Lectures on Sculpture (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. GRECIAN SCULPTURE. When we consider the gradual ravages of time, and the more compendious destruction of war, in the eastern portion of Europe, and those countries of Asia from whence the remains of ancient knowledge have been obtained?that the sites of Babylon and Memphis are scarcely known?that Persepolis, Alexandria, Elis, Eleusis, Delphos and Athens are discovered by ruins almost unintelligible, or the remains of their foundations only?that Rome, the eternal city, the mistress of the world, with all her lofty towers, magnificent temples, and imperial palaces, has suffered sevenfold conflagration !! !?that eleven thousand exquisite works of Greek and Etruscan Vide Pliny. sculpture, which decorated this metropolis of the world in her meridian splendor, were so entirely destroyed or overwhelmed by gothic ignorance, or iconoclastic fury, that in the beginning of the fifteenth century, a learned and intelligent observer, Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to Eugenius the Fourth and Nicholas the Fifth, noticed only six statues among the other remains of former grandeur?when we recollect the destruction of the Capitoline and Ulpian libraries, the first and second Alexandrine libraries, one containing 400,000, the other 1,100,000 volumes, together with the general and undistinguishing Turkish and northern devastations in every branch of learning and science, throughout better than one half of the old continent!?from such a train of reflections, and such a widely extended scene of ruin, we might be induced to suppose, that all the nobler monuments of ancient genius and knowledge were lost for ever. Upon more accurate inquiry, we shall find the fact very different from the appearance; and, on the contrary, whatever was most essential for man's good, or his in...