miércoles, 30 de mayo de 2007

Lafcadio Hearn, a propósito del arte Gótico

Copio unas citas de Lafcadio Hearn. En ellas el escritor habla del arte Gótico y de la relación que este estilo artístico tiene con lo terrible y lo horroroso.


“Books about architecture were very disappointing. I was much less impressed by what I could find in them than by reference in pure fiction to the awfulness of Gothic art, - particularly by one writer’s confession that the interior of a Gothic church, seen at night, gave him the idea of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous animal; and by a far-famed comparison of the windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its door to a great mouth ‘devouring people’.”

“‘Yes, Gothic architecture is awful,’ said a religious friend, ‘because it is the visible expression of the Christian faith. No other religious architecture expresses spiritual longing; but the Gothic embodies it’.”

“Perhaps our modern aesthetic sentiments are so interwoven with various inherited elements of religious emotionalism that the recognition of beauty cannot arise independently of reverential feeling.”

“I understood that Gothic horror was a horror of monstrous notion, - and that it had seemed to belong to the points of the arches because of the idea of such notion was chiefly suggested by the extraordinary angle at which the curves of the arching touched.”

“[…] the points and the curves are terrible because they represent the prodigious exaggeration of a real law of vegetal growth.”

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