Lectures on Painting and Design (Volume 2); Fuzeli. Wilkie. Effect of the Societies on Taste. a Competent Tribunal. on Fresco. Elgin Marbles. Beauty (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 X. ON THE EFFECT OF THE DIFFERENT SOCIETIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, ON THE TASTE OF THE BRITISH NOBILITY AND PEOPLE. First delivered December 23, 1836, AT THE LONDON MECHANICS' INSTITUTION. LECTURE X. Gentlemen, In my previous Lectures I led your mind gradually and progressively from the first dawn of a principle in Drawing and Composition to the last component parts of imitation, viz. colour, light and shadow, light and dark, execution and surface (or impasto), as the vehicles of thought and expression. I laid it down to you, and I hope I proved it to you, that thought and expression suffered in power of effect on the spectator, if colour and the other elements of imitation were deficient. That it was accident, and not intention, when the Venetians neglected form, and accident, and not intention, when the Romans neglected colour; because, when each school discovered its error, each school set about correcting its imperfections, and each school left isolated works nearly perfect. Yet Reynolds, taking the weaknesses of separate schools as the result of system, instead of accident, laid down their omissions as abstract principles, and formed a code of laws to guide the English student founded on the very weaknesses of these separate schools, which the great masters in each school (Roman and Venetian) corrected as soon as they found out they were wrong, and which Reynolds himself continually gave evidence of mistrusting, though, with the cautious policy for which he was famous, he so managed as to secure votes on either side, whichever side should be proved right in the long experience of the world. Transfiguration, Pietro Martyre, and Lazarus. B. R. H. That the union of all parts of art is a principle not new in the world, is evident from...