French Art by W. C. Brownell

Author:W. C. Brownell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: france, history, romantic, romanticism, impressionism, landscape, manet, monet, painting, painters, sculpture
ISBN: 9781781665114
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

IV

CLASSIC SCULPTURE

I

French sculpture naturally follows very much the same course as French painting. Its beginnings, however, are Gothic, and the Renaissance emancipated rather than created it. Italy, over which the Gothic wave passed with less disturbing effect than anywhere else, and where the Pisans were doing pure sculpture when everywhere farther north sculpture was mainly decorative and rigidly architectural, had a potent influence. But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer relationship with the Chartres Cathedral than modern French painting has with its earliest practice; and Claux Sluters, the Burgundian Fleming who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs of Jean Sans Peur and Phillippe le Hardi at Dijon, among his other anachronistic masterpieces, exerted considerably greater influence upon his successors than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs.

These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern spirits. Sluters was plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic material and amid Gothic ideas. In itself his sculpture is hardly decorative, as we apply the epithet to modern work. It is just off the line of rigidity, of insistence in every detail of its right and title to individuality apart from every other sculptured detail. The prophets in the niches of the beautiful Dijon Well, the monks under the arcades of the beautiful Burgundian tombs, have little relation with each other as elements of a decorative sculptural composition. They are in the same style, that is all. Each of them is in interest quite independent of the other. Compared with one of the Pisans' pulpits they form a congeries rather than a composition. Compared with Goujon's "Fountain of the Innocents" their motive is not decorative at all. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah asserts his individuality in a way the more sociable prophets of the Sistine Chapel would hesitate to do. They have a little the air of hermits - of artistic anchorites, one may say.

They are Gothic, too, not only in being thus sculpturally undecorative and uncomposed, but in being beautifully subordinate to the architecture which it is their unmistakable ancillary function to decorate in the most delightful way imaginable - in being in a word architecturally decorative. The marriage of the two arts is, Gothically, not on equal terms. It never occurred, of course, to the Gothic architect that it should be. His ensemble was always one of which the chief, the overwhelming, one may almost say the sole, interest is structural. He even imposed the condition that the sculpture which decorated his structure should be itself architecturally structural. One figure of the portals of Chartres is almost as like another as one pillar of the interior is like its fellows; for the reason - eminently satisfactory to the architect - that it discharges an identical function.

Emancipation from this thraldom of the architect is Sluters's great distinction, however. He is modern in this sense, without going so far - without going anything like so far - as the modern sculptor who divorces his

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