A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2) — John Shaqi
A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)Perrot, Georges
History
A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Perrot, Georges
Art -- Egypt -- History; Egypt -- Antiquities
Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen
years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place since
1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed
numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of
antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago.
The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the improvements
which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with
antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults
inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of
treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's _History of Art_
and Ottfried Müller's _Manual of Artistic Archæology_ so successful in
their day.[4]
[4] Germany had long felt the want which Schnaase attempted to
satisfy. As early as 1841 Franz Kugler published his _Handbuch
der Kunstgeschichte_, which embraces the whole history of art
from the earliest times down to our own day. The book was
successful; the fourth edition, revised and corrected by Wilhelm
Lübke (2 vols. 8vo. 1861, Stuttgart), lies before us, but to
give an idea of its inadequacy as a history of ancient art, it
is enough to say that the whole of the antique period, both in
Greece and Asia, occupies no more than 206 pages of the first
volume. The few illustrations are not very good in quality, and
their source is never indicated; the draughtsman has taken
little care to reproduce with fidelity the style of the
originals or to call attention to their peculiarities; finally,
the arrangements adopted betray the defects of a severely
scientific method. The author commences with Celtic monuments
(dolmens and menhirs), and then passes to the structures of
Oceania and America; before commencing upon Egypt he takes us to
Mexico and Yucatan. Lübke, whilst still occupied with the work
of Kugler, wished to supply for the use of students and artists
a book of a more elementary character; he therefore published in
1860 an 8vo volume which he called _Grundriss der
Kunstgeschichte_; the antique here occupies 208 pages out of
720. His plan seems to us to be open to the same objection as
that of Kugler; he follows a geographical instead of an
historical arrangement; he begins with the extreme east; he puts
the Assyrians and the Persians before Egypt, and India before
Assyria. His illustrations are sometimes better than those of
Kugler, but many of the cuts are common to both works.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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