch the Faustian Leitmotiv.
Take, further, the history of the Acanthus motive.[[267]] In the form in which it appears, for example, on the Monument of Lysicrates at Athens, it is one of the most distinctive in Classical ornamentation. It has body, it is and remains individual, and its structure is capable of being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and richer in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva’s, Trajan’s) and that of the temple of Mars Ultor; the organic disposition has become so complicated that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the tendency to fill up the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art—of which Riegl thirty years ago noticed the “latent Saracenic character” though he had no suspicion of the connexion brought to light here—the acanthus leaf was broken up into endless tendril-work which (as in Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite inorganically over whole surfaces. To the Classical motive are added the old-Aramæan vine and palm leaves, which have already played a part in Jewish ornamentation. The interlaced borders of “Late-Roman” mosaic pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world, mobility and bizarrerie culminate in the Arabesque. This is the genuine Magian motive—anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A masterpiece of this kind—a piece of architecture completely opened out into Ornamentation—is the façade of the Castle of Mashetta in Moab built by the Ghassanids.[[268]] The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic style (hitherto called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which invaded the whole youthful West and dominated the Carolingian Empire, was largely practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as patterns for our own weavers, metal-workers and armourers.[[269]] Ravenna, Lucca, Venice, Granada, Palermo were the efficient centres of this then highly-civilized form-language; in the year 1000, when in the North the forms of a new Culture were already being developed and established, Italy was still entirely dominated by it.
Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body. With the victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men’s conception of it underwent a complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of the period 100-250 that the Vatican Collection contains, one may perceive the opposition of Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of muscular position and “look” as different bases of expression. Even in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the sculptor made constant use of the drill, an instrument which was wholly repugnant to the Euclidean feeling towards stone—for whereas the chisel brings out the limiting surfaces and ipso facto affirms the corporeal and material nature of the marble block, the drill, in breaking the surfaces and creating effects of light and shade, denies it; and accordingly the sculptors, be they Christian or “pagan,” lose the old feeling for the phenomenon of the naked body. One has only to look at the shallow and empty Antinous statues—and yet these were quite definitely “Classical.” Here it is only the head that is physiognomically of interest—as it never is in Attic sculpture. The drapery is given quite a new meaning, and simply dominates the whole appearance. The consul-statues in the Capitoline Museum[[270]] are conspicuous examples. The pupils are bored, and the eyes look into the distance, so that the whole expression of the work lies no longer in its body but in that Magian principle of the “Pneuma” which Neo-Platonism and the decisions of the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike presume in man.
The pagan “Father” Iamblichus, about 300, wrote a book concerning statues of gods in which the divine is substantially present and working upon the beholder.[[271]] Against this idea of the image—an idea of the Pseudomorphosis—the East and the South rose in a storm of iconoclasm; and the sources of this iconoclasm lay in a conception of artistic creation that is nearly impossible for us to understand.
CHAPTER VII | | MUSIC AND PLASTIC
I
THE ARTS OF FORM