Lectures on art Author:Hippolyte Taine Volume: 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1889 Original Publisher: H. Holt Subjects: Art Art / General Art / Criticism Art / History / General Art / European Art / Popular Culture Philosophy / Aesthetics Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations an... more »d there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 1 We have now to consider the glorious epoch which men are agreed to look upon as the most beautiful of Italian creation, and which comprises, along with the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the first thirty or forty years of the sixteenth. Within this narrow limit the most accomplished artists flourished, -- Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michael Angclo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo, Giorgione, Titian, Sebastian del Piombo, and Cor- reggio; and this limit is clearly defined; and if you look backward or forward of it, you find it preceded by an incomplete art, and succeeded by a degenerate art; hitherto by those groping, and who are as yet dry, stiff and colorless, -- Paolo Uccello, Antonio Pollaiolo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaijo, Verocchio, Mantegna, Perugino, Giovanni Bellini; subsequently, by exaggerating disciples or defectiverestorers, -- Giulio Romano, II Rosso, Primaticcio, Parrnegiano, Palma the younger, the Caracci, and their school. Up to this time art is a growth, and after, it declines, its bloom being between both leriods and lasting for about fifty years. If, during the early period, we encounter an all but finished artist, Masaccio, it is due to meditation rather than to an impulse of genius, a solitary originator who instinctively sees beyond his age, an unrecognized precursor who is without followers, whose sepulchre, even, bears no inscription, who lived poor and alone and whose precocious greatness is t...« less