The Nature of the Classical in Art

Author(s): Vincent J. Scully, Jr.

Source: Yale French Studies, No. 19/20, Contemporary Art (1957), pp. 107-124
Published by: Yale University Press
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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

The Nature of the Classical in Art

An essay upon this tormented subject can, unhappily, begin only
with a definition, and with a definition of the word "classic" rather
than of "classical." In modem English usage, "classical" is a rather
ambiguous term. It is synonymous neither with "classic" nor with
"classicizing." As presently used in relation to the art of Greece
and Rome, it is intended to characterize, rather loosely, all Greek
and Roman art. The word "classic," on the other hand, is normally
used to describe what is generally considered to be the central phe-
nomenon in the formation of the fully "classical," and is usually
identified with the art of fifth-century and sometimes fourth-century
Greece. The term "classicizing" is used to describe an art which
consciously attempts to imitate or recreate the classic, as occurs at
times during the Hellenistic period, during the Augustan age, and
later. It is acutely necessary that we clearly draw this distinction
between the "classic" itself and that "classicism" which is the product
of the classicizing process and whose art may be called "classicistic."
We are fortunate that the English language is supple (or bar-
barous) enough to deal with the semantics of this problem. The
French language cannot do so, since the adjective "classicistique"
does not exist, and the word "classicists," like the English, "classicist,"
means merely one who works with the "classics." The noun, "clas-
sicisme," is therefore applied to a state of being which can be de-
scribed only by the adjective, "classique," rather than by a weaker
and more limiting word. "Classique" thus loses something of its
capacity to denote a more special and intense state of consciousness
and becomes inextricably bound up with "classicisme." No one
would claim that because of this restriction French critics have been
unable to distinguish between "classic" and classicizing works and
states of mind, but one can claim that it has caused the meaning of
the classic to be blunted and the word itself to be directed toward
areas which are not entirely appropriate to it-as to seventeenth-
century French art, for example. Peyre, in his brilliant book upon
the subject (Qu'est-ce que le classicisme?), is careful to distinguish
his intentions but must use the adjective, "classique," to describe the
specific works cited from his chosen period, which is that of Le Clas-
sicisme Franfais. An increased respectability for the term "classici-
sant" might, like the use of "classicizing" in English, help to clarify
the problem.
It becomes apparent that we must concern ourselves here directly
with the concept of the "classic,"- because it is upon that central

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concept that the related concepts depend. I should like to define the
classic as that art which is concerned with a total exploration and grasp
of the large meanings which are involved in the inner and outer life
of man-in his individual life and in his group life-and which deals
with such meanings in terms both intellectual and physical, embodied
in forms at once abstract and organic, tactile and optical, and com-
pacting the real and the ideal into a dynamic but stable whole which
appears on its own terms to be both clear and complete, instantaneous
and permanent.
The "restraint" and "proportion" of the classic, its "measure" in
the later Aristotelian sense, are built into it; they are not applied,
and if the classic seems to later ages to supply "ideal" types for art
it does so because it deals with the whole of life, and many types are
thus implicit in it. Consequently, the classic age becomes one in
which the oldest past and, in a certain sense, the farthest future,
come together as tensions in a keenly lived present and are resolved
there in terms of experience. Such experience is not safe but daring.
Because the classic age is ignited by a love for the challenge of life
as a whole it will try almost anything that comes to mind. It is thus
released alike from the more restricting aspects of those older pat-
terns which parochial or tribal traditions may have enforced before
its time and from those which its own radiant sense of wholeness
may suggest to later ages.
Whether one can find all the qualities of the classic wholly present
in any art other than that of fifth-century Greece is a question. They
may certainly exist in varying degrees during the late twelfth and
thirteenth centuries in the Ile de France, and it clearly seemed to the
men of the sixteenth century that Raphael had in fact accomplished
these things in his painting, as in his "School of Athens" and his
"Exposition of the Sacrament" in the Stanza della Segnatura in the
Vatican. (Fig. 1) A total world of past and present is set up here,
complete on its own terms and formed within an embracing ambient
which is based upon the domed and apsed architecture of Bramante-
as in his contemporary project for St. Peter's and his Cortile del
Belvedere, in which these forms are echoed in space directly outside
the windows of this room. Explicit in this art also is a view of an-
tiquity as having created an excellence which must be rivalled by
modem life and brought into union with it.
This view sees antiquity as a whole; it does not seek for a perfect
"classic" within antiquity, nor does it seem to use the term "classic"
in this sense. Therefore the High Renaissance creates an art which
is widely open to the richness of both antiquity and the present. It
is exclusive only in its own sense at once of its modernity and of its
brotherhood with the far past as it rejects the more recent past of
the middle ages which lay between. Thus antiquity was a spur, not

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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

a bridle, to High Renaissance invention, and antiquity itself was

judged in terms of present experience. What the High Renaissance
knew of antiquity it used according to its own needs: primarily Ro-
man works, some Greek. In Raphael we recognize the embracing
solemnity of an Italic tradition; in Michelangelo, forever breaking
out of later conceptions of High Renaissance order, we often recog-
nize the solid thrust of the Hellenic of whatever period-as behind
his Sistine Chapel frescoes of 1510 we perceive such Greek works as
the Belvedere Hercules, discovered a few years before.

LI

As, however, the later sixteenth century lost a certain confidence in

its own capacity for accomplishment in the present, it seems to have
looked back upon the High Renaissance as an ideal period and to
have sought, both in the High Renaissance and in antiquity, for a
set of laws and a theory which might restore that lost ideal. A cer-
tain split between theory and practice began to arise. The real and
the ideal began to diverge, and the ideal was held to be higher, be-
cause conceived in the mind. When in sixteenth-century French
usage, for example, the term "classique" appeared (as in Sebillet's
Art Poetique, of 1548: "bons et classiques ecrivains frangais . . ."),
it had about it much of its old aura of intellectual approval, as of
something worthy to be a model because past and known, a "classic"
in other words. About such a concept could gather the view of the
highest art as an "ideal" art, rational and intellectual, restrained by
rule. Such insistence upon the ideal mirrored that of later antique
classicizing theory itself, where the classic had been seen as pri-
marily an intellectual art of distance and permanence which rejected
of necessity those aspects of form having to do with the violent, the
instantaneous, and the sensational. In the similarly classicizing view
of the seventeenth century the wholeness of the classic as such was
partly lost once more, and human experience both of the past and in
the present began to be fragmented into polarities.
The seventeenth-century controversies between the Poussinistes
and the Rubensistes in the French Academy essentially accepted as
polarities two ways of figuring reality: that of Rubens as coloristic
and optical, full of the violence of illusion and the momentary and
without the serenity, clarity, and permanence to be found in the
linear, strict, and calm forms of Poussin. (Fig. 2) The latter was
seen as related to Raphael and the antique in terms of antique sculp-
ture, and Rubens was held to be "modern" and thus not so related.
In this way past and present, the classic as model and the present as
sensation, tended to be split apart as they had not been during the

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Renaissance. At the same time antiquity was still viewed more or

less as a whole-as made up of classics-and no specifically "classic"
or high moment was factored out of it. Yet in the successfully bal-
anced classicism of Poussin certain strong formal predilections can
be found which are related to specific periods in ancient art. For ex-
ample, it is obvious today that pictorial and dramatic effects, like
those of Rubens, existed in some monuments of Hellenistic antiquity,
as in the Pergamene altar-and that both tactile or linear, and optical
or pictorial, effects are to be found in the art of fifth-century Athens
itself. (Fig. 12)
The predilection of Poussin and after him of the Academy-
though its members were never able to carry it out in practice as he
had been-is actually toward classicizing works from antiquity. These
tend to tone down from the classic its more advanced and move-
mented, that is pictorial, aspects and to concentrate upon its more
conservative, linear, solid, and sculptural qualities. One may go
further and say that classicism, whether in antiquity or in the seven-
teenth century, was in fact reaching backward toward earlier-early
classic or archaic-values of a conservative character and that clas-
sicism itself would seem to represent in part a deeply felt, regressive
side of human nature as it longs for the most ancient and unchang-
ing ways of certainty for experience.
With Winckelmann-at the moment when the whole structure of
Baroque society was beginning to break up-such concentration upon
the archetype of the permanent was intensified and given a moral
basis. "The good and the beautiful are the same," said Winckel-
mann, "and only one path leads to them, while many go to the evil
and the ugly." In his History of Ancient Art, published in 1764,
Winckelmann insisted upon the purely Greek quality of good and
beautiful art and in effect denied an art to the Romans at all. He
also discovered what he called a "high" period, a "golden age" in
Greek art and explained that phenomenon in terms of development.
He saw this development as one to which a biological, or botanical,
analogy of "bloom and decay" might be applied and he found ". . .
four stages of style, namely the straight and hard, the grand and
square, the beautiful and flowing, and the imitative." He goes on:
"The first probably lasted for the most part until the age of Phidias;
the second until Praxiteles, Lysippus, and Apelles; the third probably
ceased with the school of the three later artists; and the fourth con-
tinued until the downfall of art."
Out of such a view arose not only a further exclusiveness in
theories of value but also a fixed belief, morally justified, in cultural
progress and decay. From this point of view Winckelmann explained
art since the Renaissance in historical terms, with his own period in
that art described as a period of decay. During the Renaissance it-

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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

self the present had called to the past because it felt itself to be great,
like the past, but with Winckelmann, at the beginning of the modem
age, the present feels itself to be weak and impermanent and calls
to the past for permanence and strength. Thus, through Winckel-
mann, in terms of theory and history, the detached but moralizing
view of a biological development of growth, flowering, and decay in
cultures was made possible, and, in art, its opposite, a consciously
"classic" revival. This took several forms. While Winckelmann dis-
tinguished between the "square and grand" and the "beautiful and
flowing" in the art of antiquity, it may be felt that his own peculiar
physiological qualifications-those which had apparently enabled him
to distinguish some essential characteristics of Greek sculpture even
through the veil of copies-led him in practice to prefer a rather
emasculated version of the "beautiful," out of which may be said
to grow the rather androgynous classicism of Canova, who was
praised by Winckelmann's follower, Cicognara, as the highest and
most antique of modern sculptors. Yet we find in Winckelmann not
only great learning and discrimination but also intense intuitions, as
when he writes that he would have liked to excavate at Elis because
there, he said, "I am assured that the yield . . . would be abundant
beyond conception, and that a great light would shoot up from this
soil of art, if it should be thoroughly searched."
What Winckelmann would have made in fact of the sculptors from
Olympia it is difficult to say. (Fig. 11) In all likelihood he would
have included them in his earlier phase of "straight and hard" rather
than in his more developed one of "square and grand." Yet he had
always insisted, in a way like the Academy, upon what he called
"drawing," (that is, linearity and purity in form), and the more in-
tense and creative aspects of the neo-classicism, which Winckelmann
had played a part in unleashing, actually did move toward much the
same kind of hardness, density, and geometric purity that are to be
found in the Olympic forms. The reconstruction drawings of Stuart
and Revett, and the projects of Ledoux, Boullee, and Jefferson have
this character, as do the most "classic" paintings of David-directed
to all of these into an empathetic comprehension of the new, violent,
modern world in terms of harsh linear clarity and uncompromisingly
solid forms.
Yet the fragmentation of human experience which we have noted
as a progressive development in theory since the Renaissance now
burst forth more intensely in practice than it ever had before. While
Winckelmann had been concentrating a part of European attention
upon the sculptural clarity of antiquity, another part was being di-
rected with equal intensity and sense of loss toward the pictorial
obscurity of the middle ages and the exotic. In a painting by Con-
stable, for example, the values of light and shade and shifting color

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which are evoked are consciously the opposite of those desired by

Stuart and Revett and David. Two complementary ways of experi-
ence-that through reason and clarity and that through feeling and
intuition-are seen as opposites. The word "classic" is now used
more commonly and with a meaning at once more intense and more
restricted: as the opposite of "romantic." In this way the false
polarities of "classic" vs. "romantic" are set up. The polarities are
false, first, because both are present in the classic itself and, second,
because the impetus behind both neo-classicism and romanticism in
the later eighteenth century was essentially-and in terms of their
own semantics-a romantic one, emotionally concentrated upon a
restricted idea. Yet, from this period, a sense of dichotomy between
"classic" and "romantic" becomes firmly imbedded in the modem
mind-to its great psychic disadvantage.
To the disadvantage especially of classic values, because, as the
polemic developed in the nineteenth century-recalling but refocus-
sing the old Poussinistes-Rubensistes controversy of the seventeenth
-the classic began more and more to be defended on terms which
avoided experience as known in modem life and saw the classic as
something which could be found only through rejection of the pres-
ent. It did no good for Delacroix, (Fig. 3) who understood this
problem rather well, to insist that he was as classic as Ingres (to our
eyes he may sometimes appear more classic). He must be shouted
down by the critics who knew, they believed, that these ways of
making art were truly different. Whole ranges of human experience
were thus, at last, fully forced out of the nineteenth-century view of
the classic-especially those ranges dealing with action and involve-
ment-and the classic was described in terms of a sentimental aca-
demic classicism, both "sweetened and dried" (as Peyre put it) in
comparison alike with the classicism of the seventeenth century and
with its own neo-classic beginnings.
Such academic classicism became a grab bag of culture, (Fig. 4)
superficially invoking antique forms but profoundly uninvolved in the
classic disciplines of structural geometry and the tensions of organic
beings. Nor was it involved very much with the most pressing pre-
occupations of its age; thus it was hardly classic. Through it, in the
nineteenth century, the classic in fact became profoundly lost, and
with it, in a way, antiquity itself. (A comparison between Ingres'
"Apotheosis of Homer," Fig. 4, and Raphael's "School of Athens,"
Fig. 1, can make the fact of this loss all too apparent.) At the same
time, however, in a development out of these movements called
"Romanticism" and "Realism" rather than "Classicism," a number
of much more "classic" works than those of the Academy were being
produced by later nineteenth-century artists. Both Sullivan and
Seurat compact a kind of classic order in terms of life as lived: an

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1. RAPHAEL. The School of Athens.

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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

order disciplined therefore by the classic rather than the classicizing

method and deriving out of this process the largely conceived but
active forms which seem best to embody the meaning of the whole.
Yet there are elements in the art of Sullivan and Seurat which can-
not truly be counted as classic. From the point of view of the inner
and outer life of man and of the ceremonies whereby he articulates
the meanings of his individual and group life there is too much left
out in both, as in a sense the nineteenth century as a whole left too
much out.
At the same time, from the point of view of classic permanence,
there is in Sullivan a continuously movemented interweaving of ele-
ments and in Seurat a constantly shifting kaleidescope of figures
which seem more completely involved in an inherently nineteenth-
century confidence in physical change and continuity. Perhaps the
nineteenth century, scientifically absorbed, had not yet been required
by circumstances to search deeply enough into the self to unearth
the permanent qualities beneath a changing present which seemed
always to be opening up the world for its enjoyment. Certainly con-
tinuity and change are the essence of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century art. Both Wright and Cezanne feel deeply for the
classic solidity of objects, but these they then bring into a movement
of flux and becoming, in which physical forces pull them along.
There is the problem too of the dwindling of classic themes, though
these are profoundly wished for by Cezanne. Through a study of
Poussin and nature in tension he struggles with the human form and
the culminating pyramidal shape but is somehow compelled to draw
both into the oscillating ribbons of physical continuity. Yet in the
attempt to resolve these counter forces there is much that is classic,
and to this point we shall be obliged to return. Similarly, while the
Cubism which developed by 1910 out of the work of Cezanne and
others has sometimes been called a classic art, one cannot entirely
accept it as such. The classic sense of discovery is there, but the
large themes of the classic and its completeness are not. In a sense
cubism beautifully culminates and synthesizes the most important de-
velopments of the nineteenth century: fragmentation, confidence only
in the material processes of matter, the dwindling of human auu-
sions, most of all a rejection of the classic faith in the permanence
of the instantaneous in favor of a Bergsonian becoming and the time
not of moments but of continuity. Therefore, for many reasons, the
classic as viewed or as created, indeed, the need for it, may be felt
to have largely disappeared from the early twentieth-century world.

III
At this point we should turn briefly toward twentieth-century art his-
tory and criticism in order to demonstrate the loss of the classic

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more fully. By 1900 the characteristic nineteenth-century confidence

in change and continuity had produced an art history which, while
it tended to accept the developmental philosophy of Winckelmann,
had, except among the unenlightened, substracted value judgments
from the process. Thus the rehabilitation of the Baroque led to
Wickhoff's rehabilitation of Roman art in its more pictorial and il-
lusionistic aspects. Indeed, the subtracting of judgments of value
concerning quality and meaning led to a curious new judgment con-
cerning fullness of development, a rather Darwinian view in which
Mrs. Strong, for example, though still paying service-as all since
Winckelhuann had been obliged to do-to fifth century Greek art,
was constrained to point out that Roman illusionism, dealing as it
did with optical rather than with tactile values, represented in fact a
higher level of human intellectual development than was to be found
in less developed Greek art.
Similarly, Heinrich Wolfflin, in a series of books published be-
tween 1889 and 1915, set up new polarities between what he called
"classic" and "baroque" as different kinds of art. The classic be-
comes more isolated as a moment and is seen as restricted in form.
Wolfflin's distinguishing terms have been persistent in art history
ever since and have certainly been heard in this talk: linear vs.
painterly, plane vs. recession; closed vs. open form; multiplicity vs.
unity, clearness vs. unclearness. Though Wolfflin thought of these
arts as polarities it was obvious to him that the baroque represented
a development in time out of the classic, and he also recognized an
archaic or experimental period as preceding the classic. Shortly
thereafter other scholars isolated a phase of sixteenth-century Euro-
pean art as existing between the "classic" of the early sixteenth cen-
tury and the baroque of the seventeenth and entertaining objectives
and producing forms which were clearly different from those of either
the classic or the baroque. To this art the title "Mannerist" was
given, not only because it seemed to mannerize and refine the forms
of Raphael and Michelangelo (and indeed the word "mannerist" had
been used in this way during the sixteenth century itself), but also
because it was in large part preoccupied with shock effects, contrasts,
and ambiguities in form and meaning. These have proved extraor-
dinarily sympathetic to the twentieth-century world.
With such identification of experimental, classic, mannerist or re-
fined, and baroque phases in art the way was now open for twen-
tieth-century morphologists to turn the whole business into the char-
acteristically desired flux of growth and development and to handle
any art, anywhere, upon these fluid terms. We can be spared here a
demonstration of this method upon arts, such as those of India and
China, about which I know almost nothing, although one might point
out that the method works most convincingly with arts about which

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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

one knows nothing at all. A brief demonstration with Greek art may
be allowed: that is, with the archaic as experimental, with the mid-
fifth century as classic or the culmination of those experiments, the
fourth century as refining and mannerizing the balance of the classic,
and the Hellenistic as producing a baroque which coils outward into
space, recreates classic release in more explosive terms, and other-
wise demonstrates most of the characteristics defined by Wolfflin.
One will note that the four stages of Winckelmann are back, but
without the exclusive value judgments and-in all fairness to the
morphologists-without the biological cultural analogies which, along
with judgments of value, have been incorporated into this method by
some contemporary historians such as Spengler and Toynbee and
which, partly through their influence, have found their way into vari-
ous text books on world art.
When intelligently applied, the morphological method has the great
virtue of making many kinds of art available for systematic, if rather
detached, analysis, but it has one paramount weakness so far as we
here are concerned: namely, that through it the classic is irrevocably
lost. The moment of balance is harder and harder to find; it is eaten
into on one side by the experimental and even more on the other by
the mannerist or refined, until we come at last upon the trauma of
the graduate student whose eye has become so acute to disequilibrium
that he has lost the classic forever and can never work again.
One reason morphology loses the classic is because it is inade-
quately concerned with meaning as embodied in form. It is here that
the iconologist, reacting against the morphologist, might have been
expected to serve us well. The iconologist's preoccupation with the
themes of art, and especially-through the influence of such universal
intellects as Erwin Panofsky-with the rich humanist tradition of
classical themes which run through the art of the western world from
antiquity to the present, might have aided us in rediscovering that
complexity of meaning which is an essential of the classic and which
makes it so much more than merely a moment of balance or equilib-
rium. Indeed, the method of the iconologist has helped us to value
the density of allusion which is involved, for example, in the organiza-
tion of the various cult centers on the Acropolis in Athens or in the
identification of the figures in Raphael's "School of Athens." The
iconologists have attempted as well to widen our concept of the clas-
sic in all periods by bringing into it, as in the middle ages, such a
figure, considered refined by the morphologists, as Pierre de Mon-
treuil, or as in the Renaissance, such a titan as Michelangelo.
Yet in the end, the effect of the work of the iconologists has been
to lead us not toward the classic but away from it along a river of
change which seems not so different from the one which is furrowed
by the canoes of the morphologists. This would seem to occur be-

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cause the iconologist has become preoccupied not with a classic reso-
lution of complexity but with complexity itself. He is most happy,
it seems, when traveling through the labyrinth of humanist allusion,
following a new thread of Ariadne which leads us to many curious
and forgotten culs de sac of knowledge along the way but which this
time never brings us forth from the splendid labyrinth into the vulgar
light of day. Thus iconology would seem, like morphology, to be
essentially concerned with the process of becoming, and it too loses
the classic for us, accomplishing a certain fragmentation of our view
of the whole. It seems obvious that we must bring form, as in the
morphologists, and meaning, as in the iconologists, back together
again in terms of experience, as the classic does. (One should point
out that a rather similar desire to bring all relevant aspects of human
experience together would seem to have motivated the symposium
on the classic held at Naumburg in 1930, cf. Werner Jaeger, ed., Das
Problem des Klassischen und die Antike, Leipzig, 1931.)
Yet if the classic can be lost through a modem desire for con-
tinuous complexity it can also be lost through a counter modern
yearning for maximum directiness and shock impact in form. Here
the iconologist is countered by the modern artist and critic who re-
nounces humanism in favor of primitive clarity and violent sensation.
This predilection for the abstract has served us well by making the
archaic comprehensible and desirable to our eyes. It has done the
same-despite Mr. Berenson's violent objections-for late antique
art, at the other end of Greek and Roman civilization. But with
critics such as Seltman it would deny us the Hellenistic, as less ab-
stract and too pictorial, and it would deprecate the Parthenon sculp-
tures because certain pictorial, modelled values are apparent in them.
(Fig. 12) In effect, it is the classic's love for the forms of nature to which
this attitude objects. It would leave us Olympia (Fig. 11) for what
is archaic or (in a peculiar terminology borrowed from Roger Fry)
"formal" in Olympia, but beyond that it will not value the classic,
which is thus lost to us once more. We should note that the aesthetic
criteria involved here are not so different from those of the old clas-
sicizing academy, insofar as they both are based upon profoundly
conservative-one might say hieratic rather than natural-ways of
seeing.
Through similar criteria the Parthenon itself (Fig. 8) is also lost
to us. Martienssen sees its octostyle facade as less easily grasped at
once than the usual hexastyle facades of archaic or of other fifth-century
temples. Again the criterion is one which values direct impact rather
than that stretching of vision and comprehension which the Par-
thenon, as a classic monument, certainly demands. Valuing the ar-
chaic, the criterion is still a classicizing one, like that of Vitruvius
who insisted that Doric temples were, by nature, hexastyle.

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IV

If we have lost the classic in all these different ways, how are we to
find it again? Here we should return to our definition of the classic
as that art which is of highest class because it is involved in pre-
senting the variety of human experience and the tensions of actual
life in forms which resolve but do not deny that variety and those
tensions. By this I do not mean exactly what Proust meant when he
said, "Only romantics know how to read classic works, because they
read them as they were written, romantically." I do not believe in
the distinction, but I am in sympathy with Proust's intention here-
which is to make us realize the classic as the result both of a pro-
foundly searching creative struggle and of a sense of positive human
release. Therefore, we should attempt to experience the nature of
that struggle to compact opposites into resolution, to adjust tensions
into stable forms, to create indeed that harmony of tensions, "as of
the bow and the lyre," of which Herakleitos had spoken. We should
try above all to see the classic as it is involved, most optimistically,
in creative acts-in discovery, invention, and the expansion of ex-
perience. We must, in other words, try to go forward to the classic
positively as it came to itself, through creation, rather than negatively
as the "classicizers" have gone back to it in search of the finished,
the perfect, and the ruled.
For example, in architecture the Nashville Parthenon can help us
little to recover the Parthenon in Athens; it remains a curiosity since
its exterior sculptural form in the Hellenic manner is not in tension
with the meaning of modern buildings, which is in their interior use
as space containers as well as in their exterior presence. Jefferson's
Pantheon Library can, however, help us more because here, using an
Italic tradition related to space enclosure, Jefferson shows us still the
nature of the building as used in tension with the form as applied.
This too has undergone more of the creative process in variation from
its model than has the other building.
If we wish, however, to see an architecture which attempts in-
tegrally to resolve the Italic tradition of interior space with the Hel-
lenic one of the articulated sculptural integument in terms of new
discovery, we must turn to the work of a contemporary architect. In
Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles (Fig. 5) the building
contains its interior of megaron-like apartments within a plastic sys-
tem which appears from the outside to be related only to its own
laws and which achieves in this way something of the purely sculp-
tural scale of the Greek temple. We can now experience it in terms
of the classic metaphor of the temple as a human-evoking, up-
right and weight-supporting, but purely abstract order in the natu-
tral world. Thus Le Corbusier extracts the maximum sculptural

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quality from his supports, and-as a Greek temple, by direction

and contrast, brings the whole visible landscape into human focus-
so Le Corbusier seeks a similar classic tension and focus in his build-
ings, like that which houses the High Court of Chandigarh in India.
(Fig. 6) Such combination of opposites relating to man and nature
is no less daring than many of the unlikely combinations brought into
resolution by classic art itself. For a man like Le Corbusier, who
desires classic values above all things, the method of finding them
has been one of unremitting search and struggle. He has been ob-
liged, like most of us, to reconstruct a usable past for himself, be-
cause the academy had withdrawn the past from human meaning in
the twentieth century. For interior space he seeks the meaning of
Hadrian's Villa in his drawings. Like Hadrian himself he digs into
the hollows of swelling cave types for the nature of interior experi-
ence. For exterior sculptural challenge which can state the splendour
of the human will he travels to the Acropolis in Athens, and writes
of classic art among the ruins, ". . . nothing ... left but these closely
knit and violent elements, sounding clear and tragic like brazen
trumpets." (Fig. 8)
When Le Corbusier builds a church out of the elements of interior
body and exterior challenge he will stretch us as Ictinos apparently
stretches the comprehension of the critics still. The plan may be like
the whole Acropolis brought inside. As we follow Pausanias' route
from shrine to shrine without-through all the complexity of forms-
so within Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamps (Fig. 7) we journey
from hairpin megaron to megaron. These are the cavelike chapels,
recalling to us Le Corbusier's drawings of Hadrian's Villa, and be-
yond those the homed earth sanctuaries of Sardinia, Brittany, and
Ireland-female sanctuaries which Le Corbusier was also consciously
evoking in his Mary Magdalen cave for the obsessed Trouin at Sainte
Baume. The exterior of Ronchamps shows a double intent: to hood
the chapel spaces as interior volumes but to bring up the main form
as an exterior sculptural shape, an acoustic bell, rising in a curve to
the southeast corner: a presence stretching challengingly upward like
an airfoil about to take flight. Since both walls and vault press in-
ward, the building cannot be seen simply as a hollow shell, like most
buildings. Instead, one feels inside the reality of engulfment in a
positive body, while outside the whole becomes one pier which
thrusts upward as a material force. Cave and column become one.
Ronchamps, in the lived present, challenges our capacity for experi-
ence until we remember that the Greek temple was involved in a
rather similar intent, that is, to clothe its inner cella shrine in the
exterior forms of sculptural force. We remember, too, that the
Parthenon itself, (Fig. 8) though closed within its Euclidean envelope,
is also stretching upward. It, too, challenges us: a purely compres-

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sion system which is, nevertheless, apparently rising upward as a

colonnade held down in tension at its corners-which it pulls with
it-stretching upward and with all its life wholly being the unlikely,
complex, but present fact of Athena, purely flesh and purely spirit.
Both the Parthenon, and (I think we must say) Ronchamps, are}
classic buildings because they both deal with the whole of things-
in this case relating to the Virgin Goddess-as presently existing fact.
One notes that the carefully chosen, archetypal words of the Litany
apply to both: "Spiritual Vessel . . . Tower of David . . . House of
Gold . . . Tower of Ivory." These opposites are not carefully bal-
anced in the Parthenon and Ronchamps but are fused in the heat of
the experience of them. It is little wonder that classicizers, such as
Perret, have been among Le Corbusier's most persistent detractors,
since it is not the living heat of the classic which the classicistic de-
sires but instead its apparently reproducible order. Yet neither the
Parthenon nor Ronchamps is reproducible, and they give further the
curious impression, intrinsic to the classic, of being, despite their
obvious prototypes, undeniably unique of their kind. They deal not
with the comfort of the purely relative but with the challenge of that
absolute which culminates relativity. Thus they do not mesmerize
the viewer's self but simply confront him with themselves-existing
presences counter to his own. In this way that freedom which Sartre
saw in the work of art calls to the freedom in those individuals who
can recognize it. The Parthenon and Ronchamps are therefore not
for the timid, nor is the classic, which seems to be a terrible freedom
most of all. Perhaps, though hidden and therefore unidentified be-
hind the semantic mask of "classicisme," it has always been the
classic that modern existentialists have in fact sought, since the Law
of the classic-as in Plato's dialogue on this theme-is intrinsic to
it and neither outrages the individual nor denies the group; it need
not be stolen, as in Camus' La Chute, like the panel of the Just
Judges from its proper place. If Sartre's stated goal, "the absolute
at the heart of relativity" means an absolute which grows out of the
full acceptance of relativity rather than one which is insulated against it,
then perhaps the Parthenon, not Communism, is the true object of
the existentialist's search. We can believe that this may be the case
when Sartre writes, ". . . dans leuvre d'art nous avons decouvert
la presence de l'humanite entiere." Certainly, with Le Corbusier,
whose culture is wholly French, the French search for meaning now
passes beyond its traditional "classicisme"-which is order imposed
upon anarchy-toward the organic awe and terror of the classic,
which is the inseparable wholeness of life.

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If I now seem to see the classic over much in terms of active violence
and struggle-in almost existentialist terms-it may be because a
desire to discover the truth of classic values once again has been a
consistent and poignant factor in the work of some of the greatest
artists of our time. Again, they have been French artists or artists
who have worked in France. There was, it is true, a moment at the
end of the last century when there blossomed a curiously haunting
classic as of those who had never left home. Maillol on the shores
of the Mediterranean made his solid but radiant images, and Picas-
so in his father's house on that same littoral grew up to a kind of
classic which, like that of Maillol, recalls the severity of Olympia.
But it is in the nature of the modern world that a man must leave
his father's house and come in contact with a world which is as wide
as mass civilization and history have made it. Picasso in 1901, in
the metropolis of Paris, becomes part of a sophisticated and elegant
milieu, refined and fluid like the Minoan civilization whose forms
were being excavated and published by Evans at precisely that time.
But for every modern man who is brought into a fully formed en-
vironment, there seems to operate-if he is to become a full man-
the peculiar necessity to begin again from the beginning, to relive as
personal experience the creation of those values out of which the
world is truly made. Thus Picasso consciously primitivizes himself:
a painting of 1907, a Bakota guardian of the dead, and the Great
Mother from a Boeotian amphora of the late geometric period seem
all to belong together. What are the forces underneath, the artist
asks. What are the images and the geometry? Then in full tide of
joy and strength and in full command of his material Picasso makes
his richly mature cubist forms, like archaic Greek art but without
that art's clearly fixed tribal and ceremonial pattern to base his
meaning upon-without the image of humanity as a constant in his
search. He is a normally uprooted man of the modem technological
and mass world. But he desires a tradition, or a past, passionately
and searches for it in antiquity. And when his human beings emerge
after the first world war (Fig. 9), it is as if they, like the Kouros by
Kritios, were the first human beings to move upright in the world
and to shift their weight.
But Picasso, as a modern man, cannot find confidence or excite-
ment in the deeply organic character of that movement. His figures
create the effect, found also in the characters of Cocteau, Anouilh,
and Gide, of knowing that they are playing an Hellenic part-en-
gaged in the archetypal act because they know they are expected to
do so. It is a moment of ironic classicism, fusing wit and longing.
Thus Picasso's men are here not radiant like the Greek; instead they

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5. LE CORBUSIER. Unite' d'Habitation, Marseilles.

6. ... COBSE. Hig Court, Chandigar. Perpecive

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7. LE CORBUSIER. Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamps.

_~~~~~~- A

: tsk

8. Parthenon

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9. PicASSo. The Pipes of Pan.

10. PICASso. Guernica.

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1

~~

T eW

11. Temple of Zeus, Olympia. West Pediment. 12. Parthen

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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

have a heavy, earth-bound mass, which reminds us a little of Italic

art, and a kind of reflective sadness which recalls late antiquity. Here
Picasso searches too and other groupings suggest themselves: a third
century Roman bust, withdrawn and strange; a Picasso head with the
same great eyes and the strong forms of nose and hair; then, finally,
the same motifs arranged into a whole new set of reverberations
where the original form has been pondered until its essential elements
have been found. The form which results may not be a classic one,
but it reveals a kind of classic process: that is, the attempt to re-
arrange the past in terms of present meaning. It is the opposite of
the classicizing process.
Yet Picasso cannot focus these attempts until he is faced with an
event which pulls him into contact with public as well as private life.
For him this event can hardly be a great victory over barbaric forms,
like Salamis, Plataea, or the Himera. Instead it is one of the char-
acteristic twentieth-century defeats-in this case the bombing of the
town of Guernica. Nevertheless, under the pressure of a need to
find an adequate form for a personally valid and generally true state-
ment about that event he now comes closest to a classic method and
a classic form. His Guernica, of 1937, (Fig. 10) is organized by
severe shapes and limited colors into a pyramidal composition like
that of a Greek pediment. Picasso avoids reporting the event. There
are no bombing planes. He is interested in the large meanings in-
volved in the destruction of a town. Therefore a few figures, in
terms of the unities of classic drama, stand for the whole; it is com-
plex meaning resolved in forms which are clear and complete, in-
stantaneous and permanent. Cubist geometry is resolved with the
organic; movement with stability. As at Olympia, the time of con-
tinuity becomes the time of now.
The forms themselves are pushed farther than forms had been
pushed before, and like the figures from the west pediment of the
temple of Zeus at Olympia (Fig. 11 ) they are pushed for one reason
only, to make the meaning more direct and clear. They are forms
which express as intensely as possible the agony which is the mean-
ing of the event, and they move within and as part of the basic order
of the shape which controls the dynamic unity of the whole. The
meaning is a classic one. It takes an attitude; it describes barbarism
and defines civilization. It is the rape of decency which is its theme.
But there is no radiant young god to state the triumph of human
truce and order. Instead the hero is broken and a hollow man, and
the beast totem rises triumphant once again and watches.
In this there is a profoundly classic reference. As on a stage the
whole is being regarded and illuminated. On the eastern pediment
from Olympia the crime and counter-crime of human beings is
watched by the river god as nature which is outside humanity and

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which fixes a cold, unwinking stare upon the terribly exposed ranks
of men. In the Guernica nature as the beast observes and approves
human self-destruction. For Picasso the indifferent watcher, outside
man, created by him, but now destroying him, is technology. This
illuminates the scene and pins humanity, as upon a dissecting table,
under the unwinking light of an unshaded bulb. Whatever the result
we see it whole. It is not a fragment any more but a concentrated
image of ourselves, and perhaps it tells us that our problem now is
to bring horse and rider back to life once more-as they are alive on
the Parthenon frieze-in terms of commitment, devotion, and joy.
(Fig. 12) There is also ritual to be understood, and its harmony of
the ideal and the real. There is above all life, since it has been pre-
cisely with a living harmony of real and ideal that great classic works
of art have dealt. In the Guernica the violence of the event in our
time is still too white hot, but by reference of imagery and form the
implications of classic meaning are present, and the need for a reso-
lution, as the classic would have it, is asserted.
Yet we may ask ourselves whether such resolution, if it should ever
come again, could produce once more a truly classic art. There was
a freshness in the Greek awakening to the whole of life, for example,
which has never been possible with quite the same newness for those
later ages which have had that example already fixed before their
eyes. Thus, perhaps the definition of the classic which I have offered
throughout this talk has been-because it has inevitably had ex-
emplars of the classic in mind-partly a classicizing one despite it-
self. Perhaps a classic art can arise only in a certain way, as a cer-
tain kind of people awake to individuality out of a tribal situation,
with which, for a period, their new freedom exists in vital tension.
Perhaps, therefore, some might hold the view that there can never
be another fully classic art until an adequate set of disasters forces
the human race to lose everything-even its present stock of mem-
ories-and to start again from the beginning. Some aspects of the
existentialism to which I referred earlier have seemed to demonstrate
at least a partial sympathy toward such an eventuality. A barbarian-
ization even more complete than that which separated antiquity from
the High Middle Ages might be conceived.
Our imagination revolts at the possibility. It is the one which
Shelley embraced in exacerbated form in his poem, Hellas, when
he consigned civilization as it had become to the destruction he felt
it deserved:

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream

Then all might begin again. The great decisions could be made afresh.

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VINCENT J. SCULLY, JR.

A new Ulysses leaves once more

Calypso for his native shore.

Then the new heroic acts and climactic victories might create the new
fund of memories, out of which comes the new awakening:

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;

But Shelley knew that this dream too would be fated to imperma-
nanence by the very nature of human life. Why, therefore, should
the world begin again? He cries:

The world is weary of the past

Oh, might it die or rest at last.

Yet this last cry seems nihilistic and even sentimental. It is L'Homme
Revolte among the broken images, choosing death in the impasse. In
all likelihood the world of human values can wish for neither death
nor rest and remain human. The world must use the memories it
has; it cannot discard them. Picasso and Le Corbusier, both sensing
the necessity to begin anew in the face of the new challenges of the
modern age-and Picasso especially seeming to relive the develop-
ment of experience from its beginning-have still recognized this fact
instinctively. They have understood that men cannot put away what
they have once discovered and that the challenge of the present is to
see the classic as it is and to create a fresh life for it on our own
terms if we can. They have realized also that the classic itself essen-
tially demands of us that we look not backward, but forward, to find
it. It is the concentrated image of a whole humanity which we must
seek-Sartre's "humanite entiere"-and in our time not a classicizing
order but a classic awakening. As we commit ourselves to this, clas-
sic art regains its meaning for us. It can no longer be viewed from a
distance, as merely a moment of balance in a world of eternal flux;
nor as a pure creation of the mind; nor as one of two polarities.
Perhaps this may mean that we already are awakening-indeed
out of the shadows of that revolution which Shelley envisaged and
which has largely come to pass. "Faiths and empires" have gleamed
"like wrecks of a dissolving dream." Perhaps the Athens we see
now, as we view it across the battered early-morning suburbs of our
souls, is in fact a new city, perceived through the fresh eyes of as-
tounded barbarians. And if we, no less than earlier ages, make our
own myth of the classic, we at least know now that it deals with
thought and sensation, with a keenly lived present, a challenged

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future, and a liberated memory: creating forms of permanent hu-

manity out of the utter impermanence of the human situation but
blazing, not gently, with the hope and ardour of searching men. They
seek nothing less than the whole.'

'A shorter version of this paper was read in a symposium, "The Nature of the
Classical," held at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archae-
ology and the American Philological Society, Philadelphia, December, 1956.

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