Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

“From Mexico, from the Congo, even from the cemeteries of Tarquinia, those dark gods, of which D. H. Lawrence made himself the prophet, have been brought out to extinquish the light of reason. The individual embodiment of calm and order is to be supplanted by communal frenzy and the collective unconscious.” (108) An urgent warning to Western Civilization, from a British art historian in 1956. Am definitely not regretting picking up Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, an expanded version of the A. W. Mellon Lectures he gave at the National Art Gallery in 1953. Richly stirring and rewarding reading! A compact lesson in what he argues is the most serious subject for art, and full of wariness of where our art was going even then, with the influence flowing backward from essentially alien races. The mention of “the cemeteries of Tarquinia” may seen not to fit, but when you recall that Alfred Rosenberg and other racialist thinkers of his time took a dim view of the Etruscans, it is uncanny that he thought their surviving artifacts were having an malign influence. Here are several favorite passages, mainly from the “Apollo” chapter, with the accompanying art shown. While finding images of every piece mentioned is simple now, the black and white ones in this aged paperback are marvellously effective. “The Greeks had no doubt that the god Apollo was like a perfectly beautiful man. He was beautiful because his body conformed to certain laws of proportion and so partook of the divine beauty of mathematics. The first great philosopher of mathematical harmony had called himself Pythagoras, son of the Pythian Apollo. So in the embodiment of Apollo everything must be calm and clear; clear as daylight, for Apollo is the god of light. Since justice can exist only when facts are measured in the light of reason, Apollo is the god of justice; sol justitiae. But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician's dummy, nor an artful combination of the two, will embody Apollo, the python slayer, the vanquisher of darkness. The god of reason and light superintended the flaying of Marsyas.” (55) “The Greeks attached great importance to their nakedness. Thucydides, in recording the stages by which they distinguished themselves from the barbarians, gives prominence to the date at which it became the rule in the Olympic games, and we know from vase paintings that the competitors at the Panathenaic festival had been naked ever since the early sixth century. Although the presence or absence of a loincloth does not greatly affect questions of form… psychologically the Greek cult of absolute nakedness is of great importance. It implies the conquest of an inhibition that oppresses all but the most backward people; it is like a denial of original sin. This is not, as is sometimes supposed, simply a part of paganism: for the Romans were shocked by the nakedness of Greek athletes, and Ennius attacked it as a sign of decadence. Needless to say, he was wide of the mark, for the most determined nudists of all were the Spartans, who scandalized even the Athenians by allowing women to compete, lightly clad, in their games. He and subsequent moralists considered the matter in purely physical terms; but, in fact, Greek confidence in the body can be understood only in relation to their philosophy. It expresses above all their sense of human wholeness. Nothing that related to the whole man could be isolated or evaded; and this serious awareness of how much was implied in physical beauty saved them from the two evils of sensuality and aestheticism.” (49) “We need not suppose that many Greeks looked like the Hermes of Praxiteles, but we can be sure that in fifth-century Attica a majority of the young men had the nimble, well-balanced bodies depicted on the early red-figure vases. On a vase in the British Museum is a scene that will arouse sympathy in most of us, but to the Athenians was ridiculous and shameful—a fat youth in the gymnasium embarassed by his ungraceful figure, and apparently protesting to a thin one, while two young men of more fortunate development throw the javelin and the discus.” (48) By the way, the Greek philosophy behind nudity really has me thinking. As much as nakedness makes people squeamish, maybe a way to reclaim some of that sense of body-soul integrity, that reverence for physical perfection, would be building a National Gymnasium, an outdoor stadium in stone dedicated to single sex exercise in the nude, and not just for individual fitness but for mass games. It could be located in that place known for always being temperate and pleasant, California, once that great state is reclaimed from the aliens and barbarians. “The Vitruvian principle rules our spirits, and it is no accident that the formalized body of the ‘perfect man’ became the supreme symbol of European belief. Before the Crucifixion of Michelangelo, we remember that the nude is, after all, the most serious of all subjects in art; and that it was not an advocate of paganism who wrote, ‘The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.’” (54) “One great image of Apollo from the beginning of the classic period has survived in the original: he who rises above the struggle, in the west pediment of the temple of Olympia, and, with a gesture of sovereign authority, reproves the bestial fury of the centaurs. Nowhere else, perhaps, is the early Greek ideal so perfectly embodied: calm, pitiless, and supremely confident in the power of physical beauty. Not a shade of doubt or compunction could soften the arc of cheek or brow; the Phaedo is still far away, and the Beatitudes would be totally incomprehensible.” (72) “Albrecht Durer never reached Rome, but on his first visit to Italy he must have been shown drawings of the famous antique [the Apollo Belvedere]; and, as we have seen, he made them the basis of his exercises in proportion. Almost immediately after his return, in 1501, he executed the drawing in the British Museum of a nude man bearing in his hand a flaming disk on which is written (in reverse) the word Apolo. The figure is made up of souvenirs d'Italie. The legs are copied from a Mantegna engraving, the style, both in penmanship and in degree of emphasis, shows knowledge of early drawings by Michelangelo: but, above all, it is the image he had formed of the figure in the Belvedere that has given this Apollo its godlike bearing. The flat rectangularity of the torso, the absence of articulation in the outline of the thighs, and the way in which they are joined to the waist—in these and many other points Durer's drawing is far more antique than the restless figures of the Florentines. Not for the last time a German artist has constructed a work of irreproachable classicism; yet a construction it remains, concealing only temporarily (though with wonderful mastery) Durer's real conviction that the body was a curious and rather alarming organism.” (94) “Since the Greeks of the fourth century no man felt so certain of the godlike character of the male body as Michelangelo. ‘And held it for something divine’: this phrase, which occurs so often in Vasari's life when describing his hero's work, is not rhetoric, but the statement of a conviction; and Michelangelo expresses the same belief in his sonnets to Cavalieri. It was a belief born of emotion. Michelangelo, like the Greeks, was passionately stirred by male beauty, and with his serious, Platonic cast of mind he was bound to identify his emotions with ideas. This passage of violent sensuous attachment into the realm of nonattachment, where nothing of the first compulsion is lost but much gained of purposeful harmony, makes his nudes unique. They are both poignant and commanding. The Apollo of Olympia is commanding but not at all poignant, for he has grown naturally out of an assumption that no man of the post-Christian world can make, least of all the hungry soul of Michelangelo. There can never be, in his work, the Olympian calm or the Apollonian clarity of reason. But the fierce Appollonian authority, the character of sol justitiae, that Michelangelo could give, as no man since.” (94-96) And Clark’s conclusion for the chapter, with a powerful and undisguised call for a return of discipline, light, and reason in our art. While he is clear that the Dionysian has always been a part of our culture, it will take ardor and even violence, such as the antique god meted out to the impertinent Marsyas, to restore the presence Apollonian, and thrust the expressions of chaos and darkness back into their place. And yes, had to lol at “the sensual wailing of the saxophone”, or as they called it back then, jungle music. “Dionysiac enthusiasm, as we shall see in a later chapter, produced a series of nude figures that had a longer and more continuous life than the embodiments of Olympian calm. Yet when we look at the earliest representations of enthusiasm, the satyrs and rhumba dancers on sixth-century Greek vases, we realize why the Greeks felt that their art could not rest on this basis alone. Without some element of lawful harmony it would have been no different from the arts of the surrounding cultures, Hittite, Assyrian, or, as we may speculate, Minoan; and like them have dwindled into decoration, anecdote, or propaganda. This is the justification of Apollo in his cruel triumph over Marsyas. The union of art and reason, in whose name so many lifeless works have been executed and so many ludicrous sentiments pronounced, is after all a high and necessary aim; but it cannot be achieved by negative means, by coolness or nonparticipation. It demands a belief at least as violent as the impulses it controls; and if today, in the sensual wailing of the saxophone, Marsyas seems to be avenged, that is because we have not the spiritual energy to accept the body and to superintend it.” (108) The vanquishers of darkness in our times must now rise! #KennethClark #TheNude #Apollo #Apollonian #Dionysis #Dionysian #Christ #Praxiteles #Antiquity #AncientGreece #Greece #Renaissance #AlbrechtDurer #Durer #Michelangelo #Marsyas #DHLawrence #pagan #paganism #Incarnation #Christendom #Christian #Christianity #nude #nudity #naturism #nudism #fitness #order #reason #justice #light #aesthetics #philosophy #beauty #WesternCivilization #West #sculpture #illustration #painting #arthistory #art #books #prowhite #White #Europe