Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. An abridged edition by
Helmut Werner. English abridged edition prepared by Arthur Helps
from the translation by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York:
oxford University Press c199 [1926, 1928, 1932]. xxxx,415, xvix
THE GREAT STYLE, THE HISTORY OF STYLE AS AN ORGANISM [109-
110]
We are now able to see a great style sequence as an organism.
here, as in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom
vision came In his Winckelmann he says of Velleius
Paterculus; "With his standpoint, it was not given to him to
see all art as a living thing that must have an inconspicuous
beginning a slow growth, a brilliant moment of fulfillment and a
gradual declines like very other organic being, though it is
presented in a set of individuals." This sentence contains
the entire morphology of art-history. Styles do not follow one
another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or
will or brian of the artist that makes the style, but the style
that makes the type of the artist. The style, like the
Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strict Goethian sense, be
it the style of art or religion or thought, or the style of life
itself. it is, as "Nature" is, an ever-new
experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the
world-around. And therefore in the general historical picture of
a Culture there can be but one style, the style of the
Culture. The error has lain in treating mere style-phases--
Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire--as if they were
styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as
the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a "prehistoric")
style. Gothic and Baroque are simply the youth and age of one
and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening
and ripened. Hence Ionic columns can be as completely combined
with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early Baroque in
St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque with the late
Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at
Mainz.
The test before art-history is to write the comparative
biographies of the great styles, all of which as organisms of
the same genus possess structurally cognate life-histories.
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