Chapter VIII
Synopsis
I. Kinds of human representation, p. 259
Each man himself is included within & part of, the great symbols; his expression of this is thru art and it is thru art that the Prime symbol of each Culture comes to expression.
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The Apollonian art reflects the metaphysical prime symbol with its phenomenal art, its sculpture of the naked body: totally without imperfection or flaw, anatomically exactly correct, possessing perfect proportion of its parts (Praxiteles, later Lysippus) & viewed in the round 360 degrees. For the Apollonian THIS body was the SOUL, it had no interior (just as the Greek temple has not interior, but is all columsn & façade).
This Greek expression is unique, not seen in in Chinese or Egyptian art. Gothic sculpture NEVER tried to reflect the body beneath the clothing. Indeed Faustian man rejects bodily perfection, Baroque man covered head to toe & even smelled bad (even Louis XIV smelled like a carcass). For the Faustian, the physical body is not the Soul, Faustian man sees character, personality – he sees the SOUL, the interior.
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Portraiture, Contrition, Syntax, p. 261
Apollonian sculpture obsessed with the outer surface is NOT the most perfect or natural expression of the body; neither Egyptian or Chinese sculpture were so bound. Gothic cathedral sculpture serves to express a profound tragedy, the story of the Divine tragedy unfolds in front of us. We find an expression of the contrition of the Soul. Far from “architectonic” works, this sculpture reflects inner essence. Even the tomb sculpture speaks of a person, his history, his personality. And as the Apollonian sough to express the perfected superficial body, so the Faustian Soul aims to reflect the personality of man, in Portrait.
Where the Apollonian Soul is expressed via the exterior, the Act, Faustian expressed inwardly; the interior of the Gothic cathedral speaks through its façade; portrait is an inward expression of the person. The Magian mosque is without façade, therefore no portrait, hence Islamic Iconoclasm. In Egypt the stone pylon is the face, the facade, it emerges from the stone just so Egyptian portrait materializes out of stone. Chinese portrait is one of wrinkles, each one a small yet significant sign. The Faustian portrait is musical, each gesture of the hand, or lip, the pose- all is musical & expressive.
Faustian language evolves the specific “I” pronoun in grammar, emerging from a Latin legacy bereft of such.. “I” matures in the sacrament of confession & personal absolution. It is found again in portrait reflecting a personal unique history, possessing direction, time & destiny. Apollonian portrait is a type, captures a moment, a pause without duration or direction. So we find in Latin “Veni, Vidi, Vici” - reflecting an attitude, a become; “I came, I saw I conquered”, is a becoming. Direction past & future is visible in the Gothic tomb, in the historic person, but also the carved Sibyls & Prophets telling of the impending! The Apollonian stele is timeless, its persons are types; its poetry is statuary in verse; it reflects World in nature, in being, the ever present. Western portrait arises from the stone in 1200, by the 17th century; it is man in History. Apollonian art is unreserved nature (but ONLY nature) Gothic is much more then Nature, its form language richer- the portrait is both nature AND history, a portrait is biography, self-portrait a confession. The Reformation & Enlightenment rejected auricular confession, but never confession in itself. Faustian man lives in becoming, he sees the past, the future; the Greek lives outside time, incapable of self-criticism, impersonal; the idea of autobiography alien to his soul.
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The heads of Classical statuary, p. 264
The sculpted heads of the Apollonian masters were soulless, plant like, masks, devoid of reflecting inner experience. They avoid any suggestions of intimacy or spiritual content (Myron in particular), in contrast to the Egyptians or Renaissance sculptors. They are devoid of destiny, biography & at best reflect only an attitude (a fighting spirit). Such heads are small, inconspicuous, a simple appendage of the body, not the most favoured, the seat of the Soul. Sculptors of the 5th or 4th centuries eliminate all trace soft the individual or the historical, in favour of a bland ideal. In contrast the Baroque portrait is Soul, reflects Soul through brush stroke, lighting, atmosphere & perspective. In the faces of the Rembrandt portrait, even their brows are so expressive of an inner sense, utterly lacking in the best of the Classical heads. The clothing on a Gothic statue is mere ornament serving to emphasize the head & hands, de-emphasizing the body beneath; just as the voices in Baroque & counterpoint are highlights standing out from the continuo backdrop. For the Egyptian the body is treated as a mathematical formula, all except the personality seen in the head. In Athens the body emerges from the drapery; in Gothic it is hidden beneath, to become music. The High Renaissance artist consciously rejected Gothic style; the movement to the Baroque see an unconscious ideal emerge- the body as musical.
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II. Portrayal of children and women, p. 266
Strong polarity between Apollonian Act and Faustian Portrait. Apollonian art is the art of become; Faustian is the art of becoming. Consequently, the Apollonian artist studiously ignores childhood, the child links the past, and the future. Classical art is the art of the moment, blind to time. The child is a symbol of duration during change. Becoming also encompasses Motherhood. Man through mother has identity with a destiny. Care is the root feeling of future; all care is motherly, expressed in family & state, inheritance linking both. The Indian & Apollonian deny care: the Faustian and Egyptian assert care. Phidias carves no monuments of motherhood: in the West the portrayal of motherhood is the noblest of art. The Theotokos of the Byzantines is transformed by early Renaissance into the Madonna. For the Greeks goddesses were either Amazons, or hetrerre (sex bombs).
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Hellenistic portraiture, p. 269
In 4th century we see rise of the bust. But this is not portraiture in the Western sense (reflecting individual destiny) or Egyptian (with recognizable individual features). Instead it is based on typical representation of standard men & situations, and parallels 4th century Greek comedy based on stereotypes. With such types, the label provides the distinguishing feature, not the actual marble. We can identify the person only with the name; the person then assumes the attributes of the “type”. The sculptor explored a series of defined types (the tragic poet), they did not aim to reflect character (like Rembrandt).
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III. p. 270
The Faustian Soul is evident In the post Renaissance oil paintings. Even when producing nudes the artistic focus is on the portrait (character) not the surface body. The famous nudes of Rubens reflects this tendency, with his sensual streams of life (from youth to age), not an external structure. The Greek ideal form, the nude, is distinct from the mere beautiful bodies of Rococo artists like Boucher, with a clever sensuality but lacking the Apollonian ethical significance. The greatest Faustian artists (Rembrandt) produced nudes but these are character portraits. The Faustian bodies on landscapes (the Renaissance artist) is distinctly different form the Apollonian.
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The portrait is the key to Faustian expression (not the nude). The Renaissance did NOT distinguish itself with portraits. Raphael’s great monumental work is NOT portrait. It is with Leonardo (precursor to the Baroque age) that portrait begins, the very first being the Venetian Giovanni Bellini’s Doge (1501). The Renaissance aimed to replace Gothic portrait with Apollonian Act (by “Act” Spengler means the Apollonian moment of being, devoid of personality, looking neither to the past or future but only NOW); therefor they should reflect few physiognomic traits. And yet we discover even in Italian nudes, the skin is an envelope & not a static surface. Michelangelo’s nude’s reflect the soul inside the surface body and not the surface. Italian sculpture busts are close to being identical with the Early Rhenish masters of the Gothic north. Anti-Gothic (i.e. Renaissance) architecture was a possibility (though it was not Apollonian) but anti-Gothic portrait was not possible- even Michelangelo declines this. The attempt by the Renaissance to replace the Gothic, to bring forth the ahistoric, also saw a concomitant loss of private confession in favour of the public act, the loss of self-examination in favour of the courtly existence. And where the Renaissance was strongest, the state is least developed (and most like the Hellenic state); we see constant instability & conflict. Only where sculpture lay undeveloped, where Southern music was popular & where Gothic & Baroque fuse, do we see a state of significance, of duration: Venice.
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IV. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo overcome the Renaissance, p. 273
The Renaissance was a negative phenomenon, a reaction AGAINST, not for. Theory & formulation is stronger than practice. Renaissance ease & clarity is an evasion, avoiding the overpowering, imprecise problems. The men of the Gothic & Baroque age were practical artists: the men of the Renaissance were thinkers, restless, dissatisfied. Each of the 3 giants (Michelangelo, Leonard & Raphael) strove to Classical, to replace relation with proportion, light & air effects with drawing & Euclidean body for pure space. Yet they failed each in their own fashion- Raphael’s lines, Michelangelo’s surface, Leonardo’s body, all return to the Gothic, not the Classical. Each of these 3 would be, but cannot, achieve the ideal. As early as the Palazzo Farnese we see Michelangelo abandon the ideal in favour of the dramatic, the irregular- the first hint of the future Baroque. Never happy with half measures Michelangelo strove but the pictorial in him is finally overcome by the plastic. The Sistine Chapel is most his uncompromising statement of the ideal with its giant contours, vast surface, immense naked shapes, material solid colour, and yet he is pulled another direction, to the Gothic, musical, metaphysical. He made valiant attempts but his approach to stone was NOT Greek. Phidias wishes to give marble the form it cried for: Michelangelo saw the marble is enemy, to be attacked releasing the form beneath; no cool artist but passion. He produces visible form but the Soul wills infinity not proportion, past & future, not the moment. He saw beneath the surface into the Soul; finally marble itself became trivial, Western sculpture ends with Michelangelo. He turns to architecture & the road to the Baroque. Leonardo sees the future & eschews the body, corporal space, the topography of the surface, in favour of the aerial. In contrast to Raphael, whose paintings fall into planes, well ordered groups closed off with a proportioned background, Leonardo’s figures know only space. Leonardo discovers (e.g. the circulation of the blood) & reflects the great age of discovery during the Baroque (printing, cannon, New World). He even looks to aviation, the first! To fly is the final fulfilment of the Faustian dream- we ascend into Heaven.
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V. p. 279
A gradual evolution occurs as the Florentine fresco is replaced by the Venetian oil painting. The fresco is focused on individual items, presenting the collective sum within an architectural setting. On the other hand oil painting rejects linear perspective in preference for aerial perspective achieved by gradations of tone). But the transition is made difficult by Renaissance artists not grasping their own anti-Gothic principles OR their own tendencies. Each is idiosyncratic. Leonardo’s futuristic Adoration points the way, the figure floating in space no longer trapped by a visual interpretation- yet at this point in time this work could ONLY be unfinished. Raphael gives the West the final grand line. Yet convention is near breaking point as the inward sprit begins breaking thru the surface. Even in his stale Sistine Madonna, we see the emergence of clouds- no tiny heads of cherubim! The exact same scene repeated in Faust 2, final scene. In Raphael line is silent, the Soul waiting to find expression elsewhere. Leonardo in fact is there already, with his St Jerome, he approaches but does not enter the atmospheric brown of the Rembrandt, of the 17th century. He felt the deep symbolism of oil, but remained trapped by the Florentine fresco tradition. Thus as close as he was to the Rembrandt future, it was the Venetian not Florentine who creates a colour world to serve space, and NOT things.
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Leonardo realized his age was not ready for true portraiture (hence the head of Christ is unfinished in this Last Supper). He was far ahead of his age BUT knew its limits. YET he felt the limits as destiny, hence he could produce the unfinished. While Michelangelo vainly attempted to breathe life back into a dead form, Leonardo could see a future form. And Goethe (in an age where Leonardo’s future form was realized) saw no future form was possible. Between these 3 men lay the great age of the Faustian Summer.
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VI p 281
The Faustian Summer occurs between Leonardo (1452-1519 ) & Goethe (1749-1832). This Baroque late stage is analogues to the Ionic period for the Apollonian. Anonymous schools are replaced by great Masters; a set of great art emerges. For the Apollonian these were vase-painting, fresco- relief, the great temples, Attic drama & dance, with its centre on the naked statue. For Faustian man his Ur symbol is pure spatial infinity & the centre of gravity, instrumental music. From this comes the secular by products: Jesuit propaganda, the nation state, the Industrial Revolution, the idea of progress & Western banking. In the West as calculus eclipses geometry, the music of Venice (harmony & counterpoint with basso continuo) will eclipse sculpture.
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The 2 dominant arts the Apollonian will be fresco & sculpture; for the Faustian it is oil painting & music. Fresco is first to mature, so too oil painting which dominates 1550 to1650. It reaches its limits, just as Calculus is born (1670). These 2 evoke proportion & perspective, but they are not fulfilled. This will occur only with the 3D naked statue & instrumental music. Oil (after 1650) declines- the great Masters (Rembrandt, Velasquez), are replaced (Tiepolo, Watteau. With music, the pictorial sounds of the Cantata masters (Schutz), the Baroque opera ( Lully), the classical sonata in fugal style is relegated by the concerto grosso, the suite, the 3-part sonata for solo instruments. Music is now free of the human voice, its theme no longer pictorial but a bodiless function. Bach fugues are a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration. In the Apollonian world until 460 BC fresco dominated sculpture in the round; after this Polygnotus (last of the great fresco-painters) losses his place to Polycletus. Fresco developed to the ideal of the silhouette of colour with internal drawing superposed, no difference between the painted relief and the flat picture. Sculptor at first regarded a frontal outline as the true symbol & even pedimental sculpture constitutes a frontal picture, similar to red-figure vase-painting. With Polycletus the wall-painting falls to the board-picture (a "picture" proper, in tempera or wax); the great style has migrated. Apollodorus & his new shadow painting is sheer modelling in the round, without chiaroscuro or atmosphere. This new Classical painting, clever & charming, is the equal to Watteau; Polycletus & Phidias are the equals of Bach and Handel. As Western masters liberated music from the painting, the Greek masters liberate the statue from relief.
Now the full plastic & full music reach fulfilment: Polycletus produces his canon of proportion for the body; Bach writes the Well Tempered Klavier and The Art of the Fugue. The artistic & mathematical are united, mathematical analysis with music, Euclidean geometry with plastic. While fresco & oil painting give us the mathematical laws of proportion & perspective, music & sculpture ARE mathematics, the peaks of the 2 Cultures. We now have a parade of the great artists. New forms of musical expression emerge (today no longer understood!). Along with sculpture, architecture also dies. Rococo, with its non-proportion, non-form, evanescence & instability & sparkle, destroys surface and visual order. It is the victory of tones & melodies over lines & walls, the triumph of pure space over material, of absolute Becoming over the Become; sonatas, madrigals & minuets in stone. Since Germany produced the great musicians, she also produced the great architects. But in oil, nothing.
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VII. Impressionism, p. 285.
Impressionism is the final evolution (Late culture) of Faustian art in oil paint. It is moving towards music & is reflected in the Faustian feeling for space as the ultimate consciousness, of which sensibility is secondary and subsumed within it. Optical perception is not of bodies but of light resistant surface, in space. It is about movement, not a statuesque quality. It is expressed not just in oil but in mathematics (Analysis), physics (Quantum theory, mass points), indeed across the entire Culture, even Christianity (Pietism). The artist, with minimal strokes creates content, fleeting, incorporeal. A similar tendency with Baroque music, where the artist using a single melody will embellish it, with different keys, tempo, forms, instruments. So too poetry. And in painting we see the evolution, form Masaccio with bodies in space, to Leonardo’s aerial perspective & finally with Rembrandt’s collection of strokes& patches. Distance come sot signify Future. Impressionism is of the fleeting moment, never to return. As Rembrandts portraits are not profound owing to anatomic detail but rather the inner detail, the psychological, the Soul of the sitter. So too with landscape, we are given not a topographic image but the inner nature of Nature (thing forbidden to Apollonian art), the expansion of Nature into Distance is Destiny. The Apollonian sculptors produced that which was true to nature, as they saw it (realistic), yet it lacks meaning. Likewise they painted without a feeling of depth; groups of bodies are present, some are closer (less near) – but this technique, it has no relation to Faustian depth.
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Oil painting fades out after Rembrandt. The Rococo age is decorative art on a small scale. Oil makes a brief revival after 1800 (during the civilization period) with Delacroix & Constable who usher in the Impressionist age- it is a fleeting revival. The artists reject the colours of the Great Masters- brown (Protestant), green (Catholic)- the religious Living Nature, snuffed out by western materialism, irreligion. Space is now cognized but not experienced. It is mechanical, not Destiny based. These artists are workmen, not creators but scientific & technical. They use (as specimens) older artists of Spain & Holland, restating their findings empirically, scientifically, as natural science (versus nature experience). In France the great school was closing. In Germany it is being born! While the French had a long tradition, tradition in Germany was music not oil painting. As such painting had to catch up! They had to go to a foreign tutor, Paris, just as Manet- but whereas the French recognized echoes of a long tradition, for the Germans it was all new and thus, out of season, puzzling in aim & means. In effect German painters had to evolve, to obtain the same level in 2 generations that had taken the French (and German musicians) centuries. French impressionisms was too explicit, and thus too poor for them to use. German literature is likewise in this unsteady state- it too had to evolve over a short period, over a generation to travel cross centuries of literature- to attempt a new form. Menzel, Leibl & Marees, each in their own way, achieve something akin to the Great Masters, but only an approximation
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IX. Pergamum and Bayreuth, p. 291.
Tristan (Wagner) is the final great piece of Faustian art, painting has nothing that can compare- the “moderns” are weak. For the Apollonian, their ending was Pergamum. Like Wagner, it was theatrical, dramatic & full of the old (discredited) themes & symbols. The sign of decadence is the artist seeking freedom from form & proportion. We see the use of scale- gigantic scale, becoming more common. For the Apollonian it was the Colossus of Rhodes or the Pergamum alter; the large scale architecture of Imperial Rome; for the Egyptians it is New empire (Ramses II) and for us- the American skyscraper. The artist no longer feels intuitively the Form or canon, he seeks release. During the Cultural age freedom & necessity were equivalent. Today the artist craves freedom & indiscipline. During the Culture phase, it was a school that gave body to the Form. Today it is the great individual & yet they fail to fulfil their intellectual aims, their works falls incomplete. The minor artist of the Culture could produce effortlessly great work; our “geniuses” struggle & strain.
The moderns, Manet, Wagner, conjure up in just a few strokes, a few bars, an infinite space; the images of fear & sorrow caught in a few bars or strokes- disembodied (in total contrast to Apollonian art) infinity. No linear melody emerges but rather a tone mass of sounds. Their motifs come, like a lightning bolt, then disappear, to come again in a flash. It is neither music or painting. And few recognize it, just as the Athens must have smirked at the new Asiatic schools (like Pergamum). Manet (like Wagner) is not so much the return to Nature but more the appeal to the megalopolis, its citizens seeking divertment.
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The finale of Art, p. 293
Like all the previous Cultures, the Faustian Culture has reached its end- actualized its inward possibilities. The art of today (post Wagner) is impotent, a falsehood. Instead of artists we have workmen & tradesman, aiming to produce that which will catch the market, catch the fashion. There is more intelligence & taste among the engineers of a large company then amongst the “artists” of Modern Europe. There has always been 100 minor artists to the single genius, these minors were supported by the tradition. Today we have ten thousand artists, no geniuses & no tradition. If all the art schools were closed it would have no effect on art. So too Alexandria 200 AD where we find the new style, the Literary Man- the problem dramatists. Today we have forever new styles, every 10 years, rising falling to be replaced by another. the plastic arts unashamedly steal from Egypt, Mexico, Assyria.
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The Grand Ornamentation of the past is dead; but rather than honour & obey its symbolism, we see it is re-cycled, again & again, revived & fused. Alexandria too had its Pre-Raphaelite comedians. Rome had its fashions- jumping form Graeco-Asiatic, Graeco Egyptian, to neo-Attic (after Praxiteles). Egypt with the 19th Dynasty, the Temple of Edfu, totally eclectic.
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Eventually the taste for change ends, rulers are happy to simply appropriate their art (e.g. Ramses II deletes his predecessors names, inserts his own; the Roman copyists as early as 150 simply replicate the older Greek plastic- incapable of doing anything else. These were THE artists of their age. The Roman simply took the older forms, recast them with likeness heads (as portraits). Even the Augustus of Prima Porta is but a copy of Polycletus. For us Lenbach rests on Rembrandt, and Makart upon Rubens. For 1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra) Egyptians piled portrait on portrait in the same way. In the Indian Civilization at Turfan we find dramas, copied by the Kalidasa of a later century. So too Chinese painting, swings of fashion for a thousand years starting with the Han. So it is with all Cultures, simple pattern work, which is impossible to date any closer than a century.