Ancient Art and Ritual is a book written by Jane Ellen Harrison, an English classical scholar and linguist. The book explores the relationship between ancient art and ritual, specifically in ancient Greece. Harrison argues that art and ritual are interdependent, as art is used to express and reinforce ritual practices. The book is divided into six chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of ancient art and ritual. The first chapter discusses the origins of art and ritual in ancient Greece, while the second chapter explores the role of art in religious rituals. The third chapter examines the connection between art and myth, and how art was used to depict mythological stories. The fourth chapter delves into the symbolism of ancient art, particularly in relation to fertility and death. The fifth chapter explores the use of dance and music in ancient Greek rituals, and how they were used to create a sense of community and connection. Finally, the sixth chapter discusses the decline of ancient Greek art and ritual, and the impact of Christianity on these practices.Overall, Ancient Art and Ritual is a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between art and ritual in ancient Greece. Harrison's insights and analysis provide a valuable perspective on the significance of art in ancient cultures and its enduring influence on modern art and culture.
This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like the momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary and familiar objectsan impression which we experience sometimes in instants of direst
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It has often been noted that two, and two only, of our senses are the channels of art and give us artistic material. These two senses are sight and hearing. Touch and its special modifications, taste and smell, do not go to the making of art. Decadent French novelists, such as Huysmann, make their heroes revel in perfume-symphonies, but we feel that the sentiment described is morbid and unreal, and we feel rightly. Some people speak of a cook as an artist, and a pudding as a perfect poem, but a healthy instinct rebels. Art, whether sculpture, painting, drama, music, is of sight or hearing. The reason is simple. Sight and hearing are the distant senses; sight is, as some one has well said, touch at a distance. Sight and hearing are of
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Taste and touch are too intimate, too immediately vital. In Russian, as Tolstoi has pointed out (and indeed in other languages the same is observable), the word for beauty (krasota) means, to begin with, only that which pleases the sight. Even hearing is excluded. And though latterly people have begun to speak of an ugly deed or of beautiful music, it is not good Russian. The simple Russian does not make Platos divine muddle between the good and the beautiful. If a man gives his coat to another, the Russian peasant, knowing no foreign language, will not say the man has acted beautifully. To see a thing, to feel a thing, as a work of art, we must, then, become for the time unpractical, must be loosed from the fear and the flurry of actual
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Why is this? Why can we not live and look at once? The fact that we cannot is clear. If we watch a friend drowning we do not note the exquisite curve made by his body as he falls into the water, nor the play of the sunlight on the ripples as he disappears below the surface; we should be inhuman, sthetic fiends if we did. And again, why? It would do our friend no harm that we should enjoy the curves and the sunlight, provided we also threw him a rope. But the simple fact is that we cannot look at the curves and the sunlight because our whole being is centred on acting, on saving him; we cannot even, at the moment, fully feel our own terror and impending loss. So again if we want to see and to feel the splendour and vigour of a lion, or even to watch the cumbrous grace of a bear, we prefer that a cage should intervene. The cage cuts off the need for motor actions; it interposes the needful physical and moral distance, and we
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