Art and the Formation of Taste: Six Lectures

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Chautauqua Press, 1885 - Aesthetics - 198 pages
 

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Page 133 - We have imagined for the mighty dead ; All lovely tales that we have heard or read : An endless fountain of immortal drink, Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. Nor do we merely feel these essences For one short hour ; no, even as the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite...
Page 156 - And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe...
Page 107 - What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.
Page vii - Now nature is not at variance with art nor art with nature, they being both the servants of his providence ; art is the perfection of nature ; were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos ; nature hath made one world and art another. In brief, all things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
Page 156 - their bluest veins to kiss" — the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand ; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of...
Page 175 - Graces had been the favourite oratory of Beatrice. She had spent her last days there, full of sinister presentiments; at last it had been almost necessary to remove her from it by force; and now it was here that mass was said a hundred times a day for her repose. On the damp wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, Leonardo painted the Last Supper.
Page 156 - ... other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angelguarded long ago.
Page 176 - Raphael, at Florence, painted it with sweet and solemn effect in the refectory of Saint Onofrio; but still with all the mystical unreality of the school of Perugino. Vasari pretends that the central head was never finished.
Page 114 - Venice, gave His body to that pleasant country's earth, And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colours he had fought so long.
Page 172 - Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt...

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