Some Have Been Coated With Varnish.
They Glisten Infamously.
Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of
your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over - -
Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative
and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid
lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare
phenomenon - life, and individuality, after death. They are more
noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or
at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of
them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness
out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of
night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and
flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at
that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not
easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made
flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming
been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have
been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to
how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror,
against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The
nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards
Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose
creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of
the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to
those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the
bodies of their dear friends and relatives....
Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for
something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the
kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 235 of 291
Words from 62329 to 62642
of 77809
