Andre Malraux and his Metamorphosis of the Gods. Roots of idolatry and digging for the divine…
…Andre Malraux’s next slope, considerably lower because considerably closer to the world of man, was that of Greek art. It is the art of what he called the Divine- meaning the pagan divinities. He placed the transition from the Sacred to the Divine between 550 and 500 B.C. At the beginning of that period, “all art was hieratic. The preachings of Buddha, the work of Lao-tse, the Upanishads had been known for a century. Western Europe was at the end of the Iron Age.” Half a century later, in Greece, the serenely human Kore of Euthydikos had been created. “Fifty years were enough to reject the art of three millennia. During those fifty years, man for the first time unlearned the Sacred.”
—Nothing prevents our speculating that some “late archaic” dedications, such as the kore offered to Athene by the Athenian Euthydikos , were erected in the years following rather than preceeding the Persian sack . This is a private offering, probably set up by a businessman as a token of his commercial success with no thought of Persians, moral renewal or the artificial boundaries that modern commentators have imposed on ancient art. —Read More:http://brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/publications/papers/daedalus/chapter2.html
What caused the change? Not, as some art historians used to think, an improvement in technique that brought artists closer to “illusionism”- that is, representation giving an illusion of reality. The figures of Greek sculpture for the most part were not ralistic at all, but idealized. “The cleverest forger could not insert a realistic face in the Parthenon frieze. The Ergastines are beautiful, not like their models but like columns- or music.” What caused the change was a shift in man’s concept of the “other world.” The gods changed before art did.
Image:http://www.studyblue.com/notes/note/n/mid-term-2/deck/1309929
“In Greece we hear for the first time, through the voice of Euripides: ‘I do not like the gods who are worshiped at night.’ Thus begins the fragile art of those gods who must die with the sun…”Ulysses still prostrated himself before Earth; we cannot imagine Pericles prostrate before Athena, nor praying with his hands folded. The gesture of worship that symbolizes Greece is the offering of the sacrifice. The interventions of the gods are as unpredictable as their oracles. No book of revelation sets down their law. The temples do not dispense religious instruction, and the Greeks do not have a priestly caste…without clergy, without theocracy, without Creator, without supreme Judge, and without eternity.” (to be continued)…
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