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Can a landscape become a teacher? What is the nature of clarity?
Pericles Giannopoulos, Divine Appearances: the Greek Line & the Greek Color
Page 10
It is only one curving line. Everywhere a simplest and softest, liquid and running away like the deep and calm breaths of the sea, like the big cool waves, producing a deepest aesthetic pleasure. The strait line is a vertical line of an one-bone Englishman, of a spear like Englishwoman, it is a line causing strength, producing resistance, and it is an ugly line. A curving line of a hill, softly curved neck of woman, it is a line producing sympathy, passion for touching, attracting the kiss, whether of a woman or of a line of a hill, obviously attracts the hand for a soft touch, asking to be touched. It is very strange that the idea of Parthenon's curves is admired, because it is obvious that a real artist having to raise lines on a hill of Attica, can not take into consideration nothing else but to harmonize his lines to the surrounding harmonious curve.
Thus, one and only line, clearest, simplest, delightful, harmonious, musical, in a heavenly nobility and drunkenness of melancholy, changes in every step, just the way one wave differs to another.
It is about the line of which we see the image on all ancient statuses and artistic works, at the Byzantine Virgins and saints, at the country songs, on the young man and young country man of today, the young country girl, of whom all the body is softly curved, soft all of their moves and expressions, and the face surrounds the same drunkenness of a beautiful melancholy, expressing this strange mixture, of which we are made, of light festivity and some humble, prudently melancholic sight.
Cf. Images of Greece * Oscar Wilde, I stood upon the soil of Greece at last! * Jules Verne, Not anyone can see Naxos on the moon! * Mark Twain, Seeing Athens by stealth and moonlight * W. Davis, The Physical Setting of Athens
