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Updated: June 6, 2025
The Graeco-Roman constitution was always much weaker in the East, and had far greater obstacles to overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the shock of the conquest.
Aldous turned to the right along the fine corridor lighted with Tudor windows to an inner quadrangle, and filled with Graeco-Roman statuary and sarcophagi, which made one of the principal features of the Court.
Even before the advent of the new revelation, the Jewish settlements existing in all great cities of the Graeco-Roman world excited interest at any rate among sentimentalists touched by the fascination at that time beginning to be exerted by oriental religions. And this influence of Jewish traditions was much facilitated by the existence of a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures.
But in the past the great artists, Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach, Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman world were not rebels.
In the well-known verses prefixed to the first folio Shakespeare, Jonson calls on "him of Cordova dead," in the same breath with Aeschylus and Euripides; and long after the Jacobean period the false tradition remained which, by putting these lifeless copies on the same footing as their great originals, perplexed and stultified literary criticism, much as the criticism of classical art was confused by an age which drew no distinction between late Graeco-Roman sculpture and the finest work of Praxiteles or Pheidias.
On one side the kings are sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. On the other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna. It will be gathered even from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the ideal of Graeco-Roman sculpture.
The architectural "orders" were Greek, with sundry Graeco-Roman modifications, particularly in the way of more ornate or fantastic Corinthian capitals; the notions of sculptural decoration were equally of Hellenic origin. Their theatres also were of the Greek kind adapted in non-essentials to the somewhat different conditions of a Roman performance.
It becomes more intelligible to us for this very reason, but at the same time less instructive in its relation to religious conceptions. In the art of the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman age we find two main tendencies, the one towards academic generalisation, and the other towards excessive realism, often coupled with a theatrical or sensational treatment.
Are these buildings still standing? Why do we admire these great churches? What do we call the time when men began to study once more Roman and Greek books, and began to imitate the ways of living and thinking common in the Graeco-Roman world? Who was the first of these "new" men? Where especially did men search for Greek books? What invention helped men spread far and wide this new knowledge?
One uniform fashion spread from the Mediterranean throughout central and western Europe, driving out native art and substituting a conventionalized copy of Graeco-Roman or Italian art, which is characterized alike by its technical finish and neatness, and by its lack of originality and its dependence on imitation. The result was inevitable.
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