tailieunhanh - THE ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE OF MOISSAC

This shape thrust the breasts out to the front and pushed the buttocks out at the back with the ideas of transforming the wearer into “an unctuous version of the Winged Victory of Samothrace” (Newton 37). The illustrator Frederick Barnard published a cartoon in 1869 “‘Oh Stay!’ or, Graces versus Laces,” unfavourably comparing the natural curves and waistlines of the Greek style Graces and Venus peering into a corset boutique which illustrated the ridiculous bodily form of the ‘Grecian bend’ (Barnard 120). Charles Kingsley singled out the ‘Grecian bend’ for ridicule in “Nausicaa,” deriding its ‘Grecian’ epithet and pouring. | THE ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE OF MOISSAC PART I 1 By MEYER SCHAPIRO Introduction1 The study here undertaken consists of three parts. In the first is described the style of the sculptures in the second the iconography is analyzed and its details compared with other examples of the same themes in the third I have investigated the history of the style and tried to throw further light on its origins and development. The study of the ornament because of its variety has attained such length that it will be published as a separate work. A catalogue of the sculptures and a description of each face of every capital in the cloister is desirable but cannot be given here. Such a description would almost double the length of this work. A plan of the cloister with an index to the subjects of the capitals has been substituted p. 250 Fig. 2 . This with the photographs reproduced provides a fair though not complete knowledge of the contents of the cloister. For a more detailed description the reader is referred to the books of Rupin and Lagreze-Fossat which lack however adequate illustration and a systematic discussion of style or iconography. In the present work the postures gestures costumes expressions space perspective and grouping of the figures have been described not to show the inferiority or incompetence of the sculptors in the process of exact imitation but to demonstrate that their departures from nature or our scientific impressionistic view have a common character which is intimately bound up with the harmonious formal structure of the works. I have tried to show also how with certain changes in the relation to nature apparent in the later works the artistic character is modified. In the description of purely formal relations I do not pretend to find in them the exact nature of the beauty of the work or its cause but I have tried to illustrate by them my sense of the character of the whole and the relevance of the parts to it. These relations appear in apparently simple .