The Schools of Bologna, Parma, Milano, with more or less geniality, imitated their predecessors, but added no new features to the theory of light and shade.—As to its progress on this side of the Alps, it is better to say nothing than little on the wide range of Rubens and the miracles of Rembrandt.
FOOTNOTES
[1] There will be an opportunity to notice that incredible dereliction of reminiscence which prompted him to transfer what he had rightly ascribed to Giorgione, in the Florentine edition, 1550, to the elder Palma in the subsequent ones. See [Lecture on Chiaroscuro].
[2] It ought not, however, to be disguised, that the history of art, deviating from its real object, has been swelled to a diffuse catalogue of individuals, who, being the nurslings of different schools, or picking something from the real establishers of art, have done little more than repeat or mimic rather than imitate, at second hand, what their masters or predecessors had found in nature, discriminated and applied to art in obedience to its dictates. Without depreciating the merits of that multitude who strenuously passed life in following others, it must be pronounced a task below history to allow them more than a transitory glance; neither novelty nor selection and combination of scattered materials, are entitled to serious attention from him who only investigates the real progress of art, if novelty is proved to have added nothing essential to the system, and selection to have only diluted energy, and by a popular amalgama to have been content with captivating the vulgar. Novelty, without enlarging the circle of fancy, may delight, but is nearer allied to whim than to invention; and an Ecclectic system without equality of parts, as it originated in want of comprehension, totters on the brink of mediocrity, sinks art, or splits it into crafts decorated with the specious name of schools, whose members, authorised by prescript, emboldened by dexterity of hand, encouraged by ignorance, or heading a cabal, subsist on mere repetition, with few more legitimate claims to the honours of history than a rhapsodist to those of the poem which he recites.
[3] Abstract of the Laws of the Royal Academy, article Professors: page 21.
[4] This has been done in a superior manner by J. G. Herder, in his Ideen zur Philosophie der geschichte der Menschheit, Vol. iii. Book 13, a work translated under the title of Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 4to.
[5] This account is founded on the conjectures of Mr. Riem, in his Treatise on die Malerey der Alten, or the Painting of the Ancients, 4to. Berlin, 1787.
[6] Pausanias Attic, c. xxviii. The word used by Pausanias καταγραψαι, shews that the figures of Parrhasius were intended for a Bassorelievo. They were in profile. This is the sense of the word Catagrapha in Pliny, xxxv. c. 8. he translates it “obliquas imagines.”