On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and LiteratureRuskin, John
General
On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
Ruskin, John
Art; Essays; Literature
come)--is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its God. And as if
to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards
perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts
peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art
of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by
an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or
sisters--Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture--Painting, in
Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting
stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of
Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish
and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in
equal stature and perfection."--Vol. i, pp. xii.--xiv.
* * *
28. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this
forced analogy--the comparison of the architecture of one nation with
the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the
assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes
necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere
mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because
sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they
adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and
sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the
solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to
conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in
color, and must learn to treat subjects under positive color and in
narrow groups, before they can treat them under atmospheric effect and
in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and
have no more connection with any divisions of the human mind than the
equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they
build walls, or grind corn before they bake bread. And that each
following nation should take up either the same art at an advanced
stage, or an art altogether more difficult, is nothing but the necessary
consequence of its subsequent elevation and civilization. Whatever
nation had succeeded Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had
communication with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the point
where Egypt left it--in its turn delivering the gathered globe of
heavenly snow to the youthful energy of the nation next at hand, with an
exhausted "a vous le de!" In order to arrive at any useful or true
estimate of the respective rank of each people in the scale of mind, the
architecture of each must be compared with the architecture of the
other--sculpture with sculpture--line with line; and to have done this
broadly and with a surface glance, would have set our author's theory on
firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he
compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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