The Project Gutenberg EBook of Euphorion, by Vernon Lee

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Title: Euphorion
Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the
Renaissance - Vol. II

Author: Vernon Lee

Release Date: February 17, 2010 [EBook #31304]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUPHORION ***

Produced by Marc D'Hooghe

EUPHORION: BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE

BY

VERNON LEE

_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro," etc._

_VOL. II._

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

THE PORTRAIT ART

THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO

MEDIAEVAL LOVE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

* * * * *

THE PORTRAIT ART

I.

Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving,
which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable
school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the
upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of
artists seeks after the ideal--the ideal which may mean sublimity or
platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a
realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or
idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral
importance. Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism and
idealism, which we calmly assume as already settled or easy to settle by
our own sense of right and wrong, is one of the tangled questions of
art-philosophy; and one, moreover, which no amount of theory, but only
historic fact, can ever set right. For, to begin with, we find realism
and idealism coming before us in different ways and with different
meaning and importance. All art which is not addressing (as decrepit art
is forced to do) faculties to which it does not spontaneously and
properly appeal--all art is decorative, ornamental, idealistic
therefore, since it consciously or unconsciously aims, not merely at
reproducing the already existing, but at producing something which shall
repay the looking at it, something which shall ornament, if not a place,
at least our lives; and such making of the ornamental, of the worth
loo