Beta Book

{5}
{5} The sources from which these examples are drawn, and where many
more might be found, are principally:--_D'Agincourt: "Histoire de
l'Art par les Monumens;"--Rossini: "Storia della Pittura;"--Ottley:
"Italian School of Design,"_ and his 120 Fac-similes of scarce
prints;--and the "Gates of San Giovanni," by Ghiberti; of which last
a cast of one entire is set up in the Central School of Design,
Somerset House; portions of the same are also in the Royal Academy.
The Arts have always been most important moral guides. Their
flourishing has always been coincident with the most wholesome period
of a nation's: never with the full and gaudy bloom which but hides
corruption, but the severe health of its most active and vigorous
life; its mature youth, and not the floridity of age, which, like the
wide full open petals of a flower, indicates that its glory is about
to pass away. There has certainly always been a period like the short
warm season the Canadians call the "Indian Summer," which is said to
be produced by the burning of the western forests, causing a
factitious revival of the dying year: so there always seems to have
been a flush of life before the final death of the Arts in each
period:--in Greece, in the sculptors and architects of the time after
Pericles; in the Germans, with the successors of Albert Durer.


Pages:
143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167