The Study of Art in Uniersities

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: The real training of his faculties the lover of art must receive in the galleries and concert rooms, in duly observing good works, whether they be pictures, statues, musical compositions, or books, with intensity, and with the concentration of his perceptive faculties, and with heart and mind freed from...
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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: The real training of his faculties the lover of art must receive in the galleries and concert rooms, in duly observing good works, whether they be pictures, statues, musical compositions, or books, with intensity, and with the concentration of his perceptive faculties, and with heart and mind freed from all alien and interested preoccupations. And now we must turn to the student of Art, whose needs we are bound to supply in the higher institutions of learning. He, too, may adopt some elements from the artist and from the amateur, and it appears to me not accidental that the founderof the Chair, which I now have the honour of holding, included in his plan of the university lectures which his munificence meant to establish here, lectures on the practice as well as on the history and theory of art. But it is significant that, while he gave the first place to history, the second to theory, he gave but the third place to practice; and this practice, moreover, is qualified by the term lectures. It is important for the student of art that he should know something about the technique of the works he is studying. We cannot, for instance, understand the passages in the ancient Greek authors which tell us of the advance made inpictorial art by Apollodorus, by Pauson, by Melanthion, by Zeuxis, or of what Vasari tells us of the inventions introduced by Mantegna, the Van Eycks, and Antonello da Messina, without knowing something of the technique of painting. Nor can we recognize the peculiarities of the old masters in painting or sculpture unless we know something of drawing and colour and their due application, and perspective and chiaro-oscuro; or how a clay model is made, how a colossal statue is built up, how bronze technique differs from marble work, or even how the potter works his...