Introductory studies in Greek art / by Jane E. Harrison.

  • Harrison, Jane Ellen, 1850-1928.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory studies in Greek art / by Jane E. Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    but there dwelt in his mind a certain idea {species) of surpassing beauty, the sight and intense contemplation of which directed his art and hand to produce a simili- tude of it. What is it that they all mean ? What is this quality of the art of Pheidias which we call ideality, which the ancient critics spoke of as a consecration to life, a com- fort to sorrow, a new revelation to religion, a vision of things unseen by the senses ? The Greeks of the days of Pheidias felt it, and just about the time when the life of Pheidias was drawing to its close, in the year 429, the year when Perikles, the friend of Pheidias, died, a boy was born whose mission it was to tell to the world in words that will never die just this thought, just this doctrine—for art, for philosophy, for religion—which Pheidias embodied in his statues of Zeus and Athene, and which lives on still for us in the marbles of the Parthenon. We have listened once already to a prayer that Plato puts in the mouth of Sokrates, we must listen again to a myth in the lips of this same philosopher, and we shall learn from it, if only shadowed in a parable, all it is possible to under- stand of this great doctrine of Ideality. The myth runs as follows (Plato Phsedrus, 245 1.):— The form of the soul is a theme of divine and large discourse ; human language may however speak of this briefly and in a figure. Let our figure be of a composite nature—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now