Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting. Ernest Govett
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Название: Art Principles with Special Reference to Painting
Автор: Ernest Govett
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Документальная литература
isbn: 4057664579317
isbn:
This book is put forward with much diffidence, for I am well aware of its insufficiencies. My original idea was to produce a work covering all the principles of painting, but after many years spent in considering the various recorded theories relating to æsthetic problems, and in gathering materials to indicate how the accepted principles have been applied, I came to the conclusion that a single life is scarcely long enough for the preparation of an exhaustive treatise on the subject. Nevertheless, I planned a work of much wider scope than the one now presented, but various circumstances, and principally the hindrance to research caused by the war, impelled me to curtail my ambition. Time was fading, and my purpose seemed to be growing very old. I felt that if one has something to say, it is better to say it incompletely than to run the risk of compulsory silence. The book will be found little more than a skeleton, and some of its sections, notably those dealing with illusions in the art, contain only a few suggestions and instances, but perhaps enough is said to induce a measure of further inquiry into the subject.
That part of the work dealing with the fine arts generally is the result of long consideration of the apparent contradictions involved in the numerous suggested standards of art. In a little book on The Position of Landscape in Art (published under a nom de plume a few years ago), I threw out, as a ballon d'essai, an idea of the proposition now elaborated as the Law of General Assent, and I have been encouraged to affirm this proposition more strongly by the fact that its validity was not questioned in any of the published criticism of the former work; nor do I find reason to vary it after years of additional deliberation. I have not before dealt with the other propositions now put forward.
The notes being voluminous I have relegated them to the end of the book, leaving the feet of the text pages for references only.
Where foreign works quoted have been translated into English, the English titles are recorded, and foreign quotations are given in English, save in one or two minor instances where the sense could not be precisely rendered in translation.
E. G.
New York, January, 1919.
LIST OF PLATES
| PAGE | |
| Frontispiece.—Detail from Fragonard's The Pursuit (Frick Collection, New York). | |
| This work, which is one of the celebrated Grasse series of panels, offers a very fine example of the use of an ideal head in a romantic subject. (See Page 139.) | |
| Plate 1.—The Earliest Great Sculptures | 6 |
| (a). Head from a statue of Chefren, a king of the 4th Egyptian Dynasty, about 3000 B.C. (Cairo Museum.) | |
| (b). Head from a fragmentary statuette of Babylonia, dating about 2600 B.C. (Louvre: from Spearing's "Childhood of Art.") | |
| The first head is generally regarded as the finest example of Egyptian art extant, and certainly there was nothing executed in Egypt to equal it during the thirty centuries following the 5th Dynasty. The Babylonian head is the best work of Chaldean art known to us, though there are some fine fragments remaining from the period of about a thousand years later. It will be observed that the tendency of the art in both examples is towards the aims achieved by the Greeks. (See Page 7.) | |
| Plate 2.—"Le Bon Dieu d'Amiens", in the North Porch, Amiens Cathedral | 18 |
| This figure by a French sculptor of the thirteenth century, was considered by Ruskin to be the finest ideal of Christ in existence. It is another example of the universality of ideals, for the head from the front view might well have been modelled from a Grecian work of the late fourth or early third century B.C. (See Page 319.) | |
| Plate 3.—After an Ancient Copy of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles. (Vatican) | 30 |
| It is commonly agreed that this is the finest model in existence after the great work of Praxiteles, which itself has long disappeared. The figure as it now stands at the Vatican, has the right arm restored, and the hand is made to hold up some metallic drapery with which the legs are covered, the beauty of the form being thus seriously weakened. (See Pages 111 et seq.) | |
| Plate 4.—Venus Anadyomene | 42 |
| (a). Ancient Greek sculpture from the design of Venus in the celebrated picture of Apelles. (Formerly Chessa Collection, now in New York.) | |
| The immense superiority of the sculpture over the painting (Plate 5), from the point of view of pure art, is visible at a glance. It is an indication of the far-reaching scope of the sculptor when executing ideals. (See Page 113.) | |
| Plate 5.—Venus Anadyomene, from the Painting by Titian. (Bridgewater Collection.) | 42 |
| Compare with the Sculpture on Plate 4. (See Page 115) | |
| Plate 6.—Venus Reposing, by Giorgione. (Dresden Gallery) | 54 |
| This is the finest reposing Venus in existence in painting. It was the model for the representation of the goddess in repose used by Titian, and many other artists who came after him. (See Page 116.) | |
| Plate 7.—Demeter | 66 |
| (a). Head from the Cnidos marble figure of the fourth century B.C., attributed to Scopas. (British Museum.) | |
| (b). Small head in bronze of the third century B.C. (Private Collection.) | |
| In each of these heads the artist has been successful in maintaining the ideal, while indicating a suggestion of the sorrowful resignation with which Grecian legend has enveloped the mind picture of Demeter. Nevertheless, even this slight departure from the established rule tends to lessen the art, though in a very small degree. (See Page 122.) |