The first version of Michelangelo’s Risen Christ
At Christmastide, I like to share one of my traditions, which is a reading of a selection from John Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” As a classical Christian – I know, an oxymoron – I’m always struck by how the advent of Christianity sounded a death knell for Greco-Roman culture. But then, someone’s sunrise is always someone else’s sunset.
Yet Greco-Roman culture – with its sensual tales of gods and heroes, its dramas on the terrible wonder of the human condition, its emphasis on the body in all its brutal beauty – never died. (It’s a theme of Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel “Julian,” about the post-Christian Roman emperor who attempted to reinstall the Greco-Roman pantheon.) The Greeks would instead resurface in the Renaissance and at the turn of the 19th century.
The Apollo Belvedere, marble, circa 120-140, after the bronze original by Leochares circa 350-325 B.C. Vatican Museums, Vatican City
In a sense, though, they have never out of style. Assouline, Publishing is taking preorders for a handmade journal with an exquisite relief of the Three Graces. It looks like a marble sculpture – much too fine for any but the best writing.
In an upcoming blog post, look for my report on “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. through March 20; “Mythology,” a rich new book from Thames & Hudson that is filled with sensuous gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines; and Bryan Doerries’ most affecting “The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today.”
So the Greeks never died. They just went underground a bit, waiting for the moment we needed them. And in that spirit – of hope and joy – I present this selection from “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”:
The Oracles are dumm,
No voice or hideous humm
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
Inspire's the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.
The lonely mountains o're,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn
The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
A Merry Christmas and God’s blessings on us all!