![]() Moroccan crowds are always a feast to the eye. The discovery, to the traveler returning from the East, robs the most romantic scenes of western Europe of half their charm: in the Piazza of San Marco, in the market-place of Siena, where at least the robes of the Procurators or the gay tights of Pinturicchio’s striplings once justified man’s presence among his works, one can see, at first, only the outrage inflicted on beauty by the “plentiful strutting manikins” of the modern world. To occidental travelers the most vivid impression produced by a first contact with the Near East is the surprise of being in a country where the human element increases instead of diminishing the delight of the eye.Īfter all, then, the intimate harmony between nature and architecture and the human body that is revealed in Greek art was not an artist’s counsel of perfection but an honest rendering of reality: there were, there still are, privileged scenes where the fall of a green-grocer’s draperies or a milkman’s cloak or a beggar’s rags are part of the composition, distinctly related to it in line and color, and where the natural unstudied attitudes of the human body are correspondingly harmonious, however hum-drum the acts it is engaged in. ![]()
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