The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

For this reason, too, Leonardo (after innumerable attempts) decided to leave the Christ-head in the “Last Supper” unfinished. The men of his time were not even ripe for portraiture as Rembrandt understood the word, the magistral building-up of a soul-history out of dynamic brush-strokes and lights and tones. But only Leonardo was great enough to experience this limitation as a Destiny. Others merely set themselves to paint heads (in the modes prescribed by their respective schools) but Leonardo—the first, here, to make the hands also speak, and that with a physiognomic maestria—had an infinitely wider purpose. His soul was lost afar in the future, though his mortal part, his eye and hand, obeyed the spirit of the age. Assuredly he was the freest of the three great ones. From much of that which Michelangelo’s powerful nature vainly wrestled with, he was already remote. Problems of chemistry, geometrical analysis, physiology (Goethe’s “living Nature” was also Leonardo’s), the technique of fire-arms—all were familiar to him. Deeper than Dürer, bolder than Titian, more comprehensive than any single man of his time, he was essentially the artist of torsos.[^[363]] Michelangelo the belated sculptor was so, too, but in another sense, while in Goethe’s day that which had been unattainable for the painter of the Last Supper had already been reached and overpassed. Michelangelo strove to force life once more into a dead form-world, Leonardo felt a new form-world in the future, Goethe divined that there could be no new form-worlds more. Between the first and the last of these men lie the ripe centuries of the Faustian Culture.

VI

It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea of the Destiny of an art, and admitted arts to be organisms of the Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and for ever die.

When the Renaissance—its last illusion—closes, the Western soul has come to the ripe consciousness of its own strength and possibilities. It has chosen its arts. As a “late” period, the Baroque knows, just as the Ionic had known, what the form-language of its arts has to mean. From being a philosophical religion, art has to be a religious philosophy. Great masters come forward in the place of anonymous schools. At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid group of great arts, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The Apollinian group, to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of “progress,” the modern machine-technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State—all into one immense totality of spiritual expression. Beginning with the inward rhythm of the cathedral and ending with Wagner’s “Tristan” and “Parsifal,” the artistic conquest of endless space deploys its full forces from about 1550. Plastic is dying with Michelangelo in Rome just when planimetry, dominant hitherto, is becoming the least important branch of our mathematic. At the same time, Venice is producing Zarlino’s theories of harmony and counterpoint (1558) and the practical method of the basso continuo—a perspective and an analysis of the world of sound—and this music’s sister, the Northern mathematic of the Calculus, is beginning to mount.

Oil-painting and instrumental music, the arts of space, are now entering into their kingdom. So also—consequently, we say—the two essentially material and Euclidean arts of the Classical Culture, viz., the all-round statue and the strictly planar fresco, attain to their primacy at the corresponding date of c. 600 B.C. And further, in the one and in the other case, it is the painting that ripens first. For in either kind painting on the plane is a less ambitious and more accessible art than modelling in solid or composing in immaterial extension. The period 1550-1650 belongs as completely to oil-painting as fresco and vase-painting belong to the 6th Century B.C. The symbolism of space and of body, expressed in the one case by perspective and in the other by proportion, are only indicated and not immediately displayed by pictorial arts. These arts, which can only in each case produce their respective prime-symbols (i.e., their possibilities in the extended) as illusions on a painted surface, are capable indeed of denoting and evoking the ideal—Classical or Western, as the case may be—but they are not capable of fulfilling it; they appear therefore in the path of the “late” Culture as the ledges before the last summit. The nearer the grand style comes to its point of fulfilment, the more decisive the tendency to an ornamental language of inexorable clarity of symbolism. The group of great arts is further simplified. About 1670, just when Newton and Leibniz were discovering the Differential Calculus, oil-painting had reached the limit of its possibilities. Its last great masters were dead or dying—Velasquez 1660, Poussin 1665, Franz Hals 1666, Rembrandt 1669, Vermeer 1675, Murillo, Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain 1682—and one has only to name the few successors of any importance (Watteau, Hogarth, Tiepolo) to feel at once the descent, the end, of an art. In this time also, the great forms of pictorial music expired. Heinrich Schütz died in 1672, Carissimi in 1674, and Purcell in 1695—the last great masters of the Cantata, who had played around image-themes with infinite variety of vocal and instrumental colour and had painted veritable pictures of fine landscape and grand legend-scene. With Lully (1687) the heart of the heroic Baroque opera of Monteverde ceased to beat. It was the same with the old “classical” sonata for orchestra, organ and string trio, which was a development of image-themes in the fugal style. Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. The victory of pure music over painting stands recorded in the Passions which Heinrich Schütz composed in his old age—the visible dawn of the new form-language—in the sonatas of Dall’Abaco and Corelli, the oratorios of Händel and the Baroque polyphony of Bach. Henceforth this music is the Faustian art, and Watteau may fairly be described as a painter-Couperin, Tiepolo as a painter-Händel.

In the Classical world the corresponding change occurred about 460, when Polygnotus, the last of the great fresco-painters, ceded the inheritance of the grand style to Polycletus and free sculpture in the round. Till then—as late even as Polygnotus’s contemporaries Myron and the masters of the Olympia pediment—the form-language of a purely planar art had dominated that of statuary also; for, just as painting had developed its form more and more towards the ideal of the silhouette of colour with internal drawing superposed—to such an extent that at last there was almost no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture—so also the sculptor had regarded the frontal outline as it presented itself to the beholder as the true symbol of the Ethos, the cultural type, that he meant his figure to represent. The field of the temple-pediment constitutes a picture; seen from the proper distance, it makes exactly the same impression as its contemporary the red-figure vase-painting. In Polycletus’s generation the monumental wall-painting gives place to the board-picture, the “picture” proper, in tempera or wax—a clear indication that the great style has gone to reside elsewhere. The ambition of Apollodorus’s shadow painting was not in any sense what we call chiaroscuro and atmosphere, but sheer modelling in the round in the sculptor’s sense; and of Zeuxis Aristotle says expressly that his work lacked “Ethos.” Thus, this newer Classical painting with its cleverness and human charm is the equivalent of our 18th-Century work. Both lacked the inner greatness and both tried by force of virtuosity to speak in the language of that single and final Art which in each case stood for ornamentation in the higher sense. Hence Polycletus and Phidias aline themselves with Bach and Händel; as the Western masters liberated strict musical form from the executive methods of the Painting, so the Greek masters finally delivered the statue from the associations of the Relief.

And with this full plastic and this full music the two Cultures reach their respective ends. A pure symbolism of mathematical rigour had become possible. Polycletus could produce his “canon” of the proportions of the human body, and his contemporary Bach the “Kunst der Fuge” and “Wohltemperiertes Klavier.” In the two arts that ensued, we have the last perfection of achievement that pure form saturated with meaning can give. Compare the tone-body of Faustian instrumental music, and within that system again the body of the strings (in Bach, too, the virtual unity of the winds), with the bodies of Attic statuary. Compare the meaning of the word “figure” to Haydn with its meaning to Praxiteles. In the one case it is the figure of a rhythmic motive in a web of voices, in the other the figure of an athlete. But in both cases the notion comes from mathematics and it is made plain that the aim thus finally attained is a union of the artistic and the mathematical spirit, for analysis like music, and Euclidean geometry like plastic, have both come to full comprehension of their tasks and the ultimate meaning of their respective number-languages. The mathematics of beauty and the beauty of mathematics are henceforth inseparable. The unending space of tone and the all-round body of marble or bronze are immediate interpretations of the extended. They belong to number-as-relation and to number-as-measure. In fresco and in oil-painting, in the laws of proportion and those of perspective, the mathematical is only indicated, but the two final arts are mathematics, and on these peaks Apollinian art and Faustian art are seen entire.

With the exit of fresco and oil-painting, the great masters of absolute plastic and absolute music file on to the stage, man after man. Polycletus is followed by Phidias, Pæonius, Alcamenes, Scopas, Praxiteles, Lysippus. Behind Bach and Händel come Gluck, Stamitz, the younger Bachs, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—in their hands an armoury of wonderful and now long-forgotten instruments, a whole magician’s world created by the discovering and inventing spirit of the West in the hope of getting more and more tones and timbres for the service and enhancement of musical expression—in their winds an abundance of grand, solemn, ornate, dainty, ironic, laughing and sobbing forms of perfectly regular structure, forms that no one now understands. In those days, in 18th-Century Germany especially, there was actually and effectively a Culture of Music that suffused all Life. Its type was Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler. To-day it is hardly even a memory.

And with the 18th Century, too, architecture died at last, submerged and choked in the music of Rococo. On that last wonderful fragile growth of the Western architecture criticism has blown mercilessly, failing to realize that its origin is in the spirit of the fugue and that its non-proportion and non-form, its evanescence and instability and sparkle, its destruction of surface and visual order, are nothing else than a victory of tones and melodies over lines and walls, the triumph of pure space over material, of absolute becoming over the become. They are no longer buildings, these abbeys and castles and churches with their flowing façades and porches and “gingerbread” courts and their splendid staircases, galleries, salons and cabinets; they are sonatas, minuets, madrigals in stone, chamber-music in stucco, marble, ivory and fine woods, cantilene of volutes and cartouches, cadences of fliers and copings. The Dresden Zwinger is the most completely musical piece in all the world’s architecture, with an ornamentation like the tone of an old violin, an allegro fugitivo for small orchestra.

Germany produced the great musicians and therefore also the great architects of this century (Poppelmann, Schlüter, Bähr, Naumann, Fischer von Erlach, Dinzenhofer). In oil-painting she played no part at all: in instrumental music, on the contrary, hers was the principal rôle.