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
[22] LÉO JOUBERT, _Essais de critique et d'histoire_ (Paris,
Firmin-Didot, 1 vol. 1863, p. 4). We shall never cease to regret
that politics have deprived literature of this judicious and
widely instructed critic.
In the last year of his life he traversed Italy and Sicily with
continual delight, and was like one intoxicated with the beauty of
that Athens of which he caught but a glimpse, of that Greece whose sun
so quickly destroyed him.
All this knowledge, all these experiences he hoped to make use of as
the lines and colours for the great picture of ancient Greece which he
meditated, for the canvas upon which he meant to portray the Greek
civilization for the benefit of the moderns, with all its indivisible
unity of social and political life, of literary and artistic
production. In striking him down in his forty-second year, death put
an end to this project, and the great picture, which would have been,
perhaps, one of the capital works of our century, was never executed.
But the preparatory sketches of the master happily remain to us. While
he was employed in collecting materials for the work which he meant to
be his highest title to honour, he was not shut up in silence and
meditation, as a less prolific spirit might have been. His facility of
arrangement and utterance was prodigious; all that he learnt, all new
discoveries that he made or thought he had made, he hastened to make
public, either by direct addresses to the auditors who crowded round
his chair at Gottingen, or by his pen to the readers of the numerous
philosophical periodicals to which he contributed. Like a man who has
travelled much and who loves to tell of what he has seen, he was ever
ready to take the public into his confidence when he embarked upon a
new study. This he generally did by means of papers full of facts and
ideas, written sometimes in German, sometimes in Latin. In his later
years he issued short articles upon archæology and the history of art,
in sufficient number to form five substantial volumes.[23] Besides
this, he gave to the world learned editions of Varro, of Festus, of
the _Eumenides_ of Æschylus; or important monographs like his
_Geschichten hellenischer Stämme und Städte_, including _Orchomenos
und die Minyer_ and _Die Dorier_, the most famous and most actively
discussed of his works; and finally, _Die Etrusker_, a work which was
suggested to him by one of the publications of the Berlin Academy.
There was also _Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie_,
which has been fruitful for good even in its errors, and the
_Geschichte der griechischen Literatur_, &c., which, incomplete as it
is, has never become obsolete. Since the time of Ottfried Müller
several other critics have attempted to rival his achievements, but
they have all lacked his breadth of view and comprehensiveness of
exposition, as well as the versatility with which he combined the most
accurate scientific investigations with a delicate appreciation of the
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