“The painted picture has been smashed to bits.... In continuing to paint with brush on canvas, we have seen that we are now building and the picture is burning up. We have seen that the surface of the canvas has ceased to be a picture. It has become a construction and like a house, you have to walk round it, to look at it from above, to study it from beneath. The picture's one perpendicular axis (vis-a-vis the horizon) turns out to have been We have made the canvas rotate.”
Spengler in Decline of the West:
Impressionism signifies "the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense- images as [but] secondary and conditioned actualities "within it".... Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because the things are there but as though they "in themselves" are not there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke ... if there is one art that must exclude [Impressionism] on principle, it is Classical sculpture.... For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour.... Everything merges in bodiless infinity" (DWI, pp. 285-86, 292).
According to Spengler, the inception of the decline of Faustian culture into Impressionism begins with Leonardo and Giorgione:
"The technique of oils [became] the basis of an art that [meant] to conquer space and to dissolve things in that space.... While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo's studies show the exact opposite. His much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space, and as such it is the starting- point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside ... and when he ends ... the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. ... Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood.... Leonardo investigated the life in the body . . .and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did.... [Leonardo's] discovery... signif[ies] the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present" (DWI, pp. 239, 277-78).
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