History of art . lastic emper-ors to show them as encouraging art whenever it v/asseparate from religion. Art is one; its growth increaseswith the growth of a living faith, regardless of the wayin which it is clothed or labeled or of the role in whichmen try to arrest it; and if religion dies of freedom, artlives only through its introducing into the world a littlemore freedom each time it manifests itself. To forbidart to drink at any one source is to dry up all the sourcesat once. If idolatry did not save Byzantium, it was becauseByzantium was not a beginning, but an end, a rottenfruit of th
History of art . lastic emper-ors to show them as encouraging art whenever it v/asseparate from religion. Art is one; its growth increaseswith the growth of a living faith, regardless of the wayin which it is clothed or labeled or of the role in whichmen try to arrest it; and if religion dies of freedom, artlives only through its introducing into the world a littlemore freedom each time it manifests itself. To forbidart to drink at any one source is to dry up all the sourcesat once. If idolatry did not save Byzantium, it was becauseByzantium was not a beginning, but an end, a rottenfruit of the Greek tree. But it was idolatry whichmade Egypt and Greece and India, which unchainedthe great Gothic revolution and the Italian and FlemishRenaissance, and which, later, at the threshold of ourown time, aroused sensualism, transformism, and theadmirable, vital investigation of the whole last cen- ISLAM 259 tury in Europe. Ail durable civilizations are born ofidolatry, obliged, as they have been, to demand that. Persia (xvi Century). Carpet, fragment. external nature surrender to them the inexhaustibletreasure of her teachings in order that they may givereality to the images that are within them. We cannotdemand that humanity live in the desert forever. 260 MEDIEVAL ART when we see that even the peoples of the desert seekthe oases. We may not beheve that among idolatrous peoplesthe superior minds have freed themselves from idolatry :they have freed themselves by it. It is they who, byit, by the living relationships that it revealed to them,have introduced reason into the world, not as an endin itself, but as an incomparable instrument for analy-sis and for the liberation of the individual. Thepeoples who recognize nothing but the spirit are theonly ones who have never been able to detach them-selves from the metaphysical idols which the blanknessof the desert imposes on their meditations, becausethey have been powerless to seize upon their thoughtand confront it with life. Mo
Size: 1381px × 1810px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectart, bookyear1921
