On Photography
Polyclitus Alive!
(or Holy Cow Batman who
are all these superheros?)
"Polyclitus ... made a statue which
artists call the 'Canon' and from which they derive the basic forms of
their art, as if from some kind of law." Polyclitus's often repeated
axiom was that "perfection arises through many numbers." Even if a
sculptor deviated only slightly in each of his measures, he warned, in
the end these could add up to a large error.
No microfiber so fine, no expression so succinct. The Greeks would give us philosophy, democracy, invention, history, poetry, drama, science, but nothing as so important as art the animation of them all. The Greek aesthetic assaulting a world of mysticism, superstition, and fanaticism was a wholehearted naturalism, one rooted squarely in matter.
All subsequent civilizations that would rise and fall like dominos, would be measured by Greek naturalism.
It was such spirit that like the New Testament itself, or even our government was adorned by Greek architecture.
But in an age of rampant materialism, naturalism is taken as materialism, it's hard to see anything more.
However, no boy was ever so beautiful as the Kritios, and no woman as seductive as Aphrodite.
The lasting quality is a spiritual disciple, as sharp fine and real as Occam's razor. The sensuality was a bacchanalia of natural temperance, a revelry of natural order. This is why they still speak, and compel us today. For the Greeks discovered what we've yet to fully realize, the most sublime spirituality, the most profound experience, the deepest truth is the art of the body. To the Greeks the figure was the gods, the virtues, the emotions of man, the summation of all, the concatenation of matter under the spiritual pedagogy of unadorned, unpretentious nature. They nether bowed to creation or feared it, it was the Greek mind as manifest in his art that mastered it.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
