File:History of art (1921) (14760380106).jpg

Identifier: historyofar02faur (find matches)
Title: History of art
Year: 1921 (1920s)
Authors: Faure, Elie, 1873-1937 Pach, Walter, 1883-1958
Subjects: Art
Publisher: New York and London : Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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reds and the greens had nevershone with a more liquid splendor to dye the fields ofthe earth and the broad mirrors of the sea. Never hadfire and gold mingled more harmoniously to give anadded glory to darkening suns or to envelop prayerin greater voluptuousness. All the colors of the uni-verse seem reduced to a few essential hues, deepened,intensified, made somber through being piled up inlimpid glazes and through crystallizing in space thevague harmonies that float across our minds andharass our desires. Seen through the reddish mist caused by the incenseand the ten thousand lighted candles, the Christ Panto-crator, the Virgin, the apostles, and the saints crownedwith gold and dressed in shining robes, seemed faraway. High up, the great flattened cupola held thenascent dream within the temple, which the half BYZANTIUM 219 cupolas at the angles and the three terminal apses con-nected with the soil by a series of wavelike steps—asthe foothills of a mountain chain lead from the peaks
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Ravenna (vi Century). Interior of San Vitale. to the plain. In the ancient temple everything com-bined to associate the meaning of its external formwith the line of the mountains and the surroundinghorizons; now it had turned inward, and Greek natu-ralism was brutally accommodated to the taste of 220 MEDIAEVAL ART peoples who had been enervated by Oriental life.Whatever the gathered force on the outside of SaintSophia, whatever the weight of its round domes, it wasby the luxury within that it held the crowds and stupe-fied the travelers to Constantinople who spread afarthe glory of the Greek Empire. Never did material luxury such as this bind popularsentiment to the letter of a religion which claimed torepresent pure spirit. The veined marbles, the poly-chromed mosaics, the great paintings on the vaultsand the walls, the pendentives which permitted theheavy circle of the cupola with its constellations to beinscribed exactly in the square of the building, thesilver barrier of the sanct

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