Monumental Sculpture

Augustus Saint Gaudens in his Studio

Rilke, excerpt from a letter to Benvenuta, meditation on the Great Sphinx at Giza, seen at night:

“You must have experienced this too: that a view of a landscape, of the sea, of a grand, star-studded night inspires us with the conviction of connections and agreements that we are not able to overlook; it was exactly this that I experienced in the highest degree. Here stood a creation that had taken its measure from the sky; upon which the millennia had left no greater mark than a contemptible bit of decay, and the most shocking part of it was that this thing had human feature (so profoundly recognizable to us, these features of a human face) and that they were sufficient to it in its exalted position. Ah, dear friend, I told myself, this, this face we alternately hold out to fate and cover with our hands, it must be capable of meaning something great if its form can survive in such an environment. That countenance had acquired the customs of cosmic space; parts of its gaze and smile were destroyed, but indestructible emotions had been mirrored into it by the rising and falling skies. From time to time I closed my eyes, and although my heart was beating, I reproached myself for not feeling this strongly enough; did I not have to arrive at places in my amazement where I had never been before? I told myself: Imagine you had been carried here with bandaged eyes and laid down aslant in this deep, almost impalpably wafting coolness – you wouldn’t know where you were and if you opened your eyes now… And when I actually opened them, dear God,--it took them a long while before they could withstand it, before they could take hold of this being, achieve the mouth, the cheek, the brow, on which moon light and moon shadow shifted from expression to expression. How many times my eye had already attempted the ampleness of this cheek; it rounded itself so slowly toward the top, as if in that space there were room for more places than here among us.”