more humour, more wit than Shakspeare, and who was ever so tragic, or
so employed his humour as to set it beside his most tragic scenes,
with an effect that made the pathos deeper? In such a sense was
Hogarth "comic." His "Marriage à la Mode" is the deepest of tragedies.
We turn to Mr Cleghorn's two interesting and very useful volumes. They
give a compendious, yet, for general use and information, sufficiently
elaborate view of architecture, sculpture, and painting, from their
very origin to their present condition. We know of no work containing
so complete a view. If we are disposed at all to quarrel with his
plan, it is that in every branch he comes down to too late a time. And
as it is always the case with writers who find themselves committed to
the present age, he evidently finds himself encumbered with the detail
which this part of his plan has forced upon him. In matter it will be
often found that the present age overpowers all preceding, when even
it is vastly inferior in importance. Nor is it very easy to avoid a
bias in speaking of contemporaries; nor can a writer safely depend
upon his own judgment when he looks too nearly and intimately on men
and their works, and fears the giving offence by omissions, or by too
qualified praise. His divisions into schools, with general remarks on
each at the end, give a very clear view, when taken together, of the
history of these arts; and we are rejoiced to see them--architecture,
sculpture, and painting--thus in a manner linked in history, as they
were formerly in the minds and genius of the greatest men. In this he
follows the good course led by Vasari. In his account of the Flemish
and Dutch schools, there is a strange omission of the early Flemish
painters preceding and subsequent to the Van Eycks, to the time of
Rubens; nor is the influence which the brothers Van Eyck had upon art
sufficiently discussed. We propose at some future day to treat more at
length on this subject, and to make extracts from Michiel's very
interesting little volume, his "Peintres Brugeois." Even in the short
account of Van Eyck's invention, Mr Cleghorn is somewhat careless, in
the omission of one important little word, _sue_, in his extract from
Vasari, who does not exactly describe the invention as "the result of
a mixture or vehicle composed of linseed oil or nut oil, _boiled up
with other mixtures_," but "_with other mixtures of his own_." Vasari
says, "e aggiuntevi altre _sue_ misture fece la vernice," &c.
In the following remarks on Greek sculpture we find something
consonant to the ideas we have ventured to express:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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