File:History of art (1921) (14782961702).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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f the racecohered, its artists did not free themselves from theneed of Korea, from the immemorial will of the Hindusand the Chinese. The seated gods with the loweredeyes and the open hands are like a block, round andpure and modeled by the light. The spirit that in-habits them flows from everywhere and envelops themin solitude and silence. One feels them as bound upwith space, and from all points they seem to gatherits vibrations into their fluid surfaces. Are theyJapanese, Hindu, or Chinese? They are Buddhist.It is but very slightly that religious sculpture begins,in the eighth century, to reveal the silent germinationof the true national sentiment. The development isseen in the work of Kobo Daishi, the old statue maker.In his statues of warrior gods, so radiant with energy,there is something of arrested gentleness and of arrestedviolence which is already purely Japanese. He willnot surrender his self-control. Whatever his fervor,his anger, and the impulse of his heart, the Japanese,
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Priest of the Tendai sect (about the x Century). (From The Kokka.) 108 MEDIEVAL ART when he has attained his true nature, will dominatethe expression of these feelings. Even when men think they are the masters of thosedecisions which seem freest, it is their general andunreasoned needs which dictate those decisions. WhenJapan closed her ports, at the hour when the Fujiwaracame into power, it was because she wanted to grasp rh ¥ ToBA-SoJO (xii Century). Painting, detail.(LArt du Japon y publ. by Brunoff.) in herself the meaning of her own effort, amid themerging currents of the military migrations and mari-time exchange. This people does not barter either itspower of withdrawing into itself or its power of expan-sion. As soon as it perceives that it is too much cut offfrom the world or that it has been too active, it bendsall its strength to dissipate rapidly the need for reposethat had succeeded action, or of the need for actionwhich it gathered from repose. It starts out on newroads

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