Ars ad Deorum Gloriam

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GODS (400 pp.)--Andre Malraux--Double-day ($20).

Andre Malraux is a great intellectual speculator. He floats, promotes and trades in ideas, and, thanks to his vast mental capital, never goes broke. More than a decade ago, in Psychology of Art, later rewritten as The Voices of Silence, Malraux launched the notion of the "Museum Without Walls." Among other things, this imaginary museum was a device for seeing the art of all ages out of context. With its equidistant tolerance toward previous cultures, and its technical means (reproductions, photographs) to appropriate the art objects of the past, the 20th century, according to Malraux, was the first civilization capable of "universal" vision. Even more intriguing was his theory, repeated in the current book, that art is modern man's unavowed religion.

The book is crammed with enough handsome illustrations and recondite art allusions to supply the Uffizi plus the Louvre. It is also argued with cool logic as Malraux delves into the epochs without museums, when art glorified religion. The metamorphosis of the gods, as Malraux describes it, was a little like the story of the Ten Little Indians. First they were sacred, then divine, then human, and then they were gone. This all took place between the creation of the Sphinx and the birth of Botticelli's Venus. The Egyptians could not know Aristotle, but he knew the secret of the Sphinx, for he laid down the basic dictum of all sacral art--"to depict the hidden meaning of things, not their appearance." It is easy, but incorrect, says Malraux, to think of the Egyptian tombs "as country houses in the Hereafter and the mummies as denizens of a world of never-ending childhood, buried with their toys of gold or clay . . . yet that 'country' is eternity."

Human & Divine. The Eastern gods were dark, ponderous, absolute. The Greeks challenged this authoritarianism with the restless spirit of inquiry. Against the hierarchy of the absolute, they set up "the prestige of the imaginary"--man's loftiest ideals fashioned in art. "The sacred was replaced by the sublime, the supernatural by the wondrous, and Fate itself by tragedy." Critics who believe that Greek sculptors were trying to achieve representational realism earn Malraux's ire. "Humanized but not human," a figure like the Winged Victory of Samothrace is no mere woman to Malraux, but an evocation of that "spark of the divine immanent in every form of life."

Among the Romans, where power was frequently the only truth, superficial appearance was reality. Christianity restored the art of transcendent hidden meanings. With impressive erudition, Malraux traces the sacerdotal role of cathedral, mosaic and icon and the evolution of Christian art from the austere, stylized Byzantine Pantocrators to the benign, handsome "Beau Dieu" in the central portal of Amiens Cathedral. Despite the growing intrusion of realistic detail, Giotto, as late as the 14th century, "did not copy the sky men see, but transmuted it into a sky charged with Christ's presence." But a century later Botticelli plunged into profane art with his sea-born Birth of Venus, and nymphs began competing with angels "and the Unreal with the City of God."

Apples & Pictures. Malraux is both irritating and sentimental when he tries to give art for art's sake a religious mystique. Art to him is an "anti-destiny," man's only means of asserting himself in a meaningless universe. He equates sacred and profane works of art by arguing that both aim at "defeating the tyranny of Time": though Vermeer "had no intention of imparting to his Maidservant that morsel of eternity which the Egyptian sculptor imparted to his Zoser, he may well have wished his picture of this girl to enter into a world akin to that of the Pharaoh's statue."

In this metamorphosis, the gods presumably share Olympus with The World's 100 Great Paintings. To satisfy this lofty status, Malraux exalts the secular painter's function to a kind of priestly vocation. Sacred art deified its subject; profane art deifies the calling of the artist. "Cezanne," Malraux argues, "did not wish to represent apples, he wished to paint pictures."

Malraux thus is open to attack from two sides. The art-for-art's-sake partisans are impatient with such metaphysical preoccupations, and argue that a well-painted apple is its own excuse for being. The religiously orthodox argue that the apple, no matter how well painted, has nothing to do with the case; art cannot solve what Malraux himself describes as "the problem set [man] by the spark of eternity latent in his being."

For most readers, however, the important fact will be that few critics can find as much as Malraux in the picture of an apple--or of gods and men. It is doubtful that he can help his readers find a substitute for God; it is certain that he can help them see.

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