Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream

by Johann Gottfried Herder, Jason Gaiger (Translator)

Overview

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."—Johann Gottfried Herder

Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with a wide range of sources—from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible—to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture.

Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, Sculpture is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory.

Jason Gaiger's translation of Sculpture includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226328003
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	141
File size:	319 KB

About the Author

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was a leading figure of the Sturm und Drang literary movement in Germany and an innovator in the philosophy of history and culture. His many other books include Treatise on the Origin of Language, Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity, and On Knowledge and Sensation in the Human Soul. Jason Gaiger is Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the Open University. He has published widely in the field of art history and aesthetics and is is coeditor of Art in Theory 1815-1900 and Art in Theory 1648-1815.

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Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream

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By Jason Gaiger

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 Jason Gaiger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226327558

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PART ONE

1



The person blind from birth whom Diderot observed imagined the sense of sight to be like an organ upon which the air makes an impression, just as the hand feels the impression of a stick. A mirror he conceived as a device for projecting bodies in relief, but he could not understand how the relief could be felt, and he believed that there would have to be a second device that could uncover the deception caused by the first. He held his keen and accurate sense of touch to be a fully adequate replacement for the sense of sight. He could distinguish the hardness or smoothness of a body no less subtly than a voice by its tone, or than we who can see distinguish colors. He did not therefore envy us our sense of sight, which he could not imagine to himself. If he wished for an increase of his senses, then it would be for longer arms to be able to feel the moon's surface with greater clarity and certainty, and not for eyes to be able to look upon it.

As romantic and overly philosophical as this account may seem, it has been confirmed by others who did not look through Diderot's eyes. The blind Saunderson, despite his knowledge of mathematics, could not grasp the idea ofimages upon a surface, which he could only represent to himself by means of devices. He used these rather than numbers to count, replacing the lines and figures of geometry with tangible bodies. Even the rays of the sun became in his optics fine tangible rods. The image which they produced upon a visible surface meant nothing to him; he considered it an ancillary concept derived from a foreign sense, from another world. The most difficult problem in geometry, the construction of bodies as a whole, was easy for him to demonstrate; but the easiest and most intuitive task for the sighted, the representation of figures upon a surface, was for him the most difficult. Here he had to build upon concepts that were foreign and intangible for him, and he had to speak to the sighted as if they were blind. It was easy for him to conceive a die as composed of six pyramids, but he could represent to himself an octagon upon a surface only by means of a physical octahedron.

The distinction between the sense of sight and the sense of touch-- between concepts belonging to surfaces and concepts belonging to physical bodies--is clearest in the case of the blind man to whom Cheselden gave back his sight. Even when the man's cataracts were at their worst, he could still distinguish light from dark, and, in strong light, black, white, and scarlet. But his sense of sight was still only a sense of touch. What moved upon his closed eyes were bodies rather than properties of surfaces or colors. Accordingly, after his eyes had been operated on, his sense of sight did not allow him to recognize any of the things that he had previously known through touch. He did not see space, nor could he distinguish even the most diverse objects from one other. Before him, or rather, around him, he saw only a vast painted panel. He was taught to distinguish, to recognize visually, what he had previously known through touch, to transform figures into bodies and bodies into figures. He would learn only to forget again. "That is a cat! That is a dog!" he said. "Now I recognize you and you will not elude me again." But often they did elude him until finally his eye was able to see figures in space as the same letters that had earlier constituted his tactile knowledge of bodies. By confronting rapidly the one with the other he was finally able to read the objects around him.

We thought he soon knew what pictures represented, which were shewed to him, but we found afterwards we were mistaken: for about two months after he was couched, he discovered at once, they represented solid bodies; when to that time he considered them only as party-coloured planes, or surfaces diversified with variety of paint; but even then he was no less surprized, expecting the pictures would feel like the things they represented, and was amazed when he found those parts, which by their light and shadow appeared now round and uneven, felt only flat like the rest: and asked which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing? Being shewn his father's picture in a locket at his mother's watch, and told what it was, he acknowledged a likeness, but was vastly surprized; asking, how it could be, that a large face could be expressed in so little room; saying it should have seemed as impos sible to him, as to put a bushel of anything into a pint. At first, he could bear but very little light, and the things he saw, he thought ex treamly large; but upon seeing things larger, those first seen he con ceived less, never being able to imagine any lines beyond the bounds he saw: the room he was in, he said, he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look big ger. He knew not the shape of any thing, nor any one thing from an other, however different in shape, or magnitude, but upon being told what things were, whose form he before knew from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again; but having too many to learn at once, he forgot many of them: and (as he said) at first he learned to know, and again forgot a thousand things a day.

2

What do these strange experiences teach us? Something that we ourselves could experience daily if we were to acknowledge that sight reveals merely shapes, but touch alone reveals bodies: that everything that has form is known only through the sense of touch and that sight reveals only visible surfaces--moreover, not the surfaces of bodies but solely surfaces exposed to light. This will appear paradoxical to some, a mere commonplace to others. Howsoever it is received, it is nonetheless true, and important consequences can be shown to follow from it.

What is light able to paint upon our eyes? That which can be painted: pictures. As upon the white wall of a camera obscura, pencils of light fall upon the retina of the eye from everything that stands in front of it. But they can only draw what is there--a surface, the most diverse visible objects ranged alongside one another. Things lying behind one other, solid, heavy objects, can no more be given to the eye than the lover concealed behind a hanging or the miller singing away in his windmill can be painted on a canvas.

The spacious prospect I see before me, with all its various aspects, what is it other than a picture, a surface? The sky that lowers to the ground and the wood that merges into it, the broad expanse of the field and the water close by, the bank of the river, the motif that dominates the entire picture--these are but an image, a panel, a continuum of things placed alongside one another. Every object reveals just so much of itself to me as the mirror before me reveals of myself, that is, the figure, the frontal aspect. In order to know that I am more than this I must employ my other senses, or deduce that there is more by means of ideas.

Why should it be a source of astonishment, then, that blind people whose sight is restored see before them nothing but a house of pictures, a colored surface? For none of us would see any more than this were we not able to use other means. A child sees the sky and his cradle, the moon and his wet nurse, as if they were alongside one another, and he reaches out to grasp the moon just as he reaches out to grasp his nurse. To the child everything is a picture upon a panel. Awakening from sleep in the nocturnal twilight, before we fully come to consciousness, a forest and a tree, like proximity and distance, occupy a single ground: we see them as giants close by or as distant dwarves, as phantoms that move toward us, until finally we awake and come to ourselves. Only then do we understand that we have actually learned how to see through force of habit and by using our other senses, above all, by using our sense of touch. A body that we have never recognized as a body by touching it, or the corporeality of which we have not been able to establish by means of its similarity to other objects, would remain to us forever like the rings of Saturn or Jupiter, that is to say, a mere phenomenon, an appearance. An ophthalmite with a thousand eyes but without a hand to touch would remain his entire life in Plato's cave and would never have any concept of the properties of a physical body.

For what are properties of bodies if not relations to our own body, to our sense of touch? The light that strikes my eye can no more give me access to concepts such as solidity, hardness, softness, smoothness, form, shape, or volume than my mind can generate embodied, living concepts by independent thinking. Birds, horses, and fish do not possess these concepts. Only human beings have them, because alongside reason we possess a hand that can feel and grasp. If we did not have this, if we had no means by which we could confirm the existence of a body for ourselves through our own bodily feeling, we could only infer and guess and dream and fabricate, and we would know nothing for certain. The more we are able to take hold of a body as a body, rather than staring at it and dreaming of it, the more vital is our feeling for the object, or, as it is expressed in the word itself, our concept of the thing.

Go into a nursery and see how the young child who is constantly gathering experience reaches out, grasping, lifting, weighing, touching, and measuring things with both hand and foot, thereby acquiring securely and confidently the most difficult but also the most primary and necessary concepts, such as body, shape, size, space, and distance. These concepts cannot be acquired by teaching or explanation, but only through experience, through exploring and trying things out for oneself. In a few moments the child learns more, and learns it more vividly, more truly and more powerfully, than ten thousand years of mere gaping and verbal explanations could provide. By continually combining his sense of sight with his sense of touch, allowing each to test, extend, enhance, and strengthen the other, he forms his first judgments. Mistakes and false conclusions allow him to arrive at the truth, and the more solidly he thinks, and learns to think, at this stage, the better foundation he will lay for what perhaps will be the most complex judgments of his life. Here, truly, we have the first school of the mathematical and physical sciences.

It is a tried and tested truth that a blind person who uses his sense of touch to explore the world around him is free of distractions and is able to develop concepts of the properties of bodies that are far more complete than those acquired by the sighted, who must glide across on a beam of light. With his limited, obscure, but infinitely practiced sense of touch and his method of slowly but surely making out concepts, he is able to judge the form and living presence of things far more subtly than the sighted, from whom everything flees like a shadow. There are blind people who model in wax who are far more accomplished than their sighted counterparts, and I have yet to encounter a single example of someone who was deprived of one sense who was not able to replace it by means of another. Sight is replaced through touch, luminous color by clearly modeled and enduring forms. Thus it is true that "the body seen by the eye remains but a surface, whereas the surface that is touched by the hand is grasped as a body."

Since, however, from childhood on we employ our senses in close union and cooperation with one another, they quickly become entwined and fused together. This is particularly true of the most fundamental and the clearest of our senses: touch and sight. The difficult concepts, which at first we make out only gradually and with great effort, begin to be accompanied by ideas derived from sight. These ideas then illuminate what previously we had understood only obscurely. We become accustomed to taking in with a single glance what originally we had to make out gradually by touch. When our hand encounters a body, its image is at the same time projected onto our eye; our mind connects the two together and the swift idea proper to seeing runs ahead of the slow concept proper to touching. We believe we see something when in fact we touch it and where only touch is appropriate. Eventually, we see so much and with such rapidity that we no longer feel things, even though our sense of touch remains the solid foundation and guarantor of seeing. In all of these cases sight is but an abbreviated form of touch. The rounded form becomes a mere figure, the statue a flat engraving. Sight gives us dreams, touch gives us truth.

That this is so we can see from cases in which the two senses have been separated from one other and have had to start all over again in a new medium in which they must learn anew how to work together. If a stick appears broken in water and I reach for it in the wrong place, we cannot speak of a deception of the senses. For I cannot seek to grasp a ray of light. What I saw was true, a real image upon a real surface. It is only that what I sought to grasp was not true, for who would seek to grasp a picture upon a surface? From their earliest youth, our senses of sight and touch have been educated together as sisters, helping each other with their chores and often taking over completely the other's work. The same is the case here except that one of the sisters has led the other into error. Previously they had worked together on land, but now they must operate in water, a different element in which they are not practiced and which alters the refraction of light. A water sprite would have grasped the stick more accurately.

A further example from the case we recounted earlier: "The blind person cured by Cheselden saw a painting at first only as a colored surface; but as the figures separated out and he came to recognize them, he reached out to touch them as if they were bodies." This seems strange, but it is a frequent and wholly natural occurrence. A child, with his unpracticed eye, sees a painting as a mere colored surface more often than one would imagine. As long as the figures remain attached to the surface, he cannot explain the shadow here, the stripe there. He stares intently. Then, however, the figures start to come to life. Is it not as if they emerge from the surface and become shapes? The child becomes aware of their presence and tries to grasp hold of them: the dream becomes truth. The greatest passion and delight brings about that which ignorance had earlier achieved. Here is the triumph of the painter! Through the painter's magical deception, what is seen can now be touched, just as the painter transforms what is touched into something seen.

3



I do not think it is necessary to amass yet further examples in order to demonstrate something that is so self-evident: "the sense of sight has access only to surfaces, images, and figures on a plane, whereas bodies and the forms of bodies depend upon our sense of touch." Let us see why we have followed this line of speculation for so long. What do we hope to gain from this distinction?

It seems to me we stand to gain a great deal. For the establishment of a fundamental law and the distinction of two separate realms proper to two different yet confused senses cannot be considered a matter of empty speculation. Were all the concepts we employ in the sciences and the arts to be traced back to their origin, or were we able to do so, we would be able to separate what has become fused together and to unify what has become separated, things which, in that great confusion we term life, cannot be ordered. Since all our concepts either begin with Man or tend toward him, it is close to this center, and to the way in which Man thinks and acts, that we will discover the source of the greatest errors and the most visible truth. We must find it here or we shall not find it anywhere! I shall restrict my discussion to just two of the senses and to a single concept--the concept of beauty.

The term Schonheit (beauty) derives from the words Schauen (to behold) and Schein (appearance). Beauty can most easily be understood and appreciated in terms of Schauen, that is, through schoner Schein (beautiful appearance). Nothing is faster, clearer, more dazzlingly brilliant than the light of the sun and our eyes carried upon its wing. A world of external things ranged alongside one another is revealed in an instant. Since this world does not disappear as do sounds, but endures and invites contemplation, and since the fine rays of the sun color everything so beautifully and reveal it so distinctly, is it any wonder that our doctrine of psychology chooses to borrow many of its terms from this sense? For psychology, to know is to see, and its greatest pleasure is beauty.

It cannot be denied that we see a great deal from these heights and that many things are rendered clear, luminous, and distinct. Sight is the most artificial, the most philosophical of the senses. Polished and corrected through the most refined exercises, inferences, and comparisons, it cuts with the ray of the sun. If we succeeded in "deriving" from this sense alone a true phenomenology of the beautiful and the true, we should already have achieved a great deal.

Nonetheless, we would not thereby have achieved everything and certainly not what is most fundamental, simple, and primary. The operation of the sense of sight is flat; it plays and glides across the surface of things with images and color. So much is compressed together and arrayed before it that it can never be used to arrive at the ground of things. It borrows from and builds upon the other senses, taking over from them the ancillary concepts that provide it with its foundation and then simply bathing them in light. If we do not seek to understand the concepts it borrows from the other senses, if we do not seek to grasp shape and form in their originary mode instead of merely envisaging them, the theory of the beautiful and the true that we have based on the sense of sight will be left floating in the air and drift off like a soap bubble. A theory of beautiful forms derived from a theory of optics is like a theory of music derived from our sense of taste. "Now I understand the color scarlet," declared the blind person. "It is like the sound of a trumpet." In just the same way, many treatises of aesthetics glide from one sense to another, so that in the end the reader loses all sense of orientation.

The fine arts are generally classified in accordance with our two principal senses: sight and hearing. The first of these protagonists provides everything that is wanted, even if it is not asked for: surfaces, forms, colors, shapes, statues, paintings, reliefs, apparel, costumes. That statues can be seen no one doubts. But we are entitled to ask whether the originary determination of the notion of beautiful form can in fact be derived from the sense of sight. Does the concept of form recognize sight as its origin and as its highest judge? This should not merely be doubted, but vehemently denied. A creature that is nothing but an eye, indeed, an Argus with a hundred eyes, may look upon a statue for a hundred years and examine it from every side; but if it is without a hand with which to touch, or at least able to sense its own touching, if it possesses only the eye of a bird and is all beak, gaze, pinion, and claw, it will never have anything more than a bird's-eye view. The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we can learn through sight. This is all the more true of the essence of sculpture, beautiful form and beautiful shape, for this is not a matter of color, or of the play of proportion and symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of physically present, tangible truth. The beautiful line that constantly varies its course is never forcefully broken or contorted, but rolls over the body with beauty and splendor; it is never at rest but always moving forward, creating the flow and fullness of that delightful, gently softened corporeality that knows nothing of surfaces, or of angles and corners. This line can no more be made into a mere visible surface than it can be made into a painting or an engraving, for then it loses everything that is proper to it. Sight destroys beautiful sculpture rather than creating it; it transforms it into planes and surfaces, and rarely does it not transform the beautiful fullness, depth, and volume of sculpture into a mere play of mirrors. It is impossible, then, that sight can be the mother of this art.

Consider the lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture. What would he not do to transform his sight into touch, to make his seeing into a form of touching that feels in the dark? He moves from one spot to another, seeking rest but finding none. He cannot locate a single viewpoint from which to view the work, such as a painting provides, for a thousand points of view are not sufficient. As soon as a single rooted viewpoint takes precedence, the living work becomes a mere canvas and the beautiful rounded form is dismembered into a pitiful polygon. For this reason, he shifts from place to place: his eye becomes his hand and the ray of light his finger, or rather, his soul has a finger that is yet finer than his hand or the ray of light. With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arose from the arm and the soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as if it feels. A cold description of a statue no more offers us appropriate ideas than would a pictorial representation of music; better to leave it be and pass by.

If there are those whose enthusiasm I forgive, then they are the lover of art and the artist; for without this enthusiasm there would be no art lover and no artist. The wretched fool who sits in front of his model and sees everything smooth and flat, the poor idiot who stands before a living person and is aware of only a colored surface, these are mere daubers, not artists. If the figures are to emerge from the canvas, if they are to grow, to come alive, to speak, and to act, they must first appear as such to the artist and be felt by him to be so. Phidias was inspired to paint the God of Thunder by what he read in Homer. From Jupiter's head and from his tumbling locks of hair came the power to approach the gods and to embrace them in love and majesty. The sculptor of Hercules, Apollonius Nestorides, felt the conqueror of giants, felt his breast, his flanks, his arms, his entire body. In creating his gladiator Agasias likewise felt his every tendon and sinew and abandoned himself to all his force and power. If artists such as these may not speak with enthusiasm, who else can dare to do so? They spoke fully through their work and then withdrew in silence: the lover of art responds and creates after their example. Submerged in the expanse and sea of life, he stammers out what has overcome him. In general, the closer we approach an object, the more alive our language becomes. The more vital our feeling for an object from afar, the more we sense the weight of the space that intervenes and the more everything in us surges forward to meet it. Pity the lover who gazes upon his beloved from a distance as if she were an image on a surface and for whom this suffices! Pity the sculptor of an Apollo or a Hercules who has never embraced the body of an Apollo, who has never touched, even in a dream, the breast or the back of a Hercules. Truly from nothing, there can arise only nothing: the ray of light, touching nothing, can never become the warm, creative hand.

4

If we are to allow ourselves to speak about works of art and to philosophize about art, then our philosophy must at least be exact and, where possible, reach to the simplest concepts. When it was still fashionable to philosophize about the fine arts, I sought to discover the specific concept by which beautiful forms and beautiful colors, that is to say, sculpture and painting, could be distinguished from one another--but I could not find it. Sculpture and painting are always confused with one another; they are placed under a single sense, under a single organ of the soul, which is supposed to respond to and to create the same beauty in both. A single type of beauty is recognized, which operates through the same natural signs, placed alongside one another in the same physical space, the one on surfaces, the other in forms. I confess that I understand but little of this. If two art forms belong to the domain of a single sense, they must be bound by the same subjective laws of truth and beauty, for they enter through the same portal, just as they both must leave by it, both existing only for a single sense. Painting should be able to sculpt, and sculpture to paint, as much as each will, and the result must be beautiful! Both are supposed to serve a single sense and to raise a single aspect of our soul! Nothing can be falser than this! I have closely considered both art forms and have found that no single law, no observation, no effect of the one fits the other without some difference or delimitation. I have discovered that the more something is proper to a particular art form, and the more native it is to the most powerful effects of that art, the less it can be simply carried over and applied to a different art form without the most dreadful consequences. I have found wretched examples of this in the execution of art works, but it is incomparably worse in the theory and philosophy of the arts in question, which is often written by those who know nothing about either art or science. Here everything is mixed up in a curious way. The two art forms are regarded not as sisters or half-sisters but simply as a doubled unity, and no nonsense is said about the one that is not also imposed upon the other. From this arises that miserable criticism, that wretched attempt to impose censorious and restrictive rules, that bittersweet nonsense about universal beauty that corrupts the young and appalls the master craftsman, but which is taken up in the mouths of the discriminating masses as if it were true wisdom. Finally, I arrived at my own idea of the matter, which seemed to me so true and to conform so accurately to the nature of our senses and to these two art forms, and to a hundred other aspects of our experience, that I was able to use it like a subjective boundary stone to distinguish in the most subtle way between these two arts and their corresponding rules and effects. I discovered a point from which I could identify what was proper and what was foreign to each of them, what was a source of potential and what a hindrance, what was a dream and what the truth. It was as if I had acquired a sense that could allow me, fearfully and from a distance, to glimpse the nature of beauty, where . . . but I say too much and too soon. Here is the bare outline of how, in my opinion, the different arts of beauty are related to one another.

We have one sense that perceives external things alongside one another, a second that perceives things in succession, and a third that perceives things in depth. These senses are sight, hearing, and touch.

Things alongside one another constitute a surface. Things in succession in their purest and simplest form constitute sounds. Things in depth are bodies or forms. Thus we have distinct senses for surfaces, sounds, and forms; and when it comes to beauty, we have three senses relating to three different genres of beauty that must be distinguished from one another just as we distinguish surfaces, sounds, and bodies. If there exist forms of art for which the proper domain is to be found in one of these species of beauty, then we know both their internal and external fields of application: on the one hand, surfaces, sounds, and bodies; on the other, sight, hearing, and touch. These limits or boundaries are imposed by Nature herself. They are not a matter of convention or agreement, and no decision can be made to alter them without Nature taking her revenge. Music which would paint, painting which would create sound, a sculptor who would employ color, a painter who would carve stone--all these are monstrosities irrespective of whatever effects they produce. All three arts are related to one another as surface, sound, and body, or as space, time, and force, the three great media of all-embracing Creation itself, through which they encompass and delimit everything there is.

Let us now consider a second consequence, which concerns the way in which sculpture and painting are related to each other in general.

If painting is the art that is directed to the eye, and if it is true that the eye can only perceive surfaces, that it sees everything as a plane or a picture, then a painting is indeed a tabula, a tavola, a tableau, an image on a panel on which the artist's creation appears like a dream, in which everything depends upon appearance, upon things placed alongside one another. It is here that invention and composition, unity and multiplicity begin and here that they return, together with the further litany of artistic terms. No matter how many volumes and chapters may be written on the subject, the artist can see easily that this follows from a very simple principle, that is, from the nature of his art. Here is the artist's royal command, beyond which he need acknowledge no other, the divine goddess to whom he pays homage. Once engaged in the faithful execution of his work, all philosophy on this subject must appear to him as something so elementary and so simple that it does not merit so much discussion.

Sculpture creates in depth. It creates one living thing, an animate work that stands there and endures. Sculpture cannot imitate shadows or the light of dawn, it cannot imitate lightning or thunder, rivers or flames any more than the feeling hand can grasp them. But why on this account should these subjects be denied to the painter? The painter follows another law, possesses different powers and a different vocation; why should he not be able to paint the great panel of nature in all its different aspects, in its vast, beautiful visibility? And with what magic he does so! Those who hold landscape painting, the depiction of the great unity of created nature, in low esteem, belittling its achievements and even, with ludicrous pretensions, forbidding its practice, lack wit. A painter who is forbidden to be a painter? A descriptive artist who is forbidden to describe? The painter is required to turn out sculptures with his brush and to embellish them with color as the true taste for antiquity would have it. It is considered ignoble to depict the panel of Creation, as if the sky and the earth were something worse and of less importance than the cripple who drags himself between them, whose effigy is, by force, to be made the sole subject worthy of painting.

Sculpture creates beautiful forms. It forms shapes in depth and places the object there before us. Of necessity, it must create that which merits such presentation and which possesses independent existence. It cannot gain anything by placing objects alongside one another, so that one object assists another and the whole profits thereby. For in sculpture the one object is the whole and the whole is one object. If this object is unworthy, lifeless, ill-chosen, irrelevant, all the worse for the marble and chisel! Nothing is gained from sculpting toads and frogs or rocks and mattresses if they do not serve some higher work as accessories without raising any claim to be the principal subject. What sculpture should create, and what it has succeeded in creating, are forms in which the living soul animates the entire body, forms in which art can compete in the task of representing the embodied soul--that is to say, gods, human beings, and noble animals. But whoever, driven by the high idealistic rigor of this law, seeks to impose it on depiction, on the painter of the great panel of nature, such a person is obliged to ask himself how he would go about fulfilling his own command.

Finally, we may say that sculpture is truth, whereas painting is a dream. The former is all presentation, the latter, storytelling magic. What a difference! How little the two stand upon a common ground! A sculpture before which I kneel can embrace me, it can become my friend and companion: it is present, it is there. The most beautiful painting is a magnificent story, the dream of a dream. It can transport me, making other moments present, and, like an angel robed in light, lead me away with it. But the impression made by the one is quite different from that made by the other. The ray of light wanes; it is brilliance, image, thought, color. I can think of no theorist, no humanly responsive one, who can believe that these two things derive from a single ground.

Let us now consider some other questions that are often presented as a form of altercation between these two arts. They have in general been poorly answered, but from the viewpoint we have established they become as clear as the light of day.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream by Jason Gaiger Copyright © 2002 by Jason Gaiger. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Note on the Translation
SCULPTURE, by Johann Gottfried Herder
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Editor’s Notes
Bibliography
Index