The Richness of the Antique Lies in Modeling
The value of the antique springs from ronde-bosse. It possesses in a supreme degree the art of relief. How can the critics and the professors explain this, being what they are? They do not belong to the trade. Art should not be taught except by those who practise it.
Observe any fragments of Greek sculpture: a piece of an arm, a hand. What you call the idea, the subject, no longer exists here, but is not all this debris none the less admirably beautiful? In what does this beauty consist? Solely in the modeling. Observe it closely, touch it; do you not feel the precision of this modeling, firm yet elastic, in flux like life itself? It is full, it is like a fruit. All the eloquence of this sculpture comes from that.
What is modeling? The very principle of creation. It is the juxtaposition of the innumerable reliefs and depressions that constitute every fragment of matter, inert or animated. Modeling creates the essential texture, supple, living, embracing every plante. It fills, coördinates, and harmonizes them. It penetrates everything, it animates everything, as well the depths as the surfaces. It comprises the minute as well as the immense. Mountain, horse, flower, woman, insect equally owe to it their form. When God created the world, it is of modeling He must have thought first of all. If you consider a hand, you notice its contours and the character of the whole. But the eye of the artist, that eye, sees more: it sees the infinite assemblage of projections and depressions forming a texture more closely knit, more exactly blended than the most perfect mosaic. It is this that he seeks to render; this that he translates, if he is a sculptor, by the science of depression and relief, if he is a draughtsman or painter by that of light and shadow. For light serves, in conformity with depressions and reliefs, to give the eye the same sensation that the hand receives from touch: Titian is just as great a modeler as Donatello.
To-day the sense of ronde-bosse is completely lost, not only in Europe, but among the peoples of the Orient. It is the age of the flat. No one knows anything about it. Men love what they do themselves, until they are made to see that it is not beautiful; but it takes years and years for this to penetrate into their consciousness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China and Japan still produced charming works. In ancient times their art was very great; it approached the Greek. At the exposition of 1900, we were enabled to see antique Japanese statues, superb nudes nearly as fine as those of Greece. In our time the pest of flatness has contaminated the Asiatic races as well as the European: decadence is universal.
We are so far removed from antique beauty that when we photograph the works of the ancients we take them in the spirit of our own taste, which is that of low-relief; we take from them that flower of beautiful modeling, their richness, their crowning grace. When I say low-relief, I do not use this term exactly; it is only that I know no other means of expressing the modern evil of uniformity; but I know that good low-relief is as full and as fruit-like as sculpture in the round, that it is sculpture in the round itself, as in the friezes of the Parthenon, as in our buildings of the Renaissance and of the seventeenth century.
The great concern of my life is the struggle I have maintained to escape from the general flatness. All the success of my sculpture comes from that. Although it has little enough taste, the public, despite all, is tired to death of this flatness. The charm of ronde-bosse is so great that it captivates the ignorant even without their knowing it.