Answer.—If this question had been asked with an eye to business, we might answer that decorative art makes trade brisk, induces people to buy ornaments, and fills the pockets of dealers in curiosities. But this is not our aim. So long as we fail to look upon art as an earnest and serious study, as important and necessary to our social wellbeing as either ethics or science, the influence of decorative art must be confined to enticing people to plaster their walls with all sorts of China plate, or pay dearly for Japanese trays, screens, or cupboards, because they have not learnt to distinguish between the quaint and the comical, the beautiful and the ugly. Their taste is still on a level with that of untrained children, who have plenty of money in their pockets, do not know what to buy, and rush to purchase the ugliest monstrosities. If half the money that is wasted in these directions were to be devoted to the encouragement of our hard-working rising artists, we might soon boast of still greater successes than we can proudly point to, despite the adverse circumstances under which artists have to labour amongst us. Art with us is still looked upon as an extravagance, a luxury, as it was with the Romans of old, and this produces a craving for oddities. We hang up big china cockatoos, or place big china dogs, or stags with big china antlers, on our hearth-rugs. We have coarse china frogs and lizards, crabs or lobsters, from which we eat our fruit or fish; or a life-like salmon with staring eyes is brought on our table, its back takes off, and we scoop out the real cooked salmon with which its inside is filled. Form of dish, association of ideas, and action of the host are more worthy of anthropophagi than civilised beings of the nineteenth century. So long as art-history and esthetics are not made regular studies, not only in art-schools but also in general educational establishments, and especially ladies’ schools, our national consciousness of art in general and the requirements of our age in particular cannot improve. Art is a branch of human knowledge, ingenuity, and creative force in which ladies, trained to appreciate beauty, might be made better ‘helps,’ than in the kitchen, the pantry, or the larder. The national wealth of France consists in the nation’s superiority in taste and artistic skill. The French arrange a few artificial flowers with an exquisite understanding of the juxtaposition of colours and the combination of forms, and make us pay for a ‘bouquet’ on a bonnet from fifty to sixty francs, whilst the raw material costs from five to six francs; they do the same in terra-cotta, bronze, or iron. So long as everyone with us thinks himself justified in having his own bad taste gratified, because he can pay for it, decorative artists will serve that bad taste in all our household details. Art-history comprises not merely measurements of temples, heights of spires in feet, or of statues in cubits and inches.
We have of late years made gigantic strides in the advancement of street-architecture, though we do not yet know how to create perspective views of artistic beauty; we still indulge too much in mediæval crookedness and unintelligible windings. We still decorate too gaudily, or, falling into the other extreme, too much in neutral colours; but we are beginning to understand that man does not live on stone and brick alone, but also on taste in arranging and decorating the stone. London, with the exception of some of our monstrous railway bridges and railway stations, begins to look worthy of its position as the centre of the world’s commerce. Our streets have lately put on some stately ‘Sunday clothing’ in terra-cotta, Portland cement, and iron railings. Our glass and china, our furniture and carpets, begin to have more variegated patterns, though I am sorry to hear that foreigners are still generally appointed as the principal modellers. I base this assertion on the Report on the National Competition of the Works of Schools of Art for 1876, in which the examiners say: ‘Our want of that workman-like power over the material, which is so noticeable in all French productions in modelling, is still very conspicuous. As long as this continues a large proportion of the decorative figure or ornamental designs in relief made for the English market will be in the hands of foreign artists.’ The panacea of this evil will and can only be a higher intellectual training, not merely of the faculty of imitating and combining given forms in nature, but of endowing them with ideal beauty, fostered by a correct study of art-history.
There are no illustrations to this work, but I have annexed a long list of illustrated works on art. My aim in teaching, and writing, has been consistently to induce my hearers and readers to think and study for themselves. Bad or even good wood-cuts are by no means essential in art-books, for we possess in the British, Christy’s, and South Kensington Museums such invaluable art-collections, that we may write books without illustrations if we can induce readers and students to verify what we say by a diligent study of these specimens. Theoretical generalisation ought always to precede our special studies. We only then know when we are able to systematise, to group, to draw analogies, or to arrange our details according to some general principle. If we enter on any study without having prepared our mind to grasp the connecting links in an artistic or scientific subject, our knowledge of an incoherent mass of details will only dwarf our understanding, instead of brightening and clearing it, and we shall become technically-trained machines, instead of self-conscious and self-reasoning creators in any branch of art. The Art Library at the South Kensington Museum is, without any exaggeration, the completest in the world; it abounds in the best illustrated works of all nations. Art-books with bad or indifferent illustrations, or even with good illustrations, are not so much needed as art-books with unbiased theories, esthetical principles, and philosophical ideas, which may awaken the power of reasoning in both readers and students. It is only too often the case that, in seeing bad illustrations, the student imagines he knows everything about the work spoken of and produced in outlines. He must, however, go and see for himself. Art has its own fairy domain and its own most catholic realm, in which everyone is welcome who can contribute to the improvement, delight, and happiness of man. To induce readers and students to visit, with some fore-thought and fore-knowledge, our vast and unparalleled art-collections, and to convince them, that to detach the study of art from a correct appreciation of the ideas that engendered its forms, is an impossibility, was the task I set myself in writing the pages of this book.
London: October 1876.
[CONTENTS.]
| [CHAPTER I.] | |
| PROLEGOMENA. | |
| PAGE | |
| The phenomena of destruction and combination in Nature—The difference between the sublime and beautiful—Without man no beauty—Science, industry, and art—The utilitarian principle—Choice—The realistic, historical, and critical points of view in art—Crystallisations and their elements—Symmetry and eurythmy—Proportion, action, and expression—Man is the symbol of earthly perfection | 1 |
| [CHAPTER II.] | |
| ETHNOLOGY IN ITS BEARING ON ART. | |
| The Negro, the Turanian, and the Aryan: their characteristics, facial angle, amount of brain, and artistic capacities—Space and time—Art treated historically—Pottery in its development—Generalisation and its advantage | 22 |
| [CHAPTER III.] | |
| PRE-HISTORIC AND SAVAGE ART. | |
| Traces of man’s inventive and decorative force in by-gone ages—Classification of pre-historic products—The old stone age—The new stone age—The bronze and iron ages—Man’s first dwellings—Houses and temples—Lake- or pile-dwellings in their gradual development—Cranoges or wooden islands—Art in the western hemisphere—The stucco in the rock-hewn temple at Mitla in Mexico—Difference between art-products in North, Central, and South America—Cuzco, near Lake Titicaca—Pottery as a reliable historical record—The wild and fantastic mode of ornamentation in America, and its causes | 32 |
| [CHAPTER IV.] | |
| CHINESE ART. | |
| The Chinese language—The holy books of the Chinese—The sacred number five—Principle of ornamentation—Their towns—The wall with the Chinese not yet a completing part of the building—The enclosure, the frame, and the substructure—The trellis-work of the Chinese and its subdivision—Their Tshao-pings and Miaos—Mode of colouring—Silk-weavings and their usual patterns—Feather works and embroideries—Their deficiencies in painting—Their pottery—Causes of their failings in art in a higher sense. | 45 |
| [CHAPTER V.] | |
| INDIA, PERSIA, ASSYRIA, AND BABYLON. | |
| The Aryans on this and the other side of the Himâlâyan Mountains—Science and art the offsprings of religion—Endeavours to express abstract phenomena in concrete signs—The symbolic, dialectic, and mythological periods—The Indian trinity—The principal divinities of India, and their analogy with the Egyptian, Persian, and Greek gods—Indian epic poetry—The rock-hewn temples and Buddha—Stucco ornamentation—Causes of the gorgeousness of Indian art—Persia and the Persians—Their five cosmical elements—Historical development—The Zend-Avesta—Persepolis and its oldest monuments—Zoroaster—The Persian trinity—Light and darkness—Why no temples were constructed—The Babylonians and Ninivites—Their principles of ornamentation—Their wall decorations | 60 |
| [CHAPTER VI.] | |
| EGYPTIAN ART. | |
| The sphinx the emblem of Egyptian art—Long and short chronologists—Lepsius and his list of Egyptian dynasties—State of Egypt under Menes, who ruled 3892 B.C., according to Lepsius—Division of Egyptian art into periods—The forty-two holy books of the Egyptians—Their gods of the first, second, and third orders—The Egyptian trinity—The pyramidal period—The hieratic style—The Ptolemaic style—Their mode of ornamentation and symmetrophobia | 103 |
| [CHAPTER VII.] | |
| HEBREW ART. | |
| The Hebrews are a mixed race—Social and political condition of the Jews during 6,000 years—Description of the country and aspect of nature—Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel—Architecture a sure measure of a nation’s social and political development—Egotistical character of nomadic traders—The temple and palace of Solomon, the only architectural efforts of the Jews—Sketch of their history, divided into eight periods—The tabernacle a tent—The first temple constructed on its plan—Ben David on the mysterious empty room above the Holy of Holies—Causes why the Jews had no art, and never attempted to have any | 132 |
| [CHAPTER VIII.] | |
| GREEK ART. | |
| Meshiah (humanity) was first freed by the Greeks in form, and by Christ in spirit—Aspect of nature—India, Egypt, and Persia as the component parts of Greek development—The different dialects of the Greeks—Their mythology—Traces of intelligible facts and historical events in the Greek myths—Zeus and his character—Prometheus and Faust—The nine muses and their leader—Greek life a continuous festivity—Greek poetry and philosophy—Greek artistic development—The Olympian, Pythian, Nemæan, and Isthmian games—Greek architecture: the temple—Building materials—Site of temples—Proportion—Plan of temples—The Doric, Ionic, and Korinthian orders and their subdivisions—The Attic style—Greek pottery and Greek sculpture—Different periods—The British Museum and Greek art—Onatas, Ageladas, Kalamis, Pheidias, Praxiteles, Skopas, and Lysippus—The Parthenon—Aphrodite no longer draped—The groups of Niobe, Laokoön, and the Farnese bull—Causes of the decline of Greek art | 153 |
| [CHAPTER IX.] | |
| ETRUSKAN ART. | |
| The first settlers in Etruria—Their gods of the first and second orders—The ritual of thunder—Temples and tombs—Subdivision of tombs—Cinerary chests—Excavations at Præneste—Pottery and metal works—Their style either Archaic or Etruskan—Division of Etruskan works of art into five principal categories | 212 |
| [CHAPTER X.] | |
| ROMAN ART. | |
| Characteristic differences between Greeks and Romans—The triple theocracy of Rome—The mythical period of the seven kings of Rome—Rome as republic—Roman mythology—Rome under the emperors—Roman public games—Roman literature the outgrowth of Greek literature—Polylithic wall decorations—The arch, cross-vault, and cupola—Periods of Roman art and their subdivisions—Temples—Fora and theatres—The mausoleum of Augustus—Hadrian, the divine architect—Triumphal arches—The baths of Caracalla—The advent of Christianity | 228 |
| [CHAPTER XI.] | |
| EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. | |
| North and south of our globe—Buddhism and Christianity—Christ’s divine teachings—Romanesque and Byzantine art-forms—Symbols, allegories, emblems, and myths—Catacombs at Rome and Naples—The sacredness of the number seven—Christian art in its essence and different phases—The spiritual element predominates—The first Christian churches—Constantine—Ravenna and its early churches—St. Sophia in the Byzantine style—Migration of northern nations—Their religious notions—The Teutons turn Christians—Wood and ivory carvings—Art in its relation to the progressive development of mankind—Summary and conclusion | 264 |
| [Bibliography] for the study of the historical development of Art | 301 |
| [Index] | 305 |