The Art of Constantinople [antikvár]

T FOREWORD "^HE Greeks were concerned with the creation of the universal type in its most idealized and permanent form. The Platonic doctrine of the idea was the philosophic expression of the whole Greek concept of artistic reality. Greek art was the result of a rational analysis. The personal reference is slight and even on sepulchral monuments the dead are represented as characters in the Theophrastean sense. The Romans did not aim at the universal or the ideal. Their art became a system of religious and political propaganda emphasizing an historical event or a situation which was transitory. The Emperor was a god; his image and his acts, when represented, were a form of religious art. The Senate set up the Ara Pads in the Campus Martius at Rome in 13 b.c. to commemorate the return of Augustus from Gaul and Spain and the beginning of the Pax Romana. The altar reveals the family of Augustus walking to the temple. The images are faithfully portrayed, cold, tranquil, severe. The Roman insistence on family tradition, piety, gravity, and public service is recorded for all time. Decorative ornament—animal heads, garlands, swags of fruit—is a precise statement of things seen. The rehefs on the Arch of Titus, completed in a.d. 81, celebrate the Sack of Jerusalem with an imperial triumph and a parade of Jewish trophies. The use of perspective, the effects of light and shade, the abrupt transitions from movement to stillness heighten the illusion of jubilant success. This interest in evoking atmosphere, in eye-deceiving effects of perspective, in landscape and views of cities, may be studied in less official monuments, in wall-paintings at Pompeii, at Herculaneum, and above all in the enchanting Garden Room from the House of Livia now in the Museo Nazionale at Rome. Trajan's Column, completed in a.d. i 14, introduces a detailed military epic, the campaign against the Dacians, carved in marble spirals. Already the style veers away from the classical canons crystallized by the Greeks. The continual appearance of the Emperor which halts the flow of narrative, the disproportion between the figures and the architectural background, the summary treatment of individual forms, herald an art later to be called medieval. Medieval art is foreshadowed further by the Column of Marcus Aurelius, set up between 176 and 193, on which is recorded the triumph over the Sarmatians achieved not by Roman effort but by a miracle. From this time illusion contracts, emotions verge on hysteria or ecstasy, the story is simphfied, the technique of expression becomes more summary. In spite of the Hellenistic cult sponsored by Hadrian, art was turning in a new direction. (I)