Show STUDENT LIFE ligious rites and these are but enlargements and elaborations of the primitive affairs built during the savage age Within these massive structures were placed statues of the different gods upon the walls were painted their images and the portraits of the Pharaohs with the acts of their lives for the Pharaoh was considered to be divine and was supposed to be descended from the Sun So we see that the art of Egypt the first art including architecture sculpture and painting was essentially religious in spirit and purpose We now pass over into Greece and we shall find the same sympathies and spirit reflected in their arts but on an intellectual plane of the highest possible order For art was the prophet of Greek mythology Through it alone the great gods became approachable and before the statues as representatives of Deity the people prayed and offered up sacrifices From the earliest ages a religion akin to that of Egypt had been known to the Greeks and a constellation of Gods whom they called the relatives of those of Egypt had been established to whom hymns of praise and sacrifices were offered Religious belief in the wisdom and power of the gods was universal and compul-sro- y and unbelief was punishable by death We find music both vocal and instrumental first practised by the Greeks in processions and at festivals dedicated to religious purposes and held in honor of the gods Their architecture as in the case of the Egyptians began with the temple and the tomb and in its earliest stages resembled very closely the type of that country from which the model was probably first taken The sculpture which represented the gods was in the beginning rude in form and feature showing the Egyptian influence and also the fact that at that time these works were vague in the minds of the people and ill-form- ed 123 but in their highest period of civilization the Periclean Age both architecture and sculpture reached their greatest height The Parthenon the temple dedicated to the Goddess Athena is without doubt the most perfect structure ever erected The marbles designed by Phidias which were placed in this temple represent in idea and subject the loftiest conceptions known to the Greek mind— their greatest gods In the realization of the universal abstract conception of the race these sculptures are the most ideal creations which have ever been produced and stand with the most sublime art produced in any epoch When the human mind rises above the level of image worship art improves by being restricted to its legitimate sphere Animated by loftier views of God it perceives more clearly its duties and capacities and aspires not to rep-sethe Unrepresentable but to suggest His attributes From the beginning with the savage through the Egyptian age into the early Greek we find that the first idea prevailed the same conventional unvarying type being handed down and used to represent the many different gods but in the greatest intellectual height we find art struggling to suggest those attributes which belonged to each individual god or goddess and which the people universally believed them to possess It is true that these attributes are purely pagan and they represent the highest possible development of the pagan faith but the greatest religious ideals had not yet been given to the world As we go on to the time of the Renaissance we find that the principles of Christianity have been established and that architecture leading the other arts in order to express the new faith has been undergoing a change finally culminating in the Gothic style The root of its nt |