Carl Jung: The Gothic style is also in a way hysterical
This story makes one understand the extraordinary feeling for the material in old Chinese sculpture: the material spoke to them.
And it seems as if the marble in old Greek sculpture told the artist what the figure or the column should be like that he was about to make, what the marble wanted to become.
Do you remember, for instance, the two figures of the barbarian slaves in the Boboli gardens in Florence?
I advise you, the next time you are in Florence, to go first to the tomb of the Medici and look at Michelangelo’s marbles there, and then take a taxi,don’t look out of the window, but drive straight to the Boboli gardens, and there you will see the difference.
Those two figures of the barbarians are suggested by the stone, the stone speaks, it is really the stone;
while in Michelangelo’s figures the stone has just nothing to say; you get an hysterical impression, you feel that he did something with the stone which never should have been done.
I had a feeling of nausea; I said, “Now this is hysteria.”
It is the beginning of the Baroque style, and that was certainly not suggested by the stone.
The Gothic style is also in a way hysterical because it is not true to the nature of the stone; the builders suggested wood into the stone, and therefore they made buildings which are like plants.
And in antiquity they made the living ornament, like ivy, clutching the stone, not being the stone itself.
We have got very far away from the antique activity of the stone, when the spirit was still in the
object and the object could suggest itself to the artists.
To the ancient artists or builders the material suggested a certain thing.
A goblet or a sword said: “You must decorate me in such and such a way.”
Or the canoe said: “You must paint me, you must give me eyes, you must decorate me because I love you.”
That was the relation, because the antiqueman was under the spell of the object.~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 452-453
This archetype is not merely a static image, but dynamic, full of movement.
Psychology and Religion CW 11
Self-reflection or—what comes to the same thing—the urge to individuation gathers together what is scattered and multifarious, and exalts it to the original form of the One, the Primordial Man.
In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious the sources of conflict are dried up.
This approximation to the self is a kind of repristination or apocatastasis, in so far as the self has an “incorruptible” or “eternal” character on account of its being pre-existent to consciousness.
This feeling is expressed in the words from the henedictio fontis: “Et quos aut sexus in corpore aut aetas discernit in tempore, omnes in unam pariat gratia mater infantiam”
(And may Mother Grace bring forth into one infancy all those whom sex has separated in the body, or age in time).
The figure of the divine sacrificer corresponds feature for feature to the empirical modes of manifestation of the archetype that lies at the root of almost all known conceptions of God.
This archetype is not merely a static image, but dynamic, full of movement.
It is always a drama, whether in heaven, on earth, or in hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 401-402
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
