Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors (Volume 10) (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: In Leonardo's Treatise on Painting, only one contemporary is named?Sandro Botticelli. The Pagan and Christian world mingle in the work of Botticelli; but the man himself belonged to an age that is past and gone?an age that flourished long before men recorded history. His best efforts seem to spring out of a heart that forgot all precedent, and arose, Venus-like, perfect and complete, from the unfathomable Sea of Existence. WALTER PATER. BOTTICELLI BotticelliINE Professor Max Lautner has recently ] placed a small petard under the Euro- I pean world of Art, and given it a hoist to starboard, by asserting that Rembrandt did not paint Rembrandt's best j pictures. The Professor makes his point luminous by a cryptogram he has invented and for which he has filed a caveat. It is a very useful cryptogram; no well regulated family should be without it? for by it you can prove any proposition you may make, even to establishing that Hopkinson Smith is America's only stylist. My opinion is that this cryptogram is an infringement on that of our lamented countryman, Ignatius Donnelly. C.But letting that pass, the statement I that Rembrandt could not have painted the pictures that are ascribed to him because the man was low, vulgar, and untaught, commands respect on account of the extreme crudity of the I thought involved. Lautner is so dull that he is entertaining. I have the capacity in me for every crime, wrote that gentlest of gentle men, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Of course ( he had n't, and in making this assertion, Emerson pulled toward him a little morecredit than was his due. That is, he overstated a great classic truth. If Rembrandt painted the 'Christ at Emmaus' and the 'Sortie of the Civic Guard, ' then Rembrandt had two souls, exclaims Professor Lautner...