To have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture, it is necessary
to connect it, indeed, with the inner life of the Greek world, its
thought and sentiment, on the one hand; but on the other hand to
connect it, also, with the minor works of price, intaglios, coins,
vases; with that whole system of material refinement and beauty in
the outer Greek life, which these minor works represent to us; and it
is with these, as far as possible, that we must seek to relieve the
air of our galleries and museums of their too intellectual greyness.
Greek sculpture could not have been precisely a cold thing; and,
whatever a colour-blind school may say, pure thoughts have their
coldness, a coldness which has sometimes repelled from Greek
sculpture, with its unsuspected fund of passion and energy in
material form, those who cared much, and with much insight, for a
similar passion and energy in the coloured world of Italian painting.
Theoretically, then, we need that world of the minor arts as a
complementary background for the higher and more austere Greek
sculpture; and, as matter of fact, it is just with such a world--with
a period of refined and exquisite [192] tectonics+ (as the Greeks
called all crafts strictly subordinate to architecture), that Greek
art actually begins, in what is called the Heroic Age, that earliest,
undefined period of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot
be dated, and which reaches down to the first Olympiad, about the
year 776 B.
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