"The life of forms is not the result of chance. Nor is it a great cyclorama neatly fitted into the theater of history and called into being by historical necessities. No. Forms obey their own rules - rules that are inherent in the forms themselves, or better, in the regions of the mind where they are located and centered - and there is no reason why we should not undertake an investigation of how these great ensembles, united by close reasoning and by coherent experiment, behave throughout the phases that we call their life. The successive states through which they pass are more or les s lengthy, more or less intense, according to the style itself. [...] We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above man. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind. [...] We must, in the truest sense of the word, follow closely at its heels; we must take careful note of how it lives its life."
- Henri Focillon (1881 =- 1943)
The Life of Forms in Art
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