PREFACE. 1 following Lectures have been written, not with less are but with less pains, than any in former courses, becaaso no labour could have rendered them exhaustive statements of their subjects, and I wished, therefore, to take from them every appearance of pretending to be so: but the assertions I have made are entirely deliberate, though their terms are unstudied; and the one which to the general reader will appear most startling, that the study of anatomy is destructive to art, is instantly neces sary in explanation of the system adopted for the direction of my Oxford schools. At the period when engraving might have become to art what printing became to literature, the four greatest point-draughtsmen hitherto known, Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Durer, and Holbein, occupied themselves in the new industry. All these four men were as high in intellect and moral sentiment as in art-power; and if they had engraved as Giotto painted, with popular and unscientific simplicity, would have left an inexhaustible series of prints, delightful to the most innocent minds, and trengthening to the most noble. But two of them, Mantegna and Durer, were so polluted and paralyzed by the study of anatomy that the former's best works (the magnificent mythology of the Vices in the Louvre, for instance) are entirely revolting to all women and children; while Durer never could draw one beautiful female form or face; and, of his important plates, only four, the Melencholia, St. Jerome in his study, St. Hubert, and Knight and Death, are of any use for popular instruction, because in these 'only, the figures being fully draped or armed, he was enabled to think anu feel rightly, being delivered from the ghastly toil of bonedelineation, Botticelli and Holbein studied the face first, and the limbs secondarily; and the works they have left are there fore without exception precious; yet saddened and corrupted by the influence which the contemporary masters of body-drawing exercised on them; and at last eclipsed by their false fame. I purpose, therefore, in my next course of lectures, to explain the relation of these two draughts men to other masters of design, and of engraving. BRANTWOOD, Sept. 2nd, 1872. THE EAGLE'S NEST. LECTURE I. OF WISDOM AND FOLLY IN ART.* 8th February, 1872. 1. THE Lectures I have given hitherto, though, in the matter of them conscientiously addressed to my under graduate pupils, yet were greatly modified in method by my feeling that this undergraduate class, to which I wished to speak, was indeed a somewhat imaginary one; and that, in truth, I was addressing a mixed audience, în greater part composed of the masters of the University, before whom it was my duty to lay down the principles on which I hoped to conduct, or prepare the way for the conduct of, these schools, rather than to enter on the immediate work of elementary teaching. But to-day, and henceforward most frequently, we are to be engaged in *The proper titles of these lectures, too long for page-headings, are given in the Contents. |