Art history

“ And yet there is great enjoyment, to some people, in the contemplation of a beautiful building or statue or painting,--as of a beautiful landscape or of a glorious sky. The ideas of beauty, of grace, of grandeur, which are eternal, are suggested to the mind and soul; and these cultivate and refine in proportion as the mind and soul are enlarged, especially among the rich, the learned, and the favored classes. So, in high civilizations, especially material, Art is not only a fashion but a great enjoyment, a lofty study, and a theme of general criticism and constant conversation. ”

“ THROUGHOUT the entire history of the fine arts, no period of æsthetic innovation and endeavour has suffered from public malignity, ridicule and ignorance as has painting during the last century. The reasons for this are many and, to the serious student of art history, obvious. ”

“ That art alone is truly living which is a record and an interpretation of national life—an epitome of the loves and the hates, the sorrows and the joys, the caprices and the enthusiasms, of men like ourselves. ”

“ How then do matters stand between art and civilisation? Here follows my hypothesis. There is in the history of every art (and for brevity's sake, I include in this term every distinct category, say, renaissance sculpture as distinguished from antique, of the same art) a moment when, for one reason or other, that art begins to come to the fore, to bestir itself. ”

“ This view, to which we are necessarily led by investigating any period of art-history, forces itself upon us with particular cogency when we turn our attention to the earliest stages of art-development. ”

“ The fragments of ancient grandeur which time and war have spared, the relics of bygone ages which have resisted the destructive elements, will, as the materials of art, give reality and truth to the pictorial history of times past, while the painter of modern events can command the most accurate representations not only of the costume, but of the very persons of the great men whose deeds he is called upon to immortalize. ”

“ But the chief quarrel of the modern is with the story-telling subject—the sentimental or funny incident in paint—of which we see enough and to spare at every new exhibition. This too is historical art in a way. For the genre subjects of the present time are history in the little—personal incidents usually, but nevertheless the history of the people. ”

“ Our purpose is to write a history of the art itself, to show how its various manifestations arose from social and political circumstances, to trace the emotions and thoughts which stimulated the artists to produce their greatest works and to gauge the action and interaction which created the various national styles. ”

“ So the matter stands: from the first dawn of history till quite modern times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish: but art grew and grew, saw empires sicken and sickened with them ”

“ A style of art characterised by such originality of design and excellence of execution must count for something in the history of a nation’s progress, must have its place to fill in the history of art itself, when once we have begun to realise the fact that art was not the exclusive privilege of classic antiquity. ”

“ Painting, from being a necessity of life, passed into a luxury, and the king, the state, or the private collector became the patron. Nature and actual life were about the only sources left from which original art could draw its materials. ”

“ In the progressive unfolding which characterizes a living style, all its stages must be interesting and possess their own significance, since all fall into their places in the great and golden record of the history of art itself. ”

“ In this little book I have tried to develop a complete theory of visual art. I have put forward an hypothesis by reference to which the respectability, though not the validity, of all aesthetic judgments can be tested, in the light of which the history of art from palaeolithic days to the present becomes intelligible, by adopting which we give intellectual backing to an almost universal and immemorial conviction. ”

“ Next, consider art history as a means of inculcating the principles of art. It is evident that the emotions or feelings of the artist and the methods he employs to express them may be studied in such masterpieces as the Hermes of Praxiteles and the Lincoln of St. ”

“ The history of art in connexion with the general history of the human race is a complement to it, ministering to the understanding of what is most intimate, stamping the expression of the dominant emotion on the countenance of every succeeding age. ”

“ In this we shall not only possess a historical survey of the technique of art in its stages of development, but shall have set before our minds, as an essential process with a history, that articulation of its ideal content in the distinctions of its schools, their various subject-matter, and their different modes of artistic conception and treatment. ”

“ 'Oh, glorious Art!' thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. 'Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms, that wander in nothingness, start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for, at thy touch, all that is great becomes for ever present; ”

“ The nature of a work of art, and the mode in which it is produced, are subjects well worthy of careful study. Architecture and music, poetry, painting and sculpture, have in times past constituted a vast portion of human activity; and without knowing something of the philosophy of art, we need not hope to understand thoroughly the philosophy of history. ”

“ Under these conditions, a history of the fine arts that should state correctly what is known concerning their works, and should treat their various manifestations with intelligence and in just proportion, would be of great value to the student. ”

“ Do you think I am so foolish as to place the landscape lower in rank than the historical painting, and that I do not recognise the common goal after which the painters of both classes should strive? The apprehension of nature in the deepest import of that higher sense, which kindles all beings to a higher life, that is the sacred end of all art. ”

“ It is only of late, and chiefly by a superficial imitation of foreigners, that we have begun to use the word Art by itself, and to speak of Art as we speak of Science, or Government, or Religion: we used to talk of the Arts, and more specifically of the Fine Arts: and even by them were vulgarly meant only two forms of art, Painting and Sculpture, the two which as a people we cared least about—which were regarded even by the more cultivated among us as little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. ”

“ How eagerly the poet, the painter, the sculptor, would seek to recover some traits of their terrible lineaments, or of their softer outlines when they related to scenes of the gentler passions or of domestic life!—that either a stern grandeur or the romantic glow of a primitive state of existence might be imparted to some work of art. ”

“ Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. ”

“ Whilst, at the same time, it is not disallowed that a subsequent pleasure may and does result, upon reflecting that the objects contemplated were the work of human ingenuity.
Now the subject to be treated, is the ‘subject’ of Painter and Sculptor; what ought to be the nature of that ‘subject,’ how far that subject may be drawn from past or present time with advantage, how far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title, ‘High Art,’ how far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title ‘Low Art;’ what is ‘High Art,’ what is ‘Low Art’? ”

“ Some day the world will awaken to the fact that there are other great arts besides architecture, painting, and sculpture; already there is a suspicion abroad that music, poetry, and the drama{266} are arts also and not merely vehicles for the expression of temperament, and there is even a preliminary waking of the subconsciousness which threatens to confess that ritual and ceremonial have been, and may be again, a great fine art in the same sense. ”

“ To wring from nature its countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the endless subtleties of individual form and character—these are the ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need of any other, any wider ambition? ”

“ The artists of the Middle Ages, vitalised by the same source of feeling—religion—as the mass of the people, and transmitting, in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry or drama, the feelings and states of mind they experienced, were true artists; and their activity, founded on the highest conceptions accessible to their age and 57common to the entire people, though, for our times a mean art, was, nevertheless a true one, shared by the whole community. ”

“ MANY persons of culture and poetic imagination, with a keen sense of the beautiful, but with little knowledge of living nature, believe and maintain, and in one sense justly, that certain works of old and modern masters are works of high art, from color, grouping, elegance of figures, and the various accessories which, in themselves, or by ideas and emotions excited by them, make painting and sculpture very powerful agents in instructing and elevating kind. ”

“ The explanation of this fidelity to one theme of representation in an art which was the very furthest removed from any hieratic prescriptions, in an art which was perpetually growing—and growing more human and secular—must be sought for, I think, in no peculiarities of spiritual condition or national imagination, but in two facts concerning the merely technical development of painting, and the results thereof. ”

“ Such we find to have been the case in the rise of the fine arts in this country, which up to this time have been rather an echo of the art of the lands from which our ancestors came, than distinctively original. ”

“ It shews more knowledge and feeling of the Art, more skill and beauty, more sense of what it is in objects that gives pleasure to the eye, with more power to communicate this pleasure to the world. If either this single picture, or all the lumber that has ever appeared at the Academy, were to be destroyed, there could not be a question which, with any Artist or with any judge or lover of Art. So stands the account between ancient and modern Art! ”

“ For, without beating about the bush, let us consider what the real state of art is. And first I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of the externals of our life. ”

“ These invaluable fragments of antiquity have also proved, beyond dispute, that ideal beauty and historic truth do not consist in middle or average forms, &c. but in harmonious outlines, in unity of action, and in the utmost refinement of character and expression. We there see art following close in the footsteps of nature, and exalted, raised, refined with it to the utmost extent that either was capable of. ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ It is also true that subjects not new in art are treated in a nineteenth-century manner. This is noticeable in the picturing of historical subjects. The more intimate knowledge of the world enables the historical painter of the present to impart to his representations of the important events of the past a more human and emotional element than exists in the historical art of earlier centuries. ”

“ I thought it necessary in a former discourse, speaking of the difference of the sublime and ornamental style of painting—in order to excite your attention to the more manly, noble, and dignified manner—to leave perhaps an impression too contemptuous of those ornamental parts of our Art, for which many have valued themselves, and many works are much valued and esteemed. ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, shewed the grandeur and the grasp of ancient art more strongly than the vigour with which the old painters used the effect produced upon the human mind by the power of contrast, and the infinite skill with which they employed that power, so as never to violate those essential principles of harmony which affect painting and sculpture fully as much as they affect music and poetry. ”

“ By the combined exercise of imitative art and of creative imagination, the artist has derived the types of historical painting at once from the depths of his own mind, and from the contemplation of other beings of his own race. ”