Page two The miracle of Greek art is to have succeeded in expressing the maximum of perfection with and within an acceptance of man's finiteness and scale. Art is a projection of the ego, an urge for survival, a need for beauty and the absolute. After all, is it not a material manifestation of man's noblest feelings, a surpassing of oneself? An expression of an idealism, visionary but harmless, essential to his existence and survival. This is neither the case with religions nor ideologies often responsible for extensive crimes against humanity and in untold millions of deaths. Little by little over the past forty-three years, the collection has grown more and more into a coherent whole. Objects came my way, and some of them unquestionably because they had to do so. It is as though, imbued with the spirit of their creator, they came to me because they knew I would love them, understand them, would give them back their identity and supply them with a context in keeping with their essence, relating them to their likes. But this is no place to go into detailed stories of certain precise examples that would prove this. The most recent example was Prince Siddhartha, no. 173. A surprising series of circumstances led me to the awareness of his existence and, notwithstanding all manner of pressures on me, he joined the collection. This may seem surprising as Gandharan art does not particularly attract me. I do not like provincial art, "bastard" art or baroque art, and it is all three. But he is of a dimension that surpasses all contingencies, an overpoweringly strong presence. He is a very handsome prince, the son of reigning monarchs, he has a beautiful young wife and a little son whom he adores, all the trappings of wealth and power, and he is adulated by his future subjects. But one morning he wakes up, abandons all and goes forth into the world in the pursuit of truth. He is the future Buddha. The collection has become almost as though a living entity which I have to go on looking after. Today its main body is Greek art from the Neolithic to the Byzantine with many of the peripheral cultures, preceded however by a few examples from the greatest civilizations that came before the Greeks, and born on great rivers: Sumer in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Egypt with its main artery the Nile, and China with the Yangtze and Yellow River, represented here by one example only, no. 209. As an early Greek philosopher observed, everything is in flux and man is perpetually in evolution. Thus it is important to realize that, whatever the miracle of this spiritual birth, Greek civilization was enormously indebted to the Near East and Egypt. There started the first sedentary settlements that became in time cities with their religious and political hierarchies, leading to the invention of writing, mathematics, astronomy, etc. What changes is the assessment of facts, a new perspective, a heretofore unknown awareness, a humanism which reached its maturity in 5th century Athens in the plastic and dramatic arts and in some other centres of the Greek world at that time. This humanism is foreshadowed in the Neolithic art of Greece. For example the seated terracotta idol, no. 44, with the tenderness expressed in the pose of the forearms and the hands on the right knee, some five thousand years earlier. In no other Neolithic art that I have looked at do I perceive such feelings. Certain cultures and civilizations of the past have admirably portrayed different animals, but none with the personal and human touch of the Greeks who loved them so much, harmonizing with their images and making some of them as though they were almost human: man become animal, in a Platonic sense, conveying the characteristic of their essence. Some of them exude spontaneity, vitality and humour, not to mention a sensitivity of feeling. For example the Geometric mare, no. 76, expressing maternal love as she tilts her head towards the foal which she is about to suckle, and which is now missing. Also, the doe, no. 78, as though on the edge of a forest in the mist of early dawn as she quivers with an almost human hesitancy in an awareness of potential danger. Note the spirited mischievousness of the smiling goat, no. 108, of the Archaic period from Greece proper with a human glint in his eye; the playful "dancing" bull, no. 120, from Magna Graecia where it is fun to live, for the land is bountiful. |
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