Excerpt from ‘Taste and Temperament’ by Joan Evans. To see a modern and updated version of the same theme, go here.

The quick introvert is often versatile enough to work in more than one field, but two genres are peculiarly his: decoration and landscape. As a decorator he is generally anonymous; but in all the field of ornament that is based on natural forms, from Minoan pots through Greek gems and Gothic sculpture and illumination to Turkish brocades and Audenarde tapestries, we may recognize his hand. He loves the sweetness of a curve more than the rigidity of geometric forms; but his designs have a boldness of idea, a consistency of form, that makes them completely different from the soft and graceful achievements of the quick extravert. Similarly, his colours run through a deeper and more resonant gamut than the quick extravert’s pale and elegant hues; but blacks and whites he usually eschews, preferring dark browns and creamy yellows for his extreme tints. His decoration is often sculptured, but it has always the curve of natural growth rather than the angularity of stone, whether it be the plane leaves that lie upon the surface of a Roman altar, the budding foliage of a Gothic capital, or the more formal leafage of Donatello’s balustrade. Even in iron work it will lose all spear-like quality and be as easy and gracious in its curves as is the gate of the Casa de Pilatos at Seville. Something so formal as script he will turn from Trajanic severity into a decorative arabesque, whether it be the Gothic alphabet of the Studley Royal bowl or the magnificent Cufic of such metal-work as Alp Arslan’s silver dish and of such architectural ornament as that of the Mosque of Sultan Hassan.

The quick introvert decorator enjoys many of the forms of classical architecture, but is apt to use them freely and unclassically, as decoration rather than as architecture. At its worst his enjoyment of curves and mouldings for their own sake may become as extravagant as the interior of the Cartuja at Granada; at its best it may have the sober dignity and elegant proportion of Philibert de I’Orme’s ‘French Order’ or of the French classicism of Versailles. It is never very scholarly; and the classic purity of line is often obscured. We may suspect his hand in the most diverse buildings in which architecture and ornament are completely fused, whether in the Erechtheum at Athens, or in the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, or in Exeter Cathedral or in the cloister at Gloucester. Such work will often show two characteristics: a preference for the ogival line, and a multiplication of structural forms in order to achieve decorative effect. The ogival line will be found in structures as diverse as the Alhambra at Granada, the Lady Chapel at Ely, the tower of Jacques Coeur’s house at Bourges, the choir screen at Albi and the baroque baldacchino of the Cathedral of Worms. The multiplication of forms recurs as far apart in time and space as the Alhambra of Granada and Tessin’s Riddarhus at Stockholm. We are apt to accept all Gothic as structural; but Exeter Cathedral might well have been built with fewer than sixteen colonnettes to the piers, eightfold mouldings to the archivolts and eleven ribs to the vaulting.

I have already instanced William Morris as a quick introvert. He may stand as the type of all the unnamed decorators and architects of that temperament. Characteristically plenteous in production  and generous in mind; impulsive, yet with a deep-lying consistency of purpose, hot tempered, self-centred, decisive; in every-thing responsive to beauty and in everything a reformer. His biographer tells us: ‘To him the House Beautiful represented the visible form of life itself. Not only as a craftsman and manufacturer, a worker in dyed stuffs and textiles and glass, a pattern designer and decorator, but throughout the whole range of life, he was from first to last the architect, the master-craftsman, whose range of work was so phenomenal and his sudden transitions from one to another form of productive energy so swift and perplexing because, himself secure in the centre, he struck outwards to any point on the circumference with equal directness, with equal precision, unperplexed by artificial subdivisions of art, and untrammelled by any limiting rules of professional custom.’ It is entirely characteristic that he considered the qualities fatal to art to be vagueness, hypocrisy and cowardice.

In his pictures and sculpture as in his designs the quick introvert has always a strong sense of weight. Compare with a Byzantine mosaic a painting by Mantegna, that has a massiveness that gives to his figures what we call a sculptural quality, since material weight is inescapably bound up with plastic art. Compare with the levitational scheme of the Sistine Madonna the triptych of the Virgin Enthroned by the Maitre de Moulins. She sits in an aureole nimbed by a glory of rainbow light, and beyond it floats a circle of adoring angels. Yet the Virgin and the angels alike obey the laws of gravity, and their earthly weight in no wise detracts from their heavenly beauty. Compare with the weight of a figure painted by Gains-borough the weight of a figure painted by Reynolds, and the same contrast is evident; one tends to float, the other stands.

A quick introvert’s compositions tend to be static; it is not that his personages cannot move, but they are not moving at the moment when he portrays them. Compare the dynamic schemes of Rodin with the static compositions of his pupil Maillol, and you see the difference between extravert and introvert sculpture. No sculptor can lay less stress on muscle than Maillol, or more on static mass. Bronzino balances the traditional dynamic scheme of his Christ in Limbo by the static figure of a woman, just as Manet stresses and centres his Musique aux Tuileries with the static seated figures in the left foreground. Even when the figures are in motion they still obey the laws of gravity; Mantegna’s dancing figures in Parnassus have more weight than Botticelli’s standing ones. The quick introverts’ are the compositions which Mademoiselle Marcelle Wahl has qualified as ‘immobilized’. A quick introvert artist most often finds religious significance in a scheme of hieratic stability; Berenson admirably defines this quality as ‘processional gravity’.

The quick introvert’s innate gift for simplification-‘the liberating of what is significant from what is not’-makes him paint pictures that are stylized designs, interpretations of nature far more vivid than any exacter portrayals. Wilson’s Snowdon, for example, is no topographical study, nor does it slavishly follow the classical tradition of Italian landscape, yet few pictures better convey the essential beauty of the landscape of Wales. In these compositions there is often a great sense of space and distance caused by crossing and receding planes; and often a sense of what Morris calls ‘the melancholy born of beauty’. For if the slow extravert brings wit into art, and the quick gaiety, the art of the introvert is always serious. Roger Fry has left a remarkable description of the process by which such a composition is achieved:

‘Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist a detached and aesthetic vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the (aesthetically) chaotic and accidental contemplation of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and, as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm that is set up within him. Certain relations of line become for him full of meaning; he apprehends them no longer curiously but passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so clearly from the rest that he sees them more distinctly than he did at first. Similarly, colours which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him, owing to their now so necessary relation to other colours, that, if he chooses to paint his vision, he can state it positively and definitely.’ As Binyon says of Francis Towne, ‘His attitude, perhaps, is intellectual even more than emotional. He feels the need to understand.’ This is confirmed by some of the precepts in Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting. All our knowledge, he says, comes from feeling; but the painter should always be transmuting into thought the things that he sees and always be conscious of the effect of their surroundings upon their light and colour. He sets painting before sculpture because it is inimitable; and characteristically combines the need for a fine theory to precede practice with a need for the direct and profound observation of nature. This same need for the transmutation of things seen by thought has been likewise felt by quick introverts whose medium is words: Keats writes of ‘the innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling, delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty’. Steamer the centres of pictures in which the actual facts are transmuted into a strange beauty that is yet essentially true.

The quick introvert’s need for simplification of scheme is sometimes, especially outside landscape, balanced by his delight in decorative detail. Mantegna paints an Adoration in which one of the Kings from the East offers the Child a bowl of blue and white Persian porcelain; Domenico Ghirlandajo delights in jewels; Bartolommeo Veneto uses them almost as a signature, and Simone Martini combines a characteristic emphasis on formal line, balance and weight with exquisite flower detail, delicately figured brocade, jewelled ornament, and elaborate woodwork, in a fashion that shows that had he not been a great painter he would have been a great decorative artist.

It is comparatively rarely that a quick introvert devotes himself to portraiture. When he does the picture is transmuted into something essentially decorative. The well-known portraits of the Duke, and Duchess of Monte-feltro by Piero della Francesca may stand as examples: characterized yet stylized, perfectly static, exquisite in their decorative detail, and set .against a landscape back-ground, only a quick introvert could have painted them. The same characteristics reappear in the Renaissance in Bronzino; and their essentials will be found in work as apparently diverse as the portraits of Reynolds and Manet.

Excerpt from ‘Taste and Temperament’ by Joan Evans. To see a modern and updated version of the same theme, go here.

In compositions in which a normal perspective and stability are followed the quick extravert’s dissatisfaction with the world as it is finds ‘expression in a peculiar confusion and urgency of line. Worringer writes of German Gothic art: ‘The unsatisfied impulse existing in this confusion of lines, clutching greedily at every new intensification, to lose itself finally in the infinite, is its impulse, its life. It is this exalted hysteria which is above all else the distinguishing mark of the Gothic phenomenon’. The quality is certainly evident in many of the late-medieval German paintings that Worringer illustrates: for instance, the Crucifixion in the Church of St. Stephen at Mainz, the Entombment of the Church of St. James at Gottingen and the Crown of Thorns in the Regler Kirche at Erfurt; and in such sculpture as Riemenschneider’s altarpiece in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul at Heidelberg. The quality is much less often evident in the medieval art of France: an exceptional instance is the tympanum of the great door of Vezelay.

The quick extravert is apt to set colour above form- EI Greco declared that ‘el colorido es superior al dibujo’ – and is less shocked by his own drawing than men of other temperaments often are. His aim is

To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs – what matters?

Because of this emphasis on colour, and because his rejection of the laws of gravity is with difficulty reconcilable with plastic necessities, the quick extravert is less often a sculptor than a painter. When he is, he achieves in place of colour a sculptural morbidezza. This will be found in works as distant in time as the Hermes of Praxiteles, the head of Sainte Fortunade from the Correze and the work of Sir Alfred Gilbert. An extreme instance is the sculpture of Medardo Rosso.

The quick extravert is not naturally attracted to landscape, unless it be as the background of a Fete galante. I. On the rare occasions when he paints pure landscape, it would seem as if he strove to find in it the expression of a personal sentiment rather than the disinterested emotion which inspires the quick introvert. Van Gogh writes to his brother:

‘A row of pollarded willows sometimes resembles a procession of almshouse men. Young corn has some-thing inexpressibly pure and tender about it which awakens the same emotion as the expression of a sleeping baby … A few days ago, when it had been snowing, I saw a group of white cabbages standing frozen and benumbed, that reminded me of a group of women in their thin petticoats and old shawls which I had seen early in the morning standing near a coffee stall.’ Later, when it was a question not of seeing but of painting a picture, the same sentimental preoccupation continues to be evident:

‘I have a view of the Rhone – the iron bridge at Trinquetaille – in which sky and river are the colour of absinthe, the quays a shade of lilac, the figures leaning on the parapet blackish, the iron bridge an intense blue, with a note of vivid orange in the background and a note of intense malachite… I am trying to get some-thing utterly heart-broken.’ Not thus would Cotman or Turner have written. A certain instability of composition is evident even in the landscapes of the quick extraverts. Laurence Binyon has pointed out that Fire is Blake’s most constant subject: ‘the flames which rush up and leap and bend and flicker’ – and there is a flamelike quality about Van Gogh’s paintings of flowers and even of landscape – for example, Le Ravin and The Cypress Tree – that is another expression of this tendency.

In decoration, as in other art, the quick extravert loves to deny the sense of gravity; a remarkable instance is, that column from the Abbaye de Coulombs in which traditional architectural forms and ornament in stone are not only twisted as if they had been cast in clay and contorted in a plastic state, but are also broken by human figures that seem to swim and float on the violent stream of ornament.

As in his landscape, there is often a flamelike instability about a quick extravert’s schemes of decoration. Normally such ornament is confined to its native boudoir; occasionally it makes an appearance in other fields. Those who are not quick extraverts and know Gaudi’s Portal of the Nativity in the church of the Sagrada Familia at Barcelona, will have readily believed the rumour that it was one of the first ecclesiastical buildings to be attacked by the mob at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Architecture is, in the main, an art too strictly immobilized and too straitly conditioned by stability for the quick extravert; but certain styles, in their reduction of pure structure to a chassis for scenic effects, suggest the quick extravert mind. Such are those Italian churches that are all facade and interior, with barn-like exterior sides that are not meant to be seen. Such too are those rococo structures in which everything is made subservient to ornament and every line is curved in at least three directions; and such are the productions of the ‘art Nouveau’ of the 1900’s, with a fluidity and softness of line that recalls the quality that Verlaine demands for poetry:

De la musique avant toute chose;
Et pour cela prefere l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air
Sans rien en lui qui pese ou qui pose.

A very curious example of such architecture was the Goetheanum built by the ‘anthroposophical’ followers of Steiner. Their gospel was a farrago of mysticism derived from many sources; and their temple was its perfect architectural expression.

Excerpt from ‘Taste and Temperament’ by Joan Evans. To see a modern and updated version of the same theme, go here.

The slow introvert, who strives to understand so much, rarely turns his mind to the understanding of concrete works of visual art. It is entirely characteristic that Plato’ in the Republic should desiderate a beauty of style and a harmony and grace that depend upon simplicity, and in the Timaeus should add a proportion that links the work of art with the universal and moral order, with no further discussion of the aesthetic qualities of visual art. It is equally characteristic that for him music should be the dominant art; poetry the next, and the visual arts no more than the vaguest background.

It is not often that the slow introvert will express an opinion about a work of visual art; yet if its sudden beauty forces him to do so, his canons of proportion and relation and his natural sincerity make him a critic to be respected. It is a characteristic of almost diagnostic validity that he does not write about the visual arts, unless he is a practising artist; then he writes as a crafts-man rather than a critic.

The individual is apt to find a peculiarly congenial quality in works of art produced by men of his own temperament. Delacroix, who might stand as the type of the slow extravert artist, admired (and sometimes even copied) the works of Goya, Rowlandson, Rubens, Ingres, Constable and Lawrence; and I should conceive all these artists to have been of the same temperament as himself. Curiously often the man who is conscious of this spontaneous liking will describe it in terms of friendly affinity. William Morris wrote of the Gothic Churches of Northern France that they were ‘the grandest, the most beautiful, the kindest and most loving of all the buildings that the earth has ever borne’. The late Professor of Poetry at Oxford writes:

‘Some poets are more friendly than others. I like to think that among the friendly poets are some of the greatest. The most friendly of them all is the first of them, Chaucer … After Chaucer… the most friendly of them is, beyond a doubt, the greatest of them, Shakespeare… After Chaucer and Shakespeare for friendliness we must go, I think, to two Scots-to Burns and “Sir Walter”.’ Such frankly subjective criticism is revealing because- as here – it is apt to group together writers and artists of similar temperament.

A man will always tend to have a primary attraction towards the art produced by men of like temperament with himself; so the slow extravert Daumier had a passion for Rembrandt and Rubens, and David – a man of the same temperament – admired Van Ostade, Teniers, Subleyras and Rembrandt, all slow extraverts likewise. Yet a man may also experience a secondary attraction to the work of men of another type. A slow introvert, if he be sad or tired, may find the work of another slow introvert depressing, and may turn to that of a man of a quicker form of his own temperament. A slow extravert in like case may turn to the work of a quick extravert, and find there either the human gaiety or the mystical reassurance that he needs. In his turn the quick extravert (though rarely) may seek reassurance from those who are closer to actuality than himself; so Van Gogh writes: ‘I feel always a great attraction for the figures either of the English draughts-men or of the English authors, because of their Monday-morning-like soberness, and studied simplicity and prosaicness and analysis, as something solid and strong that can give us strength in days when we feel weak’. So the quick introvert may find in the gracious calm of the work of the slow introvert the peace that his over-stimulated mind demands. Thus the quick introvert William Morris had an especial admiration for the work of the melancholic Van Eyck and Holbein, and Corot enjoyed and even imitated Vermeer of Delft. Manet said of Velasquez: ‘II ne m’a pas etonne, mais il m’a ravi’. Such secondary attractions, however, are often symptomatic of fatigue or stress, and are less characteristic and more variable than the attraction of like to like.

The author sets out to argue that Platonism is a modernized and distorted composite of the teachings of the Orpheus-cults and Pythagoras-cults. I personally believe that this thesis has a lot of merit, as also explored in The Shape of Ancient Thought. But this book could have used a good editor. It reads more like a lot of minutiae, rituals, symbolism, and tentative parallelisms thrown around at large, mixing and matching from the sources with no trace of internal judgment on the author’s part.

The book could have been shortened some 80% (and it is already very short). In its present form, the book is not really suitable for educated readers who want to know more about the mystical element in Plato. In fact, the book is not even that relevant to the general reader who wants to know something about Orpheus and the Orphic cult. It reads more like a series of notes for some future work, rather than actually as a work intended for the general reader. If one is after a comprehensive reinterpretation of Plato, then The Shape of Ancient Thought is a much better book for that purpose.

The most important take-away from this book is that Plato is no mere rationalist but also a ‘mystical’ thinker with a non-rational agenda (besides his rational one). Paradoxically, though, this book never really argues the thesis; it just spams sources. The inner narrative structure of the book is paper-thin and the book consistently fails to elaborate on the greater philosophical or theological importance of the esoteric rites that it is describing. In its present form, it can only be recommended to professionals who need a scholar’s raw notes on the subject matter and not for the educated, general reader.

If it is Platonic gnosis that one is after, one would do much better by delving into Jung’s typology than reading this book. If it is the esoteric and mystical elements of Greek thought that one is after, one would do better to read The Shape of Ancient Thought.