Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=). The text includes a modest amount of Greek, which has been rendered using available fonts. Ruskin used the inverted breve popularized by Richard Porson, an 18th century Greek scholar, for the Greek diacritical mark "persipomeni", which had until the 19th century been printed as a tilde. It is the tilde that appears in most fonts, and is used in this text (e.g., νοῦς). Some characters might not display in this UTF-8 text version or in the html version. If so, the reader should consult the iso-8859-1 (Latin-1) text file 42917-8.txt or 42917.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42917/42917-8.txt) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42917/42917-8.zip) Footnotes have been located to the end of each numbered paragraph. Consult the transcriber's note at the end of this text for details. THE EAGLE'S NEST. Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art, Given Before the University of Oxford, in Lent Term, 1872 by JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D., Honorary Student of Christ Church, and Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Twelfth Thousand London George Allen, 156, Charing Cross Road 1900 [All rights reserved] Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press PREFACE. The following Lectures have been written, not with less care, but with less pains, than any in former courses, because no labour could have rendered them exhaustive statements of their subjects, and I wished, therefore, to take from them every appearance of pretending to be so: but the assertions I have made are entirely deliberate, though their terms are unstudied; and the one which to the general reader will appear most startling, that the study of anatomy is destructive to art, is instantly necessary in explanation of the system adopted for the direction of my Oxford schools. At the period when engraving might have become to art what printing became to literature, the four greatest point-draughtsmen hitherto known, Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Dürer, and Holbein, occupied themselves in the new industry. All these four men were as high in intellect and moral sentiment as in art-power; and if they had engraved as Giotto painted, with popular and unscientific simplicity, would have left an inexhaustible series of prints, delightful to the most innocent minds, and strengthening to the most noble.